1744

In 1744, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was six years old and living in the care of Madame Gaillard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The period was one of intense olfactory development for the boy, who had already grasped his surroundings olfactorily. He knew every object, person, stone, tree, bush, and picket fence in Madame Gaillard's house and the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne by their unique smells, storing tens of thousands of specific odours in his memory with such clarity that he could recall them at will and even combine them into new, imaginary scents. This ability was akin to a musical prodigy who, having learned the alphabet of tones, composes new melodies, but with the crucial difference that Grenouille's creative activity took place entirely within himself and could be perceived by no one else.

Learning to Speak Through Scent

Grenouille's acquisition of language was deeply tied to his olfactory experiences. He spoke his first word, "fishes," at the age of four, bursting out with it like an echo when a fishmonger cried his wares in the distance. Subsequent words included "Pelargonium," "goat stall," "savoy cabbage," and "Jacqueslorreur," the name of a gardener's helper who never washed. He used only nouns for concrete objects, plants, animals, and human beings, and only when these things suddenly overcame him with their odour. One day in March 1744, while sitting on a cord of beech-wood logs that gave off a sweet burnt smell and a mossy aroma, he became so overwhelmed by the scent of wood that he felt himself turning into wood itself. After a long while, he gagged up the word "wood," vomiting it as if he were filled with wood to his ears. This intense experience left him fuddled for days, and he would mutter "Wood, wood" whenever the memory rose up too powerfully. He had great difficulty with abstract words like justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, and gratitude, which remained mysteries to him. Conversely, everyday language proved inadequate for the richness of his olfactory world: he could differentiate kinds of wood—maple, oak, pine, elm, pear, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy—down to single logs and splinters, and he found the single word "milk" grotesquely insufficient for the varying smells of the white drink Madame Gaillard served each day, which changed depending on the cow, its feed, and the cream content.

Life in Madame Gaillard's Household

Madame Gaillard, though not yet thirty, was emotionally deadened by a childhood blow from a poker that had destroyed her sense of smell and all human passion. She ran her establishment with merciless order and justice, showing no preference among the children and serving exactly three meals a day. She changed nappies three times daily until the second birthday, after which any child who soiled himself received an uncensorious slap and one less meal. Exactly half the boarding fees were spent on the wards, half retained for herself. Her goal was to save enough for an annuity that would allow her to die at home rather than in the public Hôtel-Dieu. For Grenouille, this environment was a blessing: he survived measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water, emerging with scars, a slightly crippled foot, and a limp, but alive. He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree, requiring a minimum of food and clothing and nothing for his soul. The other children sensed his sinister presence from the first day, avoiding him and sometimes conspiring to suffocate him, but he survived their attempts. They were afraid of him because they could not smell him.

The Olfactory World of 1744 Paris

The year 1744 was set against the backdrop of eighteenth-century France, where cities were dominated by a stench barely conceivable to modern sensibilities. Streets stank of manure, courtyards of urine, stairwells of mouldering wood and rat droppings, kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat, bedrooms of greasy sheets and chamber-pots. The stench of sulphur rose from chimneys, caustic lyes from tanneries, and congealed blood from slaughterhouses. People stank of sweat, unwashed clothes, rotting teeth, and onions. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat. In Paris, the stench was foulest at the Cimetière des Innocents, where for eight hundred years the dead had been brought from the Hôtel-Dieu and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone. It was on this most putrid spot that Grenouille had been born in 1738. By 1744, he had begun to rove alone through the northern parts of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, through vegetable gardens, vineyards, and meadows, sometimes staying away for days. He bore punishment without a whimper, and eighteen months of sporadic schooling at Notre Dame de Bon Secours had no observable effect beyond learning to spell a little and write his own name. His teacher considered him feeble-minded.

Madame Gaillard's Discovery and Decision

Madame Gaillard noticed that Grenouille possessed unusual, almost supernatural abilities. He had no fear of darkness and could be sent to the cellar or shed on the blackest night without a light, finding his way immediately. She thought he could see through paper, cloth, wood, and even brick walls: he knew how many wards were in the dormitory without entering, detected a worm in a cauliflower before it was split, and once pointed to a spot behind a fireplace beam where she had hidden her money. In reality, he caught these scents with his increasingly keen nose, but Madame Gaillard, whose own sense of smell had been destroyed, believed he had second sight. Since she knew that people with second sight bring misfortune and death, she grew nervous, especially at the thought of living under the same roof with someone who could spot hidden money. When the Cloister of Saint-Merri ceased paying its yearly fee around the time Grenouille turned eight, she took him to a tanner named Grimal in the rue de la Mortellerie, who had a notorious need for cheap young labourers for perilous jobs like scraping meat off rotting hides and mixing poisonous tanning fluids. She obtained a written receipt for the boy and a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, then returned home, feeling no twinge of conscience. She thought her actions not merely legal but also just, for if a child for whom no one was paying stayed on, it would endanger her own future and her dream of a private, sheltered death.