Chambre de Bonne

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 10 years ago, Clémentine Spiler moved to Paris, France. She was full of ideas of what her life could be.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: I just wanted to go to Paris. I didn’t really want to study anymore, so I just packed a bag and moved to Paris, which is a pretty romantic movie-like kind of thing. So I guess I had this idea that you can make it in Paris–you can just get there and then try to make it.

ROMAN MARS: Clementine was working for a wealthy family. She babysat their 11-year-old twins, cooked dinner, and cleaned a bit.

JEANNE BOËZEC: At the time I was Clémentine’s neighbor.

ROMAN MARS: That’s producer Jeanne Boëzec.

JEANNE BOËZEC: She grew up near Nantes, a city on the west of France. Clémentine stayed in the area during her undergrad, but then she wanted to see the big city. In France, Paris is the center of everything. In exchange, the family gave her an apartment to live in.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: There was an interview, and then we got out of the building and walked to another building that was, like, two, three minutes away, climbed the six floors, and then, yeah… She took me to the room, and she was like, “Ta-da. That’s it.”

ROMAN MARS: Clémentine stared into her new home and discovered it was really small. Actually, it was just one room.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: I sat on the bed. There was nowhere else to sit on. I sat on the bed. There was a tiny, tiny kitchen in the corner. There was a shower. There was a table that folded that I basically never used because if you unfolded it, you couldn’t walk. Basically, I think you could walk three steps in the room from the door to the window. It’s like a small corridor. In terms of widths, it was maybe two meters wide.

JEANNE BOËZEC: I remember when I was sitting on your bed, I could put my foot up against the wall.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: It’s a good thing I was smaller than you were because… Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: Clémentine was living out a rite of passage for generations of young people moving to the French capital. Her place was a very specific, very Parisian type of apartment called a “chambre de bonne”–literally a “maid’s room.” A chambre de bonne is usually one small room on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building.

JEANNE BOËZEC: I lived in a chambre de bonne down the hall from Clémentine. But my chambre de bonne was a little bigger. My apartment had two windows and my own bathroom, but it was still very small. I had a bathroom so narrow I could stretch out my arms and touch both walls at the same time. Last October, Clémentine and I returned to our old building for the first time in years to take a trip down memory lane.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: You know what I remember? The stairs on the last one are higher, and it’s the moment when you run out of breath and you’re like, “I hate my life.” And you have to keep going, and it’s even longer than you think.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Yeah, but I remember climbing the stairs and seeing all the floors. They’re so pretty.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: Oh, my God. Also, remember the old guy who got the far-right newspapers?

JEANNE BOËZEC: Clémentine lived in our chambre de bonne for three years.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Yeah, it looks smaller.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: It looks smaller, or did we grow?

JEANNE BOËZEC: At the time? Clémentine loved her apartment. It was a way to make her dream of living in Paris a reality, even though her employer felt a little awkward about it.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: I remember she was kind of apologizing. She was kind of, “Sorry, that’s it. I hope it works for you.” And me–I was just like, “Wow. I want to be this person. This is like you’re under the roofs in Paris, and it’s my home. It’s mine.”

JEANNE BOËZEC: Just like Clémentine, I loved my chambre de bonne. Our building was in Les Marais, a fancy neighborhood in the center of Paris, in a beautiful building hidden behind a big, heavy, green door and a pretty courtyard. But today both of us see things very differently. It was kind of terrible to live in this place.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: I remember when I moved out, I felt how my mind was able to expand as well. It wasn’t just physically. When I moved out, I realized that I hadn’t had enough space to think. It’s like the space was so small that you couldn’t even get out of your own limitations mentally. It also impacts your ability to think forward, and living in such a tiny space is always a reminder–even if it’s unconscious–that you’re only entitled to this tiny bit of space.

ROMAN MARS: Parisians like Clémentine have difficult relationships with the chambre de bonne because it represents a lot of things. It’s affordable housing in a city where finding housing is nearly impossible, but it’s unpleasant for people who have to live there. And it represents the gap between the rich people in Paris and everyone else.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: And even now that I understand the class relationship and the fact that it was so small–and it’s pretty violent to make people live in such small spaces.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Today, many people live in chambre de bonne apartments because there’s not a lot of small, affordable housing in Paris. And the city is so dense it’s impossible to build new housing. So the chambre de bonne is an imperfect solution. But today, the chambres de bonne are disappearing, and many are wondering where are those people going to live?

ROMAN MARS: The chambre de bonne was invented as a housing type during a major redesign of Paris in the 1850s. It was led by a man named Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whose name I will pronounce the English way. In French, it’s more like…

JEANNE BOËZEC: Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I don’t know how to say it that way. Anyway, Haussmann was the prefect for Paris for 20 years. He was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III to overhaul the city’s architecture. Napoleon wanted Paris to be masterful and a capital of the world. To reflect these grand ambitions, Haussmann created wide boulevards and avenues.

JEANNE BOËZEC: A lot of people say Haussmann made the bourgeoisie visible in Paris. He destroyed working class neighborhoods and replaced them with luxury buildings.

ROMAN MARS: Paris was a mess of construction for 50 years. Workers from all over the country came to serve Haussmann’s vision.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Suddenly in the streets of Paris, you could hear accents and songs sung by workers from all over France. They created some of Paris’ most iconic landmarks: the avenue de l’opéra, the boulevard Haussmann, the boulevard Voltaire…

ROMAN MARS: But all this construction was at a cost. In some cases, Haussmann cut buildings in half to make room for new ones. Some people called him an “artist demolisher.” Haussmann only designed apartments because that’s where everyone lived in Paris at the time–and he designed every apartment building to be the same, inside and out.

MARIE-JEANNE DUMONT: Chaque appartement comporte des pièces de réception, des pièces pour dormir, les chambres à coucher, une cuisine. Dans les immeubles bourgeois, il peut y avoir un seul appartement par étage dans des immeubles d’un standing plus modeste. Il peut y avoir deux, trois, quatre appartements par étage, beaucoup plus petits et… Mais dans les immeubles de grand standing, eh bien, les familles bourgeoises ont comme exigence de pouvoir loger leur domesticité…

JEANNE BOËZEC: That’s Marie-Jeanne Dumont. She’s an historian of architecture. Marie-Jeanne says, “In Haussmann’s buildings, there was always one apartment per floor. And in those luxury buildings, the families expected to have rooms to house their servants.”

ROMAN MARS: In the 1850s during the Haussmann redesign of Paris, there was a large influx of young women moving to the city to work for the bourgeoisie.

MARIE-JEANNE DUMONT: Les domestiques des appartements bourgeois sont souvent des femmes qui viennent des régions pauvres, notamment la Bretagne. La Bretagne alimente beaucoup la domesticité parisienne…

JEANNE BOËZEC: “They came from poor regions like Brittany in the west of France. At the time, French regions were mostly rural, and coming to Paris was a way to find a job and send money to your family. All those people who came were quite young–14 or 15 years old in many cases.”

ROMAN MARS: Life was hard for these servants, and many of them were living inside their employer’s apartments, which made them available to work 24 hours a day with very few breaks. In 19th century France, it was common for rich, French people to wake up their servants in the middle of the night for small, annoying tasks like fetching a glass of water. The work ruined many of these young workers, who returned home after life in Paris exhausted and demoralized.

MARIE-JEANNE DUMONT: Au XVIIIᵉ siècle, dans un hôtel particulier, la domesticité habite dans les parties de service, au dessus des cuisines, au dessus des écuries, dans des parties séparées, à l’exception des femmes de chambre qui doivent être logées au plus près de la personne qu’elles servent. Donc dans des petits, des petits réduits, des petites chambres sans fenêtres, tout près de la chambre…

JEANNE BOËZEC: Marie-Jeanne is explaining that before the chambre de bonne in the 18th century, servants lived in areas above the kitchen or the stables. Chambermaids would sleep in tiny rooms near the employer’s bedroom–very small rooms usually with no window.

ROMAN MARS: But the Haussmann redesign changed that.

MARIE-JEANNE DUMONT: Le ménagement de chambre de bonne est lié aussi un système constructif. Jusque dans les années 1830-40, la toiture d’un immeuble d’habitation parisien. C’est une toiture à deux pentes assez faible pente recouvert de zinc, et y aménager des chambres n’est pas très facile parce qu’il faut faire des lucarnes qui sont assez éloignées du centre.

ROMAN MARS: Marie John says that, before Haussmann, Paris apartment buildings had small triangle roofs made of zinc. There was not a lot of room to install an attic under the roofs, but Haussmann’s redesign included a series of sloped, mansard roofs. The mansard roofs were sweeping and dramatic. They were a popular design. But Haussmann created these sloped roofs because of something very mundane: municipal height restrictions.

JEANNE BOËZEC: At the time, Paris had a height limit on new buildings. Every building could only be 65 feet tall.

ROMAN MARS: But that height limit wasn’t for the very top of the building. It was for the cornice line, where the roof begins. So the mansard roof is kind of like cheating. It allowed the building to be taller without violating city laws.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Now, the very top floors were all big triangles, and they could put big attics under there.

ROMAN MARS: These triangle attics weren’t desirable for the bourgeoisie living in Paris. You cannot rent it out like the rest of the apartment. But the bourgeoisie decided that they would pay a little extra money for the space and put their servants up there. That’s how the idea of the chambre de bonne was born. Instead of living with their employers, now maids and servants could live in a private space above them.

JEANNE BOËZEC: I visited a typical, classic chambre de bonne with Marie-Jeanne Dumont. This apartment is in the 11th arrondissement, right near La Place de la République. Marie-Jeanne is telling me that this chambre de bonne was pretty typical of its era. It was lit up by a small window. The space is very well preserved. It actually looks like it came straight from the 19th century. Marie-Jeanne says that chambre de bonne were by definition very small, so architects had to make the most of every square foot of space. This old-style chambre de bonne is a lot smaller than the one I lived in.

ROMAN MARS: Based on Haussmann’s designs, the original chambre de bonne were usually about 75 square feet. You could barely fit a bed in there. It was typical for these rooms to have one iron bed, a small table, a chair, and a small piece of furniture to store things. There was no water inside. The only bathrooms or sinks were in the hallway.

JEANNE BOËZEC: The early chambre de bonne were not well maintained by the rich people. Some bourgeoisie didn’t even change the sheets when they hired new employees. Life was awful up there. Domestic workers would die because there was no ventilation.

ROMAN MARS: At the beginning of the 20th century, Parisians became very concerned about tuberculosis. They started to believe that the chambres de bonne were so filthy that they made workers sick and that the maids brought the diseases into their employer’s home.

JEANNE BOËZEC: So the very first chambre de bonne were abundant, and employers moved servants into slightly bigger rooms. This wasn’t because they wanted better living conditions but because they were afraid of the disease.

ROMAN MARS: But the new chambres de bonne were still really small, and the problems continued. Things didn’t change much until the early 20th century.

MARIE-JEANNE DUMONT: Ce qui va changer la donne petit à petit, c’est le travail des femmes qui se développe à l’occasion de la Première Guerre mondiale et le fait que les femmes n’ont plus envie d’être domestique. Ce n’est pas du tout un travail attirant, on préfère travailler en usine, même si le travail peut être très dur en usine et avoir un salaire, un vrai salaire, un vrai emploi, plutôt que de travailler comme domestique dans une famille bourgeoise.

JEANNE BOËZEC: “During World War I, women were authorized to work in factories for the first time, and being a servant became a lot less appealing. The factory jobs had a proper salary, and women preferred them even if the work was more intense.” Marie-Jeanne explains that bourgeois called this “the domesticity crisis.” It was harder in many ways to work at a factory, but young people thought it was better than being a servant, so there was nobody available to do things like cooking and cleaning.

ROMAN MARS: With this labor shortage, there was a pressure on rich people to make the chambres de bonne more livable. And French politicians at the time were passing labor laws, creating more rights for workers.

JEANNE BOËZEC: In 1904, the law was passed. Now all apartments had to be 86 square feet. The old closet-sized chambres de bonne weren’t allowed anymore. The new apartments were still just about nine feet by nine feet, but it was an improvement.

ROMAN MARS: Slowly, the chambres de bonne got even better. Landlords added windows and more toilets in the hallway. And after World War II, France developed a middle class. By mid-century, it wasn’t servants and domestic workers moving to Paris to live in the chambres de bonne. Now, it was a popular housing type for students and young people coming to the city for the first time, and they had higher expectations.

JEANNE BOËZEC: But it was not until 2002 that France passed another law to make apartments bigger.

ROMAN MARS: The new law said that no one should live under 97 square feet out of decency. In a hundred years, Parisians only gained a few feet of space.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Many of the existing chambre de bonne apartments were no longer in compliance. So many landlords decided to demolish the walls between two or three chambres de bonne to make a single, larger apartment.

ROMAN MARS: This rule has led to a lot of chambres de bonne being combined, and that has created some very strange apartment layouts.

MANISHA: My name’s Manisha. I’m 22 years old. I’ve been living in Paris for a year and living in this chambre de bonne for 10 months. and I work in a publishing house.

JEANNE BOËZEC: I wanted to meet up with Manisha because she lives in one of the new style chambres de bonne. Her apartment is 150 square feet. It’s on the seventh floor of a building in the 11th arrondissement, and it’s very obviously two apartments that were smashed together.

JEANNE BOËZEC: So this is your house.

MANISHA: It is. My flat more than a house.

JEANNE BOËZEC: So tell me a bit about it. So we’re in the first room?

MANISHA: Yeah. Well, there’s only one room, but it’s separated by a wall, I guess.

JEANNE BOËZEC: In the middle of the apartment, there is a wall with no door. That wall separates the bedroom/bathroom area from the kitchen/dining room area.

MANISHA: So this is the kitchen. There’s a small table–two chairs. Here, I have my clothes because there’s not a lot of storage.

JEANNE BOËZEC: And it’s right behind the door.

MANISHA: Yes. So you cannot fully open the door, but that’s okay.

JEANNE BOËZEC: And there’s a window.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Manisha doesn’t like her apartment very much. She was living in a bigger place in Lyon, in the south of France, where she studied. This place she’s living in now is small. It’s imperfect, but she can afford it.

MANISHA: There are so many people looking that the flats–as soon as an ad is posted, it’s, like, gone. Yeah, there’s a lot of demand.

ROMAN MARS: The chambre de bonne is still an important part of the housing ecosystem. The average rent for a one bedroom in this neighborhood is 1,400 euros or about $1,500 per month. This apartment costs about one third of that. And since Manisha is making the French minimum wage, it still takes up about 40% of her salary.

JEANNE BOËZEC: In some ways, Manisha is lucky because her situation–a young person with little income renting a cheap chambre de bonne–is becoming rare across the city.

ROMAN MARS: Against all odds, the chambre de bonne is becoming a valuable commodity. The price to rent a chambre de bonne has been going up in recent years. There are a couple of reasons for this, including the newfound popularity of elevators in Paris apartment buildings. According to Marie-Jeanne Dumont, the elevator has changed who is living on the top floor of buildings. With the invention of the elevator, poor people and domestic workers started to move down to the first floor–closer to street noise–and rich people moved up to the penthouse suite. This was a common phenomenon around the world.

JEANNE BOËZEC: But Paris was pretty late to the party. When I lived in a chambre de bonne, it was very strange for a Haussmann building in Paris to have an elevator. You had to climb six or seven floors to get to your small apartment. But more and more, landlords have installed elevators across the city. Back in October, Clémentine and me were shocked to discover an elevator–we actually say an “ascenseur”–in our old building.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Y’a un ascenseur!

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: Oh! Putain [BLEEPED] ça c’est abusé, alors là par contre j’ai le seum.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Y’a un putain [BLEEPED] d’asenceur.

ROMAN MARS: For those of you who don’t speak French, Jeanne and Clémentine are… let’s say, disappointed that the landlord waited until after they left to add an elevator.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: Ils disaient ça à l’époque!

JEANNE BOËZEC: Ils disaient qu’il y avait pas la place.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: L’arnaque.

JEANNE BOËZEC: After years of our landlords saying that there was no room for an elevator–voila–a beautiful new ascenseur. It probably explains why our old places are more expensive today. I left in 2016. When we talked to the new tenant, I was surprised to learn the rent had gone up.

ROMAN MARS: The chambre de bonne is becoming more expensive, but it’s also beginning to disappear as a housing type in Paris. In 1968, there were 66,000 people living in chambre de bonne apartments in the city. According to the most recent public data, that number is down to just over 17,000.

JEANNE BOËZEC: The disappearance of chambre de bonne is striking. A big reason for this is people with money taking old chambre de bonne and renovating them.

ROMAN MARS: In fact, today wealthy Parisians will buy up a whole floor of chambre de bonne apartments and make them into one big living space. The apartments have gone from cramped living quarters for poor people to some of the most valuable real estate in Paris.

JEANNE BOËZEC: This is Guillaume. Years ago, he did one of these renovations. He’s 50 years old, and he lives in the 5th arrondissement, right near the Place Saint Michel. It’s a very fancy part of town. You can actually see Notre Dame through the window of his living room, which is pretty unusual in Paris. Nobody has that kind of view.

GUILLAUME: One of my ancestors built this building. and in exchange for his work and participation in the reconstruction of Paris, he was paid in real estate. That’s how the bourgeoisie I’m from was created. The wealth is entirely rooted in real estate. This building has been in my family for 150 years. The memory I have of people who worked for my parents and who were housed here–the domestic workers did the groceries, cooked, and everything. They lived and worked here full time.

ROMAN MARS: When Guillaume’s mother died a couple of years ago, his father passed down all their real estate to their kids. One apartment went to Guillaume’s sister–and the top floor, which contains the servant’s chambre de bonne, was given to Guillaume.

JEANNE BOËZEC: It was the beginning of the 2000s, and Guillaume decided not to rent out the old chambre de bonne. Instead, he kept it and did a big renovation to make one apartment for his family.

ROMAN MARS: By knocking down walls and extensive reconstruction work, Guillaume and his wife took seven chambres de bonne and made one big, beautiful, living space.

JEANNE BOËZEC: You may have mixed feelings about this. It sounds bad during a housing crisis to take seven rooms and make one big apartment. But to Guillaume, those rooms just couldn’t be used as apartments anymore.

GUILLAUME: It was a pretty obvious decision. These little walls–they weren’t usable for an apartment. They were really tiny. Well, there were squat toilets with a water tap that went into a tub. So I was obliged to change the layout. It wasn’t usable.

JEANNE BOËZEC: And besides, he needed somewhere to live with his growing family. Today, Guillaume has four kids. And finding a place for a family of six is virtually impossible in Paris.

ROMAN MARS: Renovations like Guillaume’s are becoming more common across Paris. In many cases, these renovations take a small, cramped apartment and make them livable. But this kind of renovation has also reduced a valuable source of affordable housing. Ultimately, it’s not up to people like Guillaume to preserve affordable chambre de bonne apartments. That’s a problem for the decision makers at city hall.

IAN BROSSAT: Paris est une ville qui est majoritairement une ville de locataires. Donc ce qui concerne le plus les parisiens, c’est le niveau des loyers…

JEANNE BOËZEC: Ian Brossat is a senator from the Communist Party. He just got elected last September. But before that, he was a deputy mayor in Paris, working specifically on housing for nine years. He says that Paris is a city of tenants, and most Parisians are concerned about rent. Brossat says the rent in Paris is too high. He says, “When families grow, they can no longer afford to live here because they cannot afford to rent a bigger place.” Ian Brossat says, “Paris is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, so there isn’t much opportunity to build new housing. The city is already too built up.”

ROMAN MARS: Paris is a dense and historic city where it’s actually illegal to construct high-rise buildings. So, Paris can’t just build a lot of tall apartments. And with the lack of housing stock, the prices keep going up. Brossat says his team made some progress on housing when he was deputy mayor. They managed to get the amount of social housing in the city up to 25%. But the city is still facing a major lack of affordable housing.

JEANNE BOËZEC: The chambre de bonne could be a useful solution for this because many of them are vacant. According to the most recent data I could find, 85% of the chambre de bonne in Paris are vacant. This is largely because of the law passed in 2002 to guarantee a minimum apartment size. Many chambre de bonne are just too small to be left in.

ROMAN MARS: Ian Brossat says that the chambre de bonne could be a breeding ground for new housing in the city. Obviously, these apartments have to be combined, but Brossat says there is great housing potential under Parisian roofs.

JEANNE BOËZEC: When I first moved to my chambre de bonne, I remember how big it felt. My dad was here to help me, and one of his first comments was how small it was given the rent. I could not see it. I was too happy to move to Paris. I was doing my first internship in public radio. To me, apartments are more than just a place we live in. They are also a place where we make memories. I always remember the sound of Clémentine’s lock in the morning when she left her room and the text we used to send each other at the end of the day–“I’m downstairs. Do you need anything?–so that the other one doesn’t have to climb all the stairs a second time in the day. When I moved out, two years later, I got sad. Clémentine took a picture of me sitting on the floor in the empty room, covered in sweat, after moving all my stuff. More than saying goodbye to my apartment, I was saying goodbye to this part of my life. And Clémentine had the same experience when she moved out.

CLÉMENTINE SPILER: Some friends came to help me move out. And one of my friends who’d never been here looked at my empty room and was like, “You lived here? For three years?” And we just stood there. And I had never looked at the room that way. And I think, because I was leaving, I finally could look at it and be like, “I had to be in a lot of denial to be able to have a daily life in such a tiny space. It’s barely made to sleep at night.” But I was having a very normal life. I would have friends over.

JEANNE BOËZEC: So, yeah, I understand why it’s easy to get nostalgic about the chambre de bonne. But maybe it’s time to retire this type of housing and find a better solution for Parisians. One thing is clear. If the chambre de bonne disappears forever, we need to find something to replace it.

ROMAN MARS: When we come back, in many places, the entrance to chambre de bonne apartments are hidden and only accessible by a special set of stairs. More with Jeanne Boëzec after this.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Jeanne Boëzec. Hey, Jeanne!

JEANNE BOËZEC: Hi!

ROMAN MARS: So in this episode, we talked about your ordeal of climbing six flights of stairs to get to your chambre de bonne. But something we didn’t get to in the episode is this idea of service stairs. Can you explain service stairs to me?

JEANNE BOËZEC: So service stairs are most of the time hidden–and they are how many people get into their chambre de bonne apartments. The service stairs connects the chambre de bonne to the first floor, so it’s not the main stair that you use. To understand this, first we need to talk about private mentions in Paris. So, before Haussmann, most bourgeois who lived in Paris live in hotel particulier, which are private mansions. You can still see examples of these in Paris. For example, the Musée Carnavalet–the Museum of the City of Paris–it used to be a hotel particulier. So, in these mansions, they had separate staircases for servants. And they had the opportunity to separate where the people who live there actually go in and where the servants go in and go out–and it was separated. They used the front door and servants the back door, just to be clear. And then Haussmann comes along, and we get all these apartments for the bourgeois. And in many cases, they retain the idea of the service stairs. It’s connected by the kitchens. And the idea was that all the ugly stuff leaves the apartment by those stairs. So groceries, coal, trash, and the servants–we don’t see them. And they would still have a separate staircase for the people living in the chambre de bonne. Actually, service stairs were the only stairs going all the way up to the chambre de bonne. The main one wouldn’t go all the way there. Just for you to have a better understanding of the difference between the main stairs that was used by the bourgeois and the service stairs that was used by the servants–to imagine it, you need to think about a Haussmann building and the stairs. We always talk about the stairs in Haussmann buildings. They have a nice, red carpet, and it’s super nice. Well, when you think about the service stairs, it’s the opposite. It’s very narrow–very small. It’s just stairs–one point to another point.

ROMAN MARS: And so how do they work? How do you get to the service stairs inside of a Haussmann apartment?

JEANNE BOËZEC: You think about a Haussmann building, and to go to the service stairs, you don’t go to the main stair. You cross the courtyard. Usually when it rains, you are not protected. And it made sense at the time because the courtyard was where the carriage would be parked and discharged. So servants would directly use the service stairs to take goods up to the apartment.

ROMAN MARS: Right. The chambres de bonne themselves are already interesting to, I think, American ears because we tend to not encourage rich people and poor people to live in the same building at all in the United States. And so this idea that they’d be in one building and that the poor people live upstairs… but I thought, I guess, that there would at least be some mingling because everyone still has to come in through the same entrance. But this is not the case. These people and their stairway into their home actually is hidden.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Yes. For example, when Marie-Jeanne Dumont and I visited a chambre de bonne in the 11th arrondissement, you had a service stairs in the courtyard. But you also had an entry. You couldn’t see the door. It was in the wall. It was invisible. They didn’t want those people to be seen and also not to see how they worked around the families.

ROMAN MARS: The architecture of the staircases–it is clear that they’re an afterthought. They’re not in service of the people using them. They’re in service of the people who just don’t want those people to be seen.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Yes, yes, yes, yes. It was uncomfortable. And when you walk the stairs now, you can see also that the painting is less beautiful and the stairs are really not easy to climb. Nothing is really thought of for the people. It’s just like, “We want them there. And that’s it.”

ROMAN MARS: Wow. It’s so interesting. Well, thank you so much, Jeanne. We had such a fun time making this episode with you. I really appreciate it.

JEANNE BOËZEC: Well, thank you. Roman.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jeanne Boëzec. Edited by Chris Berube. Fact-checking and translation by Lara Bullens. Mix and sound design by Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.

JEANNE BOËZEC: And a special thanks to OU and Charlotte Rothman.

ROMAN MARS: Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Sarah Baik, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martín Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Neena Pathak, Kelly Prime, Swan Real, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I am a proud community owner. Other teams come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always. You can find links to us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server, of which there are now 3,000 people talking about architecture, talking about movies, talking about music, and talking about The Power Broker. There’s a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.