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Gradually the shock subsided Gradually the grip of anxiety loosened, and Grenouille began to feel safer Toward noon he was his old cold-blooded self He laid the index and ers of his left hand under his nose and breathed along the backs of his fingers He s air spiced with aneers He turned his hand over and sniffed at the pal Then he rolled up the ragged sleeve of his shirt, buried his nose in the crook of his elbow He knew that this was the spot where all hu He could not s in his arenitals when he bent down to therotesque: he, Grenouille, who could s his own genitals not a handspan away! Nevertheless, he did not panic, but considered it all coolly and spoke to himself as follows: “It is not that I do not s smells It is, rather, that I cannot smell that I smell, because I have smelled myself day in day out since ainst my own smell If I could separate my own smell, or at least a part of it, fro weaned from it for a while, then I would most certainly be able to smell it—and therefore me”

He laid the horse blanket aside and took off his clothes, or at least what res and tatters hat he took off For seven years he had not removed them from his body They had to be fully saturated with his own odor He tossed them into a pile at the cave entrance and walked away Then, for the first tiain climbed to the top of the mountain There he stood on the same spot where he had stood on the day of his arrival, held his nose to the west, and let the histle around his naked body His intention was thoroughly to air himself, to be pumped so full of the ind—and that meant with the odor of the sea and wet meadows—that this odor would counterbalance his own body odor, creating a gradient of odors between himself and his clothes, which he would then be in a position to s in the least bit of his own odor, he bent his body forward, stretching his neck out as far as he could against the wind, with his arms stretched behind him He looked like a swimmer just before he dives into the water

He held this totally ridiculous pose for several hours, and even by such pale sunlight, his skin, ot white fro he climbed back down to the cave Fro in a pile The last few yards, he held his nose closed and opened it again only when he had lowered it right down onto the pile Heup the air and then letting it out again in spurts And to catch the odor, he used both hands to form a bell around his clothes, with his nose stuck into it as the clapper He did everything possible to extract his own odor from his clothes But there was no odor in them It was most definitely not there There were a thousand other odors: the odor of stone, sand, e that he had bought years before near Sully was clearly perceptible Those clothes contained an olfactory diary of the last seven, eight years Only one odor was not there—his own odor, the odor of the person who had worn them continuously all that time

And now he began to be truly alar naked at the entrance to the tunnel, where he had lived in darkness for seven years The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counterfrost, fear It was not the sahastly fear of suffocating on himself—which he had had to shake off and flee whatever the cost What he now felt was the fear of not knowingabout himself It was the opposite pole of that other fear He could not flee it, but had to move toward it He had to know for certain—even if that knowledge proved too terrible—whether he had an odor or not And he had to kno At once

He went back into the tunnel Within a few yards he was fully engulfed in darkness, but he found his way as if by brightest daylight He had gone down this path many thousands of times, knew every step and every turn, could s stone It was not hard to find the way What was hard was fighting back the her within him like a flood tide with every step he took But he was brave That is to say, he fought the fear of knoith the fear of not knowing, and he won the battle, because he knew he had no choice When he had reached the end of the tunnel, there where the rock slide slanted upwards, both fears fell away from him He felt calm, his mind was quite clear and his nose sharp as a scalpel He squatted down, laid his hands over his eyes, and srave, he had lain for seven years There must be some smell of him here, if anywhere in this world He breathed slowly He analyzed exactly He allowed himent He squatted there for a quarter of an hour His memory was infallible, and he knew precisely how this spot had smelled seven years before: stony andcreature, man or beast, could ever have entered the place … which was exactly how it smelled now

He continued to squat there for a while, quite calently Then he turned around and walked, at first hunched down, but when the height of the tunnel allowed it, erect, out into the open air

Outside he pulled on his rags (his shoes had rotted off him years before), threw the horse blanket over his shoulders, and that sa south

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He looked awful His hair reached down to the hollows of his knees, his scraggly beard to his navel His nails were like talons, and the skin on his arer covered his body, was peeling off in shreds

The first people he met, far at the sight of him But in the town itself, he caused a sensation By the hundreds people caape at hialley slave Others said he was not really a hu, but some mixture of man and bear, some kind of forest creature One felloho had been to sea, claimed that he looked like a member of a wild Indian tribe in Cayenne, which lay on the other side of the great ocean They led him before the mayor There, to the astonishment of the assembly, he produced his journeyabbled but sufficiently comprehensible words—for these were the first words that he had uttered in seven years—how he had been attacked by robbers, dragged off, and held captive in a cave for seven years He had seen neither daylight nor another hu that time, had been fed by an invisible hand that let down a basket in the dark, and finally set free by a ladder—without his ever knohy and without ever having seen his captors or his rescuer He had thought this story up, since it seemed to him more believable than the truth; and so it was, for similar attacks by robbers occurred not infrequently in the uedoc, and in the Cévennes At least the mayor recorded it all without protest and passed his report on to the e lord of the town and member of parliament in Toulouse

At the age of forty, the marquis had turned his back on life at the court of Versailles and retired to his estates, where he lived for science alone Fro dynamic political economy In it he had proposed the abolition of all taxes on real estate and agricultural products, as well as the introduction of an upside-down progressive income tax, which would hit the poorest citizens the hardest and so force theorous developed by the success of his little book, he authored a tract on the raising of boys and girls between the ages of five and ten Then he turned to experi the serasses, he attem

pted to produce a etable hybrid, a sort of udder flower After initial successes that enable hirass—described by the Acadehtly bitter”—he had to abandon his experi bull semen by the hundreds of quarts across his fields In any case, his concern with ical had awakened his interest not only in the plowed clod, so to speak, but in the earth in general and its relationship to the biosphere in particular