Grenouille's wet nurse Jeanne Bussie

Jeanne Bussie, a wet nurse living in the rue Saint-Denis, was the first person to perceive the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's fundamental abnormality: he had no smell at all. Her refusal to continue nursing him, based on this olfactory absence, initiated the pattern of rejection and isolation that would define his life. She was not merely a caretaker who gave up a difficult charge; she was the first to articulate the terrifying void at the center of Grenouille's being, a void that would drive him to become the greatest perfumer and most abominable murderer of his age.

Identity and Background

Jeanne Bussie was a wet nurse in the rue Saint-Denis, a woman who made her living by nursing infants for the Cloister of Saint-Merri. She was a practical, stubborn woman, deeply attuned to the physical realities of her trade. When the police officer La Fosse gave the newborn Grenouille to her, she was to receive three francs per week for her trouble. She had already changed him three times before, as no one wanted to keep him for more than a couple of days. He was too greedy, they said, sucking as much as two babies and depriving the wet nurses of their livelihood. Bussie herself found him insatiable: he had "stuffed himself on me," she complained, "pumped me dry down to the bones." She had lost ten pounds and been eating like three women, all for three francs a week.

The Confrontation at the Cloister

A few weeks after taking him in, Bussie appeared at the gates of the Cloister of Saint-Merri with the infant in her market basket. She confronted Father Terrier, the bald monk with a faint odour of vinegar who administered the cloister's charities. When Terrier examined the child and declared him "rosy pink and well nourished," Bussie retorted that he had "stuffed himself on me" and that she had "put a stop to that." She insisted that the cloister feed him themselves with goat's milk, pap, or beet juice, claiming he would "gobble up anything." Terrier, an easy-going man who despised technical details, tried to negotiate, offering first four, then five francs a week. Bussie refused all money. "I don't want any money at all," she said. "I want this bastard out of my house."

The Revelation of Odorlessness

When pressed for her reason, Bussie made a startling claim: "He's possessed by the devil." Terrier, a man of education who prided himself on his critical faculties, dismissed this as superstition. He argued that an infant could not be possessed, as it was a "pre-human being" without a fully developed soul. He asked if the child could talk, twitch, or move things about the room, or if some evil stench came from him. Bussie's answer was devastating in its simplicity: "He doesn't smell at all." Terrier, trying to soothe her and test his own courage, lifted the basket and sniffed it, declaring he smelled "absolutely nothing out of the ordinary." Bussie insisted it was not the nappy she meant, but the child himself: "the bastard himself, he doesn't smell." Terrier argued that only sick babies smell, and that Grenouille's lack of odor was a sign of health. Bussie countered that her own children "smell like human children ought to smell."

The Description of a Baby's Scent

Under Terrier's relentless questioning, Bussie was forced to articulate what a baby should smell like. She described it with a vivid, almost poetic precision that contrasted sharply with the monk's abstract reasoning. Their feet, she said, smell "like a smooth warm stone" or "more like curds... like butter, like fresh butter." Their bodies smell "like a pancake that's been soaked in milk." And the best smell of all, she said, tapping the bald spot on Terrier's head, is on the top of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick. "It smells like caramel, it smells so sweet, so wonderful, Father, you have no idea!" She concluded that if a child does not smell like that, "even less than cold air does," then she would not take it back. Terrier, momentarily struck speechless by this flood of detailed inanity, eventually dismissed her, but not before he himself, after she had left, lifted the basket and sniffed the infant's head, finding nothing.

Consequences and Significance

Bussie's refusal to keep Grenouille was the first of many rejections he would face. Her testimony, grounded in the most intimate and practical knowledge of her trade, was the first to name the fundamental absence at the core of his being. She was not a superstitious fool, as Terrier believed, but a woman whose senses told her the truth: that this child was not like other children. Her act of returning him set in motion the chain of events that led to his placement with Madame Gaillard, his apprenticeship under Grimal, and ultimately his career as a perfumer and murderer. She was the first to recognize that Grenouille was an abomination, a creature without the most basic human attribute: a scent. Her description of a baby's smell—fresh butter, milk-soaked pancakes, caramel—stands as a poignant counterpoint to the world of stench that surrounds Grenouille's birth, and as a measure of the humanity he would never possess.