The Tenant

Originally published in French in 1964 as Le Locataire chimérique, the novel follows Trelkovsky, a polite, quiet young man in his early thirties facing eviction from his Paris studio. When his friend Simon mentions a vacant apartment on the rue des Pyrénées, Trelkovsky visits immediately, bribing the ill-tempered concierge to gain entry. The apartment consists of two gloomy rooms with no kitchen, its single window facing a courtyard and looking directly at an oval window belonging to a toilet in the adjacent building. The concierge reveals that the former tenant threw herself out this window onto a glass roof three stories below and is now hospitalized, unlikely to recover.

Trelkovsky negotiates with the landlord, Monsieur Zy, who lives one floor below and demands a five-hundred-thousand-franc fee. The landlord stipulates strict rules: no children, no women as guests, no animals, and no musical instruments. He delays his decision until the former tenant's fate becomes clearer, prompting Trelkovsky to visit her in the hospital.

At Saint-Antoine hospital, Trelkovsky finds the former tenant, Simone Choule, swathed in bandages with one upper incisor tooth visibly missing. A young woman named Stella, Simone's close friend, leans over the bed and pleads with Simone to recognize her, but Simone responds only with an unbearable scream. Trelkovsky lies, claiming to be a casual acquaintance rather than admitting he has no connection to Simone. He invites Stella for a drink and learns that Simone worked in a bookshop and spent her leisure reading historical novels. He takes Stella to lunch and a movie. That evening, Simone dies.

Trelkovsky attends a sparsely attended memorial mass, where the funeral atmosphere triggers an intense meditation on death. He returns to Monsieur Zy, who agrees to a compromise of four hundred and fifty thousand francs. Simone's family does not retrieve her furniture, so everything remains for Trelkovsky. He moves in, feeling melancholy that his old room will soon bear no trace of him.

Around mid-October, Trelkovsky hosts a housewarming party attended by Scope, a lawyer's clerk, Simon, and other friends. After one in the morning, a neighbor pounds on the door complaining about noise. Trelkovsky forces his guests out but accidentally shatters a bottle; the landlord below pounds on the ceiling. From then on, Trelkovsky keeps his radio barely audible and goes to bed by ten, yet neighbors continue knocking on the walls despite his near-total silence. He withdraws from his friends entirely and begins noticing strange phenomena: trash he drops on the staircase vanishes before he returns, and from his darkened window he observes figures who enter the toilet across the courtyard, stand motionless, pull the chain, and leave without using the facility.

One evening, Trelkovsky discovers a hole in the wall behind the armoire containing a tooth, an incisor, which recalls Simone's missing tooth. He reflects on personal identity, wondering at what point a person ceases to be themselves when parts are removed. He also finds Simone's letters and historical novels beneath a commode. A man named Georges Badar, Simone's childhood friend who had planned to propose to her, arrives and learns of her death. Trelkovsky spends the night consoling him, and when he returns at dawn, he finds his apartment burglarized: his radio, suitcases, childhood photographs, and personal souvenirs are gone. The landlord discourages him from contacting the police.

Small transformations accumulate. At the café across the street, the waiter automatically brings Trelkovsky chocolate and dry toast, Simone's regular order, instead of coffee. When no Gauloises are available, he buys Gitanes, the brand Simone smoked. An old woman named Madame Dioz, a neighbor in the building, presents him with a petition signed by multiple tenants protesting another tenant's disturbances; Trelkovsky refuses to sign, interpreting it as a veiled threat. He encounters Stella again and joins her circle of friends, who reminisce about Simone's habits. He listens intently, comparing Simone's preferences to his own.

Trelkovsky falls seriously ill with a high fever. Bedridden and alone, he experiences terrifying hallucinations: the room shrinking, empty space solidifying. While feverish, he sees, or hallucinates, Simone sitting in the toilet across the courtyard. She turns toward him with a hideous smile. For several seconds he feels transported across the courtyard, looking back at a terrified double of himself.

When the fever lifts, workmen repairing the glass roof laugh at him as he appears at his window. He goes to the mirror and discovers his face painted with lipstick, rouge, and mascara. Finding cosmetics in a drawer of Simone's dresser, he arrives at a terrifying conclusion: The neighbors are systematically transforming him into Simone Choule. He connects every detail into a conspiracy: The concierge drew his attention to the toilet window, the robbery erased his past, the wall-knocking conditioned his behavior, the café waiter switched his order. He reasons that once the transformation is complete, he will be compelled to commit suicide just as Simone did, and that the workmen are repairing the glass roof for his fall.

Trelkovsky resolves to resist. He confronts Monsieur Zy, who accuses him of bringing a woman into the apartment after hearing a female voice; Trelkovsky denies it but privately recognizes the voice was his own, already altered. He orders coffee at the café, but the waiter claims the machine is broken. A summons to the police station follows, where the superintendent warns him about disturbance complaints and questions his foreign-sounding name. He reunites with Scope and Simon but finds himself estranged, unable to remember his habitual seat or order his usual food. Walking through his old neighborhood afterward, he recognizes nothing of his former life. He returns to the building late at night, collides with a figure in the dark entrance, is struck on the head, and loses consciousness. He wakes in his apartment dressed as a woman.

Convinced the neighbors will force him from the window, Trelkovsky barricades the apartment with furniture tied together by twine. Through a gap beside the window, he witnesses an elaborate spectacle in the courtyard: neighbors in ritualistic performance, masked figures, and one man wearing a mask resembling his own face. He flees at dawn, checks into a hotel under a false name, and purchases a toy pistol after failing to find a real weapon. On his way back, a car driven by one of the neighbors strikes him. A doctor declares him unharmed, and the neighbor drives him home despite Trelkovsky's screaming protests that the man is a murderer. At the building, additional neighbors seize him and lock him inside the apartment.

In broad daylight, Trelkovsky's body, fully dressed as a woman, crashes through the newly repaired glass roof. A doctor declares it a suicide, but Trelkovsky insists it is murder and that he is not Simone Choule. With astonishing strength, he rises and staggers toward the staircase, smearing blood on every door and step and screaming accusations. On the third-floor landing, neighbors surround him and push him back into the apartment. For the second time, his body crashes through the glass roof.

Trelkovsky slowly regains consciousness in a hospital, hearing voices refer to the patient as "she." He opens one eye. A man who is his exact double sits silently at his bedside. Then Stella appears, leans close, and repeats the same words she spoke to Simone in the hospital at the novel's beginning: "Simone, Simone, you recognize me, don't you? It's Stella; your friend, Stella. Don't you recognize me?" A moaning sound comes from Trelkovsky's mouth, swelling to an unbearable scream that mirrors Simone's earlier response, completing a cyclical loop that collapses both tenants' identities into one.