1752

The year 1752 occupies a crucial position in the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, marking the moment when his hibernation-like existence under the tanner Grimal ended and his active conquest of the olfactory world began. By this time, Grenouille had survived the lethal hazards of the tannery, including a bout of anthrax that left him immune to reinfection and elevated his value from expendable labour to a useful house pet. Grimal granted him half of Sunday off, and by the age of thirteen, he was even allowed to go out on weekend evenings for an hour after work. The days of his tick-like hibernation were over; Grenouille stirred again, caught the scent of morning, and was seized with an urge to hunt. The greatest preserve for odours in the world stood open before him: the city of Paris.

The Olfactory Wonderland of Paris

For Grenouille, the adjacent neighbourhoods 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 that the air at ground level formed damp canals where odours congealed. The atmosphere 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 smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw. Thousands upon thousands of odours formed an invisible gruel that filled the street ravines. While the inhabitants no longer experienced this gruel as a special smell—it was the very air they breathed—Grenouille smelled it all as if for the first time. His discerning nose did not merely perceive the mixture in the aggregate; it dissected it analytically into its smallest and most remote parts and pieces, unravelling the knot of vapour and stench into single strands of unitary odours. Unwinding and spinning out these threads gave him unspeakable joy.

The Hunter of Scents

Grenouille would often stand leaning against a wall or crouching in a dark corner, his eyes closed, his mouth half-open and nostrils flaring wide, quiet as a feeding pike in a great, dark, slowly moving current. When a puff of air tossed a delicate thread of scent his way, he would lunge at it and not let go, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odour might be an old acquaintance, a variation on one, or a brand new one with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled before: the odour of pressed silk, of wild-thyme tea, of brocade embroidered with silver thread, of cork from a bottle of vintage wine, of a tortoiseshell comb. He hunted down such unknown odours with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him. When he had smelled his fill of the thick gruel of the streets, he would go to airier terrain where the odours were thinner, mixing with the wind as they unfurled, much as perfume does—to the market of Les Halles, for instance, where the odours of the day lived on into the evening, invisibly but ever so distinctly. Grenouille saw the whole market smelling, and he smelled it more precisely than many people could see it, for his perception was perception after the fact and thus of a higher order: an essence, a spirit of what had been, undisturbed by the everyday accidents of the moment.

The Scent of the Sea and the Premonition of Hope

He would also go to the Place de Grève, where his mother had been beheaded, a spot that stuck out to lick the river like a huge tongue. From the west, via this one passage cut through the city by the river, came a broad current of wind bringing the odours 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 smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect it into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy components. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit in his memory, relishing it 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. Nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow's nest of a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea—which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells—dissolving with pleasure in that breath. But it was never to be; Grenouille, who stood there on the river bank at the Place de Grève steadily breathing in the scraps of sea breeze, would never in his life see the real sea, the immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell.

The Olfactory Autodidact

By the age of six, Grenouille had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object in Madame Gaillard's house, no place along the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person, stone, tree, bush or picket fence, no spot be it ever so small, that he did not know by smell and could not recognize again by holding its uniqueness firmly in his memory. He had gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly at his disposal that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. He even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, creating odours that did not exist in the real world. It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odours that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences—at an age when other children stammered words to formulate their first inadequate sentences describing the world. 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 on his own, with the difference that the alphabet of odours is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that of tones, and that Grenouille's creative activity took place only inside him and could be perceived by no other than himself.

The Pledge of Freedom

One specific scent from the year 1752 became for Grenouille the odour of hope. It was a scent sniffed up in spring, before sunrise on the Pont-Royal, his nose directed to the west, from where a light breeze bore the blended odours of sea and forest and a touch of the tarry smell of the barges tied up at the bank. It was the scent from the end of his first night spent roaming about Paris without Grimal's permission. It was the fresh odour of the approaching day, of the first daybreak that he had ever known in freedom. That odour had been the pledge of a different life. Grenouille guarded it carefully, and he drank of it daily in his later fantasies. This single olfactory memory encapsulated the promise of liberation from the oppressive human stench of Paris and the drudgery of the tannery, and it would remain a touchstone in the inner empire of his soul, a reminder of the moment when the tick first stirred and began its hunt for the ultimate scent.