The Elegance of the Hedgehog (French: L'Élégance du hérisson) is a novel by the French novelist and philosophy teacher^[1] Muriel Barbery. The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the Parisian hôtel particulier where Renée works.

Featuring a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections; Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.

First released in August 2006 by Gallimard, the novel became a publishing success in France the following year, selling over two million copies. It has been translated into more than forty languages, and published in numerous countries outside France, including the United Kingdom (Gallic Books, London) and the United States (Europa Editions, New York), and has attracted critical praise.

The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris. Divided into eight luxury apartments, all occupied by distinctly bourgeois families, the building has a courtyard and private garden.

The widow Renée is a concierge who has supervised the building for 27 years. She is an autodidact in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants. Likewise, she wants to be alone to avoid her tenants' curiosity. She effects this by pretending to indulge in low-quality food and television, while in her back room she actually enjoys high-quality food, listens to opera, and reads works by Leo Tolstoy and Edmund Husserl. Her perspective is that "[t]o be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age".

Twelve-year-old Paloma lives on the fifth floor with her parents and sister, whom she considers snobs. A precocious girl, she hides her intelligence to avoid exclusion at school. Dismayed by the privileged people around her, she decides that life is meaningless, and that unless she can find something worth living for, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence",  she will commit suicide on 16 June, her thirteenth birthday. Planning to burn down the apartment before dying, she also steals her mother's pills. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.

Paloma is the only tenant who suspects Renée's refinement, and for most of the novel, the two "cross each other but don't see each other", in the words of Time Out reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli. apanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, whom Renée and Paloma befriend, then takes a room in the same apartment building. Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".

Toward the end of the novel, Renée comes out of her internal seclusion, teaching young Paloma that not all adults pursue vanity at the expense of their intelligence and humanity. However, only shortly after Renée realizes that the beauty of life and her connections with the world make life worth living, she dies in the same way as Roland Barthes; she is struck down by a laundry van. This leaves Paloma and Ozu devastated but leads Paloma not to commit suicide.