Our Apartment/Impregnable Fortress

Katie and Darryl left this morning after a lovely week-long visit, and now we turn to preparing for our next visitors, who arrive Monday. (Just in case my dissertation adviser is reading this: Yes, I am still researching out the wazoo. In fact, I may have just had my most productive week yet. Maggie does a good job of keeping me on top of things. No matter how many visitors we have, I'm still on track to finish this thing by . . . well . . . sometime around June 2012 or June 2013.)

It seems like every one of our visitors has noticed one thing in particular about our apartment: the door. As you can see below, it is a very secure door. Technically there's only one keyhole, and the same mechanism locks the door in five separate places. And then there's the security latch, which we use at night, just for kicks.

We're not sure why our door needs to be so secure. Anyone who wants to get in at night first has to know the code to get through the porte cochère or outside door, which lets you into the first courtyard. Then at all times of day there's the door to our building, for which you need a different code. And finally, the outside of our apartment door has no doorknob - there's nothing to jimmy or turn, other than the single keyhole that operates the single five-lock mechanism. If one managed to reproduce the key (which would be no small feat - we had to go to five serruriers (keysmiths) before we could find someone with the right technology) it wouldn't matter if we'd closed the door without locking it, or locked it in five places, since you could easily unlock everything yourself. The only thing these locks seem to defend against is an extremely forceful, direct assault with a medieval battering ram. But if they tried that, we'd pour boiling oil and shoot flaming arrows all over the attackers. 

In the end, our door is just as perplexing to us as to our visitors. And it's not exceptional by French standards. So add our door's quadruply-redundant security to the growing list of things that we don't get, but that we don't mind, because it's all part of the charm of Parisian life.