1746

The year 1746 is the hinge on which Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's childhood swings from a marginal, tolerated existence into outright exploitation. At eight years old, having outlived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a fall into a well, and a scalding, he is removed from Madame Gaillard's care when the Cloister of Saint-Merri ceases its yearly fee. Madame Gaillard, who has long sensed that Grenouille possesses an uncanny ability to locate hidden objects—she mistakes his olfactory genius for second sight—decides to rid herself of him. She leads him to the tanner Grimal, who lives near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and has a notorious need for cheap, expendable child laborers. She secures a written receipt for the boy and a brokerage fee of fifteen francs, then returns home, feeling not the slightest twinge of conscience. Her custodianship is ended; what happens to Grenouille from here is, in her view, no longer her affair.

Life Under Grimal

From his first breath of Grimal's odour, Grenouille understands that this man could thrash him to death for the least infraction. His life is worth precisely as much as the work he can accomplish. He responds by bottling up his defiance and expending it solely on survival, becoming a paragon of docility, frugality, and diligence. He sleeps on the hard earthen floor of a closet where tools and raw salted hides are stored. During the day he works from dawn until dark—eight hours in winter, fourteen to sixteen in summer—scraping meat from stinking hides, watering, plucking, liming, bating, and fulling them, rubbing them down with pickling dung, chopping wood, stripping bark, and climbing into tanning pits filled with caustic fumes. For months on end he hauls water from the river in two buckets, hundreds of bucketfuls a day, leaving his clothes dripping wet and his skin cold and swollen like a soaked chamois. After one year he contracts anthrax, a disease usually fatal to tanners. Grimal writes him off and looks for a replacement, but Grenouille survives, bearing scars from large black carbuncles behind his ears, on his hands, and on his cheeks, leaving him disfigured and immune to reinfection. This immunity sets him apart from apprentices, journeymen, and potential successors; his value rises. He is allowed a plank-bed, straw, a blanket, and is no longer locked in at night. His food improves. Grimal no longer keeps him as just any animal, but as a useful house pet.

Baldini's Lament for a Lost Age

While Grenouille endures the tannery, Giuseppe Baldini, the aging perfumer on the Pont au Change, looks out at the river and sees his own life flowing away. He is consumed by a bitter, wide-ranging critique of the times. He rails against the mania for novelty, the new roads and bridges, the race to cross the Atlantic in a month, the expeditions to Lapland and the South Pacific. He denounces the Enlightenment philosophers—Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau—whom he calls scribblers who have infected society with their delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything. He laments that people read incendiary books, that priests dawdle in coffee houses, that the King himself has allowed a demonstration of electricity. He sees the great comet of 1681 as an omen of a century of decline and disintegration, ending in a spiritual, political, and religious quagmire where only glossy, stinking swamp flowers like his competitor Pélissier can flourish. Baldini's tirade is the voice of a craftsman who feels the ground shifting beneath him, a man who has never invented a perfume in his life but has inherited formulas and bought them from traveling salesmen, and who now finds himself outmaneuvered by a vinegar-maker who launches a new scent every season.

The Convergence of Two Worlds

In 1746, Grenouille is a tick-like creature surviving on minimal rations, while Baldini is a man drowning in nostalgia and resentment. The year does not yet bring them together—that will happen seven years later, in 1753. But the foundations are laid. Grenouille's apprenticeship under Grimal hardens him into an organism that can endure any deprivation, while Baldini's despair prepares him to grasp at any miracle. The year 1746 is the seedbed of the partnership that will eventually make Baldini Europe's greatest perfumer and set Grenouille on the path to becoming a creator of scents. It is also the year that Madame Gaillard, having done her duty, walks home to the rue de Charonne, unknowingly beginning her own long, slow decline toward a public death in the Hôtel-Dieu in 1799, a fate that would have shattered her faith in justice had she foreseen it.