Sully

Sully, a modest town on the Loire River, appears at two critical junctures in Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's journey, each time marking a decisive shift in his relationship with the human world and his own olfactory existence. It is not a place of action or residence, but a threshold: the point where Grenouille first escapes the dense human stench of Paris and, years later, the last settlement he passes before re-entering the capital to die.

A Crossing into Solitude

On the third day of his journey south from Paris, Grenouille, having avoided Orléans to preserve his newfound respiratory freedom, came upon the Loire at Châteauneuf and crossed it at Sully. His sausage had lasted that far; he bought himself a new one and, leaving the river behind, pushed on into the interior. This crossing was the decisive break. Until Sully, he had still followed the great river, the artery of French civilization. After Sully, he abandoned even that connection, heading into the woods and away from all human settlements. The town thus stands as the last point where Grenouille still engaged in the ordinary commerce of travel—buying food, following a road—before he began his radical withdrawal into a world where he would avoid not only cities and villages but even isolated farms and shepherds.

The Final Return

Years later, after his triumph in Grasse and his subsequent flight, Grenouille crossed the Loire again at Sully on his way back to Paris. By this time he was travelling by night, feeding on whatever he found, and had no desire left but to die. The next day he had the odour of Paris in his nose. Sully, then, frames the entire middle section of his life: it was the gate through which he left the world of men for the solitude of the Auvergne and the perfumer's education in Grasse, and the gate through which he re-entered that world for the final time, carrying the ultimate perfume that could enslave humanity but could not give him his own scent. The town itself remains a silent witness, a geographical hinge between the two poles of Grenouille's existence: the suffocating human mass and the empty, odourless freedom of the self.