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That was in the year 1799 Thank God Mada her as she walked ho Grenouille and our story behind She ht possibly have lost her faith in justice and with it the onlythat she could make of life

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Frolance at Monsieur Grimal—no, fro Gri him to death for the least infraction His life orth precisely as much as the work he could accomplish and consisted only of whatever utility Grimal ascribed to it And so, Grenouille ca an attempt to resist With each new day, he would bottle up inside hiies of his defiance and contue in his ticklike way Tough, uncoht of life’s hopes as a very son of docility, frugality, and diligence in his work, obeyed implicitly, and appeared satisfied with every , he meekly let himself be locked up in a closet off to one side of the tannery floor, where tools were kept and the raw, salted hides were hung There he slept on the hard, bare earthen floor During the day he worked as long as there was light—eight hours in winter, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours in su hides, watered them down, dehaired them, li dung, chopped wood, stripped bark fro pits filled with caustic fumes, layered the hides and pelts just as the journeyallnuts, covered this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth Years later, he would have to dig theain and retrieve these rave

When he was not burying or digging up hides, he was hauling water For months on end, he hauled water up from the river, always in two buckets, hundreds of bucketfuls a day, for tanning requires vast quantities of water, for soaking, for boiling, for dyeing Forleft hi his clothes were dripping wet and his skin was cold and swollen like a soaked shammy

After one year of an existence more animal than human, he contracted anthrax, a disease feared by tanners and usually fatal Gri around for a replaceret, by the way, for he had never before had a more docile and productive worker than this Grenouille But contrary to all expectation, Grenouille survived the illness All he bore froe black carbuncles behind his ears and on his hands and cheeks, leaving hilier than he had been before It also left hie—so that now he could strip the foulest hides with cut and bleeding hands and still run no danger of reinfection This set him apart not only from the apprentices and journeymen, but also froer be so easily replaced as before, the value of his work and thus the value of his life increased Suddenly he no longer had to sleep on bare earth, but was allowed to build hiiven straw to scatter over it and a blanket of his own He was no longer locked in at bedtier kept him as just any animal, but as a useful house pet

When he elve, Griave hio out on weekend evenings for an hour after work and do whatever he liked He had triumphed, for he was alive, and he possessed a small quantum of freedom sufficient for survival The days of his hibernation were over Grenouille the tick stirred again He caught the scent of reatest preserve for odors in all the world stood open before him: the city of Paris

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It was like living in utopia The adjacent neighborhoods of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Eustache were a wonderland In the narrow side streets off the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin, people lived so densely packed, each house so tightly pressed to the next, five, six stories high, that you could not see the sky, and the air at ground level forealed It was a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and srease and soggy straw and dry straw Thousands upon thousands of odors forruel that filled the street ravines, only seldoround below The people who lived there no longer experienced this gruel as a special smell; it had arisen froain; it was, after all, the very air they breathed and fro you no longer sainst your skin Grenouille, however, smelled it all as if for the first tigregate, but he dissected it analytically into its s nose unraveled the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors that could not be unthreaded further Unwinding and spinning out these threads gave him unspeakable joy

He would often just stand there, leaning against a wall or crouching in a dark corner, his eyes closed, hispike in a great, dark, slowlycurrent And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way, he would lunge at it and not let go Then he would s it into hiht be an old acquaintance, or a variation on one; it could be a brand-new one as well, with hardly any si he had ever smelled, let alone seen, till that moment: the odor of pressed silk, for example, the odor of a wild-thyme tea, the odor of brocade embroidered with silver thread, the odor of a cork froe wine, the odor of a tortoiseshell comb Grenouille was out to find such odors still unknown to hiler and stored them up inside him

When he had so to airier terrain, where the odors were thinner,with the wind as they unfurled, much as perfume does—to the market of Les Halles, for instance, where the odors of the day lived on into the evening, invisibly but ever so distinctly, as if the vendors still swar the crowd, as if the baskets still stood there stuffed full of vegetables and eggs, or the casks full of wine and vinegar, the sacks with their spices and potatoes and flour, the crates of nails and screws, the meat tables, the tables full of cloth and dishes and shoe soles and all the hundreds of other things sold there during the day … the bustle of it all down to the smallest detail was still present in the air that had been left behind Grenouille saw the whole , if it can be put that way And he smelled it more precisely than many people could see it, for his perception was after the fact and thus of a higher order: an essence, a spirit of what had been, so undisturbed by the everyday accidents of thehus

Or he would go to the spot where they had beheaded his mother, to the place de Grève, which stuck out to lick the river like a huge tongue Here lay the ships, pulled up onto shore or rain and hay and damp ropes

And froh the city by the river, ca with it the odors of the country, of the meadows around Neuilly, of the forests between Saint-Germain and Versailles, of far-off cities like Rouen or Caen and sometimes of the sea itself The sea sht up water, salt, and a cold sun It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odors i

nto fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on He preferred to leave the s it as a unit in hisit whole The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it And later, when he learned froe the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased hih up in the crow’s nest of the foreh the endless smell of the sea—which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all s with pleasure in that breath But it was never to be, for Grenouille, who stood there on the riverbank at the place de Grève steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose, would never in his life see the sea, the real sea, the immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to le himself with its smell