1797

In 1797, the long, grim arc of Madame Gaillard's life reached its conclusion. She was nearing ninety years old, and the fortune she had scraped together over almost a century of hard work was gone. The revolution that had begun in 1789 had, after a series of economic convulsions, rendered her annuity worthless. She was forced to sell her house at a ridiculously low price, receiving only worthless paper slips in return. By 1797, she was living in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles, stripped of everything she had accumulated.

The Death She Dreaded

Death finally arrived, not as the private, sheltered end she had planned for, but as a protracted bout with cancer. The disease robbed her first of her appetite and then of her voice, so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hôtel-Dieu. There, she was placed in a ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill—the same ward in which her husband had died. She was laid in a bed shared with total strangers, pressed body upon body with five other women, and for three long weeks was left to die in public view.

The Final Disposal

After her death, Madame Gaillard was sewn into a sack, tossed onto a tumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses, and driven to the newly founded cemetery of Clamart, a mile beyond the city gates. There she was laid in her final resting place: a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime. The narrator notes with grim irony that she had suspected nothing of this fate as she walked home in 1746, leaving Grenouille behind, for if she had, she might have lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning she could make of life.