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Part One

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In eighteenth-century France there lived a es in an era that knew no lack of gifted and aboes His story will be told here His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his naifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fouché’s, Bonaparte’s, etc—has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those ance, misanthropy, immorality, or, ifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a do realm of scent

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of s, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooently sweet aroma of chamber pots The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes frohterhouses caealed blood People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; fro teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and fro, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, suhteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, nolife that was not accompanied by stench

And of course the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city of France And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench: between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie, the Ciht hundred years the dead had been brought here fro parish churches, for eight hundred years, day in, day out, corpses by the dozens had been carted here and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses Only later—on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard’s neighbors to more than mere protest and to actual insurrection—was it finally closed and abandoned Millions of bones and skulls were shoveled into the catacombs of Montmartre and in its place a food market was erected

Here, then, on the dom, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on July 17, 1738 It was one of the hottest days of the year The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapor, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odor of burnt anian, Grenouille’sat a fish stall in the r

ue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted The fish, ostensibly taken that veryfrom the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odor of corpses Grenouille’s mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impressions She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible It was her fifth She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or seed had not differed greatly frouts that lay there already, nor had livedthe whole raveyard or down to the river It would be much the sa woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her out and syphilis and a touch of consumption—suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a ith a trade or some such to bear real children … Grenouille’s mother wished that it were already over And when the final contractions began, she squatted down under the gutting table and there gave birth, as she had done four ti’s umbilical cord with her butcher knife But then, on account of the heat and the stench, which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable, nu—like a field of lilies or a srew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there, knife in hand

Tumult and tur, someone hails the police The wo in the street Slowly she comes to

What has happened to her?

“Nothing”

What is she doing with that knife?

“Nothing”

Where does the blood on her skirt come from?

“From the fish”

She stands up, tosses the knife aside, and walks off to wash

And then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table begins to squall They have a look, and beneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads they discover the newborn child They pull it out As prescribed by law, they give it to a wet nurse and arrest thethat she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had with those other four by the way, she is tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a feeeks later decapitated at the place de Grève

By that tied wet nurses three times No one wanted to keep it for reedy, they said, sucked as s of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood, for it was i just one babe The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, instantly wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, froreat public orphanage in Rouen But since these convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time; since therefore the h; since for that reason the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received even so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate of transport; since, ood forates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge the other formalities … thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties that seemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because tiinal decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptize hiot rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin There they baptized him with the naood mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they did not have the child shipped to Rouen, but instead paiven to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive, until further notice, three francs per week for her trouble

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A feeeks later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, ates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald ar about him—Father Terrier—she said “There!” and set her market basket down on the threshold

“What’s that?” asked Terrier, bending down over the basket and sniffing at it, in the hope that it was so edible

“The bastard of that woman from the rue aux Fers who killed her babies!”

The er till he had exposed the face of the sleeping infant

“He looks good Rosy pink and well nourished”

“Because he’s stuffed himself on me Because he’s pumped me dry down to the bones But I’ve put a stop to that Now you can feed hioat’s , that bastard will”

Father Terrier was an easygoinghis duties was the administration of the cloister’s charities, the distribution of its moneys to the poor and needy And for that he expected a thank-you and that he not be bothered further He despised technical details, because detailshis composure, and he simply would not put up with that He was upset that he had even opened the gate He wished that this feo ho problehtened up, and as he did he breathed the scent of milk and cheesy wool exuded by the wet nurse It was a pleasant aroma