Behind the chic facades of French apartment blocks
Posted: Sun May 25, 2014 12:36 amBBC News Magazine
Nightmare neighbours: behind the chic facades of French apartment blocks
Neighbours' Day happens every May across France. It is a time for people to make peace with the people next door. But in the apartment blocks of
Paris, bitterness and hostility are thriving.
The people upstairs are having breakfast. I know because there is a particular scraping of chairs and the blunt thud of slippered feet crossing to and fro from kitchen to dining room. He talks, she hums. A pause. They must be pouring the coffee.
Our apartment building, like many in Paris, dates from the late 19th Century. The floors are echoing, antique parquet and there is absolutely no sound insulation.
A sneeze on the fourth floor can be heard on the second.
My neighbour, Madame Joliot, an unabashed television addict, is bemused.
"It is strange," she says. "In all those American soaps, the neighbours are lovely. Helpful, chatty, kind, romantic. But when I watch Nos Chers Voisins - well, that's France!"
The sitcom Nos Chers Voisins, or Our Dear Neighbours, reflects the real-life tensions of apartment living
Madame Joliot and several million other French tune in each evening to watch Our Dear Neighbours, the cult TV comedy series of everyday life in a fictional apartment block.
It gives the perfect "front-door spy hole" view of what goes on amongst the neighbours.
Brief encounters in the hallway, conversations in the lift, little incidents in the courtyard - all the tensions, intrigues, scheming rivalries and absurd pettiness of communal French living are revealed.
Madame Joliot herself is caught in the usual tangled web of inter-neighbour dispute.
There is the woman on the floor below who cannot abide Madame Joliot's flowering terraces because, from time to time, leaves blow onto her balcony.
Complaints ensue - formal letters are sent by registered post, threatening legal action unless Madame Joliot personally vacuums the few leaves, with her own vacuum cleaner, whenever they might fall.
On the second floor, the daughter of the building's owner throws deafening all-night parties with dismaying regularity but no-one dares complain lest there be trouble with the lease.
If, however, Madame Joliot's pet dog barks even once in the courtyard in the middle of a weekday, there is hell to pay.
Just above, there is a lady with stilettos - extraordinarily loud when heard through the ceiling. Madame Joliot complained, fountain pen on elegant visiting card duly slipped under doorway.
The reply, a typed letter, sent by registered post, copied to a solicitor, read: "Madame, I have restored and polished my parquet and I have no intention of ruining the effect with rugs just for your benefit."
Leaves, heels and parties are one thing. Vandalism as revenge is quite another and yet, it is relatively common.
Madame Grelois, 72, has lived in the same building in Saint Germain for the last 50 years and raised her children and now her grandchildren there.
"Pushchairs, prams, there is always a problem," she says. "There are mountains of rules but it makes no difference.
"The number of pushchairs that are vandalised - deliberately ruined - when they are left neatly and correctly in the hallway!
"My first baby's pram was slashed so I had to lug it down the cellar steps each night and up again each morning."
With much of Paris living between 19th century walls and floors, it is clear that disturbances between neighbours cannot be anything new.
The writer, Marcel Proust, had his bedroom lined with cork to deaden the noise but it was not entirely successful as a new volume of letters, just published, reveals.
Letters to His Neighbour is a collection of notes written by Proust to his upstairs neighbour, Madame Williams - an accomplished harpist - and her husband, an American dentist whose consulting room was directly above Proust's bedroom.
Full Article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27502469
Nightmare neighbours: behind the chic facades of French apartment blocks
Neighbours' Day happens every May across France. It is a time for people to make peace with the people next door. But in the apartment blocks of
Paris, bitterness and hostility are thriving.
The people upstairs are having breakfast. I know because there is a particular scraping of chairs and the blunt thud of slippered feet crossing to and fro from kitchen to dining room. He talks, she hums. A pause. They must be pouring the coffee.
Our apartment building, like many in Paris, dates from the late 19th Century. The floors are echoing, antique parquet and there is absolutely no sound insulation.
A sneeze on the fourth floor can be heard on the second.
My neighbour, Madame Joliot, an unabashed television addict, is bemused.
"It is strange," she says. "In all those American soaps, the neighbours are lovely. Helpful, chatty, kind, romantic. But when I watch Nos Chers Voisins - well, that's France!"
The sitcom Nos Chers Voisins, or Our Dear Neighbours, reflects the real-life tensions of apartment living
Madame Joliot and several million other French tune in each evening to watch Our Dear Neighbours, the cult TV comedy series of everyday life in a fictional apartment block.
It gives the perfect "front-door spy hole" view of what goes on amongst the neighbours.
Brief encounters in the hallway, conversations in the lift, little incidents in the courtyard - all the tensions, intrigues, scheming rivalries and absurd pettiness of communal French living are revealed.
Madame Joliot herself is caught in the usual tangled web of inter-neighbour dispute.
There is the woman on the floor below who cannot abide Madame Joliot's flowering terraces because, from time to time, leaves blow onto her balcony.
Complaints ensue - formal letters are sent by registered post, threatening legal action unless Madame Joliot personally vacuums the few leaves, with her own vacuum cleaner, whenever they might fall.
On the second floor, the daughter of the building's owner throws deafening all-night parties with dismaying regularity but no-one dares complain lest there be trouble with the lease.
If, however, Madame Joliot's pet dog barks even once in the courtyard in the middle of a weekday, there is hell to pay.
Just above, there is a lady with stilettos - extraordinarily loud when heard through the ceiling. Madame Joliot complained, fountain pen on elegant visiting card duly slipped under doorway.
The reply, a typed letter, sent by registered post, copied to a solicitor, read: "Madame, I have restored and polished my parquet and I have no intention of ruining the effect with rugs just for your benefit."
Leaves, heels and parties are one thing. Vandalism as revenge is quite another and yet, it is relatively common.
Madame Grelois, 72, has lived in the same building in Saint Germain for the last 50 years and raised her children and now her grandchildren there.
"Pushchairs, prams, there is always a problem," she says. "There are mountains of rules but it makes no difference.
"The number of pushchairs that are vandalised - deliberately ruined - when they are left neatly and correctly in the hallway!
"My first baby's pram was slashed so I had to lug it down the cellar steps each night and up again each morning."
With much of Paris living between 19th century walls and floors, it is clear that disturbances between neighbours cannot be anything new.
The writer, Marcel Proust, had his bedroom lined with cork to deaden the noise but it was not entirely successful as a new volume of letters, just published, reveals.
Letters to His Neighbour is a collection of notes written by Proust to his upstairs neighbour, Madame Williams - an accomplished harpist - and her husband, an American dentist whose consulting room was directly above Proust's bedroom.
Full Article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27502469
