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For little Grenouille, Mada He probably could not have survived anywhere else But here, with this sh constitution Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again He could eat watery soup for days on end, he etables and spoiled meat In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest True, he bore scars and chafings and scabs frohtly crippled foot left hih as a resistant bacteriu quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before He required afor his body For his soul he required nothing Security, attention, tenderness, love—or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require—were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille Or rather, so it seeo on living—from the very start The cry that followed his birth, the cry hich he had brought hialloas not an instinctive cry for sympathy and love That cry, eht almost say upon ainst love and nevertheless for life Under the circumstances, the latter was possible only without the former, and had the child derisly end Of course, it could have grabbed the other possibility open to it and held its peace and thus have chosen the path fro itself and the world a great deal of mischief But to have made such a modest exit would have demanded a modicum of native civility, and that Grenouille did not possess He was an abomination from the start He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice

Obviously he did not decide this as an adult would decide, who requires hisvarious options But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside s be

Or like that tick in the tree, for which life has nothing better to offer than perpetual hibernation The ugly little tick, which by rolling its blue-gray body up into a ball offers the least possible surface to the world; which by , lets not the tiniest bit of perspiration escape The tick, which makes itself extra small and inconspicuous so that no one will see it and step on it The lonely tick, which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind, deaf, and du, foranimal that it could never reach on its oer The tick could let itself drop It could fall to the floor of the forest and creep a s and lie down to die under the leaves—it would be no great loss, God knows But the tick, stubborn, sullen, and loathsome, huddles there and lives and waits Waits, for thatblood, in animal form, directly beneath its tree And only then does it abandon caution and drop, and scratch and bore and bite into that alien flesh…

The young Grenouille was such a tick He lived encapsulated in hi but his dung—no slimmer in the eye, not even his own scent Every other woman would have kicked this monstrous child out But not Madame Gaillard She could not ss froht

The other children, however, sensed at once what Grenouille was about Froave theed closer together in their beds as if it had grown colder in the rooht; they felt a draft sweep through the roo their breath away One day the older ones conspired to suffocate his and blankets and straw over his face and weighed it all doith bricks When Mada, he was crumpled and squashed and blue, but not dead They tried it a couple of ti their bare hands or stopping up his mouth and nose—would have been a dependable method, but they did not dare try it They didn’t want to touch hi yourself to crush in your own hand disgusts you

As he grew older, they gave up their attempted murders They probably realized that he could not be destroyed Instead, they stayed out of his way, ran off, or at least avoided touching him They did not hate hie hihtest cause of such feelings in the House of Gaillard It simply disturbed them that he was there They could not stand the nonsmell of him They were afraid of him

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Looked at objectively, however, there was nothing at all about hirew older, he was not especially big, nor strong—ugly, true, but not so extreht at hiressive, nor underhanded, nor furtive, he did not provoke people He preferred to keep out of their way And he appeared to possess nothing even approaching a fearful intelligence Not until age three did he finally begin to stand on two feet; he spoke his first word at four, it was the word “fishes,” which in a moment of sudden excite up the rue de Charonne cried out his wares in the distance The next words he parted ere “pelargoniue,” and “Jacqueslorreur,” this last being the na convent of the Filles de la Croix, who occasionally did rough, indeed very rough work for Mada washed in all his life He was less concerned with verbs, adjectives, and expletives Except for “yes” and “no”—which, by the way, he used for the first time quite late—he used only nouns, and essentially only nouns for concrete objects, plants, anis—and only then if the objects, plants, anis would subdue him with a sudden attack of odor

One day as he sat on a cord of beechwood logs snapping and cracking in the March sun, he first uttered the word “wood” He had seen wood a hundred times before, had heard the word a hundred times before He understood it, too, for he had often been sent to fetch wood in winter But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to trouble himself to speak its name It happened first on that March day as he sat on the cord of wood The cord was stacked beneath overhanging eaves and for the south side of Madaave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of the cord came a mossy aroma; and in the war of the shed

Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed He had closed his eyes and did not stir He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing He only s up around him to be captured under the bonnet of the eaves He drank in the aroh his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half hour or ed up the word “wood” He vomited the word up, as if he were filled ood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his sto over ood And that brought hi presence of the wood, its aroma, was about to suffocate his, and tottered away as if on wooden legs Days later he was still completely fuddled by the

intense olfactory experience, and whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within hily, over and over, “wood, wood”

And so he learned to speak With words designating non-s objects, with abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or reatest difficulty He could not retain them, confused thely and often incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, huratitude, etc—what these were meant to express remained a mystery to him

On the other hand, everyday language soon would prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accu mere wood, but kinds of wood: , rotting, s, chips, and splinters—and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight It was the sas For instance, the white drink that Madanated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it s on hoarm it hich cow it had co, how much cream had been left in it and so on… Or why should smoke possess only the name “sam of hundreds of odorsunities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air—each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odor and thus aninated by just those three coarse words All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by sh for the lad Grenouille to doubt if languagesuch words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary

At age six he had cos olfactorily There was not an object in Mada the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person, no stone, tree, bush, or picket fence, no spot be it ever so sain by holding its uniqueness firathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall theain, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection And as e new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odors that enabled hireat nue when other children stammer words, so painfully drummed into them, to for the world Perhaps the closest analogy to his talent is the musical wunderkind, who has heard his way inside melodies and harmonies to the alphabet of individual tones and now composes completely new melodies and harmonies all on his own With the one difference, however, that the alphabet of odors is incoer and more nuanced than that of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself

To the world he appeared to grow ever h the northern parts of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, through vegetable gardens and vineyards, across , re hi hi hihteen months of sporadic attendance at the parish school of Notre Dame de Bon Secours had no observable effect He learned to spell a bit and to write his own na more His teacher considered him feebleminded

Madame Gaillard, however, noticed that he had certain abilities and qualities that were highly unusual, if not to say supernatural: the childish fear of darkness and night seen to him You could send him anytime on an errand to the cellar, where other children hardly dared go even with a lantern, or out to the shed to fetch wood on the blackest night And he never took a light with hiht back as deknocked over More reht she had discovered his apparent ability to see right through paper, cloth, wood, even through brick walls and locked doors Without ever entering the dormitory, he kne many of her wards—and which ones—were in there He knew if there was a worm in the cauliflower before the head was split open And once, when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn’t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places), he pointed without a second’s search to a spot behind a fireplace beam—and there it was! He could even see into the future, because he would infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the person arrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky Of course, he could not see any of these things with his eyes, but rather caught their scents with a nose that fros more keenly and precisely: the worm in the cauliflower, the money behind a beam, and people on the other side of a wall or several blocks away But Madauessed that fact in her wildest dreaan intact She was convinced that, feebleht And since she also knew that people with second sight bring ly nervous What ht of living under the sa hidden money behind walls and beams; and once she had discovered that Grenouille possessed this dreadful ability, she set about getting rid of him And it just so happened that at about the saht—the cloister of Saint-Merri, without mention of the reason, ceased to pay its yearly fee Madame did not dun them For appearances’ sake, she waited an additional week, and when the money owed her still had not appeared, she took the lad by the hand and walked with him into the city

She was acquainted with a tanner named Grimal, who lived near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and had a notorious need for young laborers—not for regular apprentices and journeymen, but for cheap coolies There were certain jobs in the trade—scraping thefluids and dyes, producing the caustic lyes—so perilous, that, if possible, a responsible tanning master did not waste his skilled workers on them, but instead used unemployed riffraff, tramps, or, indeed, stray children, about whom there would be no inquiry in dubious situations Madame Gaillard knew of course that by all normal standards Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal’s tannery But she was not a wos She had, after all, done her duty Her custodianship was ended What happened to her ward froh, well and good If he died, that ell and good too—the ally And so she had Monsieur Grimal provide her with a written receipt for the boy she was handing over to hie fee of fifteen francs, and set out again for hoe of conscience On the contrary, she thought her actions not al but also just, for if a child for who were to stay on with her, it would necessarily be at the expense of the other children or, worse, at her own expense, endangering the future of the other children, or worse, her own future—that is, her own private and sheltered death, which was the only thing that she still desired from life

Since we are to leave Madame Gaillard behind us at this point

in our story and shall not ain, we shall take a few sentences to describe the end of her days Although dead in her heart since childhood, Madame unfortunately lived to be very, very old In 1782, just short of her seventieth birthday, she gave up her business, purchased her annuity as planned, sat in her little house, and waited for death But death did not co not a soul in the world could have anticipated: a revolution, a rapid transformation of all social, moral, and transcendental affairs At first this revolution had no effect on Madahty by now—all at once the rate, was stripped of his holdings, and forced to auction off his possessions to a trouser e would have no fatal effect on Madame Gaillard, for the trouser manufacturer continued to pay her annuity punctually But then caer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printed paper, and thatof her economic demise

Within two years, the annuity was no longer worth enough to pay for her firewood Madame was forced to sell her house—at a ridiculously low price, since suddenly there were thousands of other people who also had to sell their houses And once again she received in return only these stupid slips of paper, and once again within two years they were as good as worthless, and by 1797 (she was nearing ninety now) she had lost her entire fortune, scraped together fro in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles And only then—ten, twenty years too late—did death arrive, in the forrabbed Mada her first of her appetite and then of her voice, so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hôtel-Dieu There they put her in a ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill, the same ward in which her husband had died, laid her in a bed shared with total strangers, pressing body upon body with five other wo weeks let her die in public view She was then sewn into a sack, tossed onto a tu with fifty other corpses, to the faint tinkle of a bell driven to the newly founded ceates, and there laid in her final resting place, a rave beneath a thick layer of quicklime