Rooftoppers

The majestic rooftops of 19th-century Paris are the magical setting for Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, a coming-of-age story suffused with the baroque wonder of picturesque cities and skylines. The novel’s heroine, a 12-year-old foundling named Sophie, arrives in Paris to search for her mother and discovers a secret community of “sky-treaders”—ragamuffins who eke out a death-defying existence on the city’s windswept roofs, trees, bridges, and train stations. The “spring”-legged Matteo, who has not set foot on the ground in years, has forged a life for himself in the bleak valleys and peaks of Paris’s slate, tile, and zinc rooftops, like Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Rundell’s novel is, in large part, a love letter to these iconic features of Parisian architecture, the elegance of which is inseparable from the city’s storied ambience.

Schooling Sophie in the art of rooftopping (traversing the city by roof instead of by street), Matteo warns her that “[p]oor buildings are usually pointed; rich buildings are usually flat” (138). As an afficionado of roof surfaces, which are highly regimented in Paris, Matteo knows whereof he speaks. Paris’s harmonious consistency of design is unique in modern cities—a legacy of Baron Haussmann’s sweeping mid-19th century redevelopment of the city, which established a standard height, width, and layout for residential buildings, as well as lavish decorative features—wrought iron balconies, dormer windows, and parquet floors. Haussmann’s massive rebuilding project, one of the most ambitious urban renewal ventures of all time, gave Paris’s edifices and boulevards a graceful unity, elegance, and clarity of line that makes them globally recognizable as Parisian.

Until Haussmann, Paris hadn’t shifted from the teeming squalor of its medieval period. For centuries, the swarming heart of the city was cluttered with ramshackle houses, shops, and inns, and its streets were narrow, dark, and disease ridden. In the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed and abandoned several ambitious schemes for urban renewal; it was not until his nephew, Emperor Napoleon III, seized power in 1851 that Paris’s structural failings were remedied on a massive scale. Seeking to remake Paris as a modern, salubrious city suffused with beauty, spaciousness, and light, the new emperor invested Haussmann, his “prefect of the Seine” (city governor), with sweeping powers to demolish most of medieval Paris and rebuild it around meticulously ordered city centers. These included elegant residential buildings, wide boulevards, public parks, state-of-the-art sewer systems, and majestic institutions such as the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) and the opulent Palais Garnier (opera house).

The facades of Paris’s new buildings were fashioned out of solid rock and crowned with mansard roofs angled at 45˚ to allow the maximum amount of sunlight into the streets. The buildings’ standardized height (generally no more than six stories) gave neighborhoods harmony—and in Rooftoppers, this makes Matteo’s daily commute from one rooftop to another considerably easier. The roofs themselves were typically covered with zinc, a lustrous, pliable metal that was easily molded to the buildings’ ornate features, such as the city’s famous dormer windows. Many were also made from gray slate, such as Matteo’s “home” atop the city’s law court.

All of these facets combine to create the sweeping grandeur of the rooftops of Paris when viewed from an upper-story window, like a pastel landscape of “sharp angles and eyes” (112)—Sophie’s description of Matteo himself. In the days before elevators, the top stories of Paris’s Haussmannian buildings (like Sophie’s hotel room) were home to the poorer classes, but in the 20th century, they became the most desirable and expensive lodgings largely due to their spectacular rooftop views.