Solitude on Plomb du Cantal

The Solitude on Plomb du Cantal marks the most extreme phase of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's withdrawal from the human world. After leaving Paris and spending weeks avoiding every settlement, he reached the peak of a six-thousand-foot volcano in the Auvergne, the Plomb du Cantal, in August 1756. There he discovered a natural tunnel leading a hundred and fifty feet into the mountain, ending in a rock slide so narrow that his shoulders touched the walls. He spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down, feeling blessedly wonderful. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up in flames out there, but here he would not even notice it. He began to cry softly, not knowing whom to thank for such good fortune.

The Olfactory Vacuum and the Tick's Triumph

Grenouille's journey to this solitude was driven by an overwhelming disgust for the human odour that had oppressed him since birth. In Paris, six or seven hundred thousand people lived densely packed, their compacted effluvium pressing on him like air heavy with an imminent thunderstorm. As he withdrew from them, he realized it was not the world in general he wanted to squirm away from, but the people in it. On the Plomb du Cantal, he finally achieved what he had craved: olfactory peace. Spread all about lay nothing but the drifting, homogeneous odour of dead stones, grey lichen, and withered grasses. He needed a very long time to believe that he was not smelling. He stood on the peak for a whole day, scanning the horizon for the least sign of human presence, listening for a scythe being whetted or the bark of a dog. Only as the sun set did his mistrust fade before an ever-increasing sense of euphoria. He had escaped the abhorrent taint. He was truly completely alone. He erupted with thundering jubilation, dancing in circles, roaring his own name to the four winds, and shaking his fists triumphantly at the setting sun as if he personally had chased it from the sky.

The Inner Empire of Scents

Inside the crypt, Grenouille lived for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and silence, sitting on his horse blanket with his back resting on the rock slide. He was not doing penance nor waiting for supernatural inspiration; he had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, to be nearer to himself. The setting for his debaucheries was the innermost empire where he had buried the husks of every odour encountered since birth. He would first conjure up the earliest and most remote: the hostile, steaming vapours of Madame Gaillard's bedroom, the vinegary breath of Father Terrier, the carrion stench of the Cimetière des Innocents. Then, with orgasmic force, he would thrash at these odours like a hurricane, drowning them in a grand purifying deluge. After annihilating the pack of demons, he would stretch out on the cleanly swept mats of his soul and let delicate scents play about his nose: a spicy gust from springtime meadows, a mild May wind wafting through green beech leaves, a sea breeze with the bitterness of salted almonds. He became Grenouille the Great, a giant planting himself in all his glory, sowing fragrance of all kinds across his empire, commanding a shower of rectified spirit to fall so that the seeds of scent would germinate and sprout. He would then cause the wind of his breath to blow, and the blossoms would spill over with scent, intermingling into one constantly changing odour of universal homage to Him.

The Heart's Purple Castle

Returning home from these divine labours, Grenouille would retreat to his heart, which was a purple castle with a thousand private rooms and a thousand underground chambers. The private rooms were shelved from floor to ceiling with all the odours he had collected in his life, several million of them. In the cellars, the best scents were stored in casks, drawn off into bottles that lay in miles of damp, cool corridors. There, as dear little Jean-Baptiste, he would order his imaginary servants to fetch this or that volume from the great library of odours and to bring him something to drink from the cellars. He would pour a glass of a scent from the year 1752, sniffed up in spring before sunrise on the Pont-Royal, the odour of the approaching day, the first daybreak he had ever known in freedom. That odour was for Grenouille the odour of hope, and he drank of it daily. He would read from the book of revolting odours, and when his disgust outweighed his interest, he would slam the book shut and pick up another. Finally, he would drink the most splendid of all: the scent of the girl from the rue des Marais, drinking glass after glass until the bottle was empty, growing sadder and sadder as he drank, knowing he could not handle so much good scent.

The Catastrophe and the End of Solitude

This life continued for seven years. War raged in the world outside, robbing a million people of their lives, but Grenouille noticed nothing. He almost froze to death one winter without ever noticing it, and once fed on the stiff carcasses of frozen bats. He would have remained there until his death if catastrophe had not struck. The catastrophe was internal: a dream in which he found himself standing in the middle of a moor from which fog was rising. The fog was his own body odour, and the awful thing was that although he knew this odour was his, he could not smell it. He gave a scream as dreadful as if he were being burned alive. When he awoke, he knew one thing for sure: he would change his life, if only because he did not want to dream such a frightening dream a second time. He threw his horse blanket over his shoulders and crept out into the open. He tested his clothes, his armpits, his genitals, but could smell nothing of himself. He was incapable of smelling his own genitals not a handspan away. He returned to the tunnel, squatted at the end where he had lain for seven years, and smelled. The spot smelled exactly as it had seven years before: stony and moist, salty, cool, and so pure that no living creature could ever have entered the place. There was no smell of him. He pulled on his rags, threw the horse blanket over his shoulders, and that same night left the Plomb du Cantal, heading south.