the Revolution

The Revolution is the great historical upheaval that concludes the novel's timeline, serving as the ironic backdrop to the fates of minor characters who had built their lives on the stability of the ancien régime. It is not a direct event in Grenouille's story, but its consequences—social chaos, currency collapse, and the erasure of old institutions—provide a grim coda for those who survived him.

The Stench of the Old World

The world into which Grenouille was born, in 1738, was defined by a pervasive, almost unimaginable stench. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat. The stench of sulphur rose from chimneys, caustic lyes from tanneries, and congealed blood from slaughterhouses. People stank of sweat, unwashed clothes, rotting teeth, and onions; from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese, sour milk, and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter. In the eighteenth century, there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life, was not accompanied by stench. The stench was foulest in Paris, the largest city of France, and the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom was the Cimetière des Innocents, where Grenouille was born. Only later—on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard's neighbours to more than mere protest and to actual insurrection—was it finally closed and abandoned. Millions of bones and skulls were shovelled into the catacombs of Montmartre, and in its place a food market was erected.

The Collapse of Madame Gaillard's World

Madame Gaillard, the foster mother who raised Grenouille in her emotionless, orderly household, had spent her entire life saving for a single goal: a private, sheltered death. She wanted to afford to die at home rather than perish miserably in the Hôtel-Dieu as her husband had. In 1782, just short of her seventieth birthday, she gave up her business, purchased her annuity as planned, sat in her little house, and waited for death. But death did not come. What came in its place was something not a soul in the world could have anticipated: a revolution, a rapid transformation of all social, moral, and transcendental affairs. At first this revolution had no effect on her personal fate, but then—she was almost eighty by now—all at once the man who held her annuity had to emigrate, was stripped of his holdings, and forced to auction off his possessions to a trouser manufacturer. For a while it looked as if even this change would have no fatal effect, for the trouser manufacturer continued to pay her annuity punctually. But then came the day when she no longer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printed paper, and that marked the beginning of her economic downfall. Within two years, the annuity was no longer worth enough to pay for her firewood. Madame was forced to sell her house at a ridiculously low price, since suddenly there were thousands of other people who also had to sell their houses. Once again, she received in return only these stupid slips of paper, and once again within two years they were as good as worthless. By 1797, she had lost her entire fortune, scraped together from almost a century of hard work, and was living in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles. Only then—ten, twenty years too late—did death arrive, in the form of a protracted bout with a cancer that grabbed her by the throat, robbing 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 they put her in a ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill, the same ward in which her husband had died, laid her in a bed shared with total strangers, pressing body upon body with five other women, and for three long weeks let her die in public view. She was then sewn into a sack, tossed on to a tumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses, to the faint tinkle of a bell driven to the newly founded cemetery of Clamart, a mile beyond the city gates, and there laid in her final resting place, a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime. This was in the year 1799. Thank God Madame had suspected nothing of the fate awaiting her as she walked home that day in 1746, leaving Grenouille and the story behind. She might possibly have lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning that she could make of life.

The Erasure of the Old Order

The Revolution also indirectly claimed the physical legacy of Giuseppe Baldini, Europe's greatest perfumer. The night after Grenouille left Paris, the west side of the Pont au Change collapsed, hurling Baldini and his wife into the river. The entire inheritance—house, business, raw materials, laboratory, and the little book of six hundred formulas—was lost. Only a motley odour of musk, cinnamon, vinegar, lavender, and a thousand other things floated above the Seine from Paris to Le Havre for several weeks. The Revolution's later decree that all buildings on the bridges of Paris be torn down made this collapse a permanent erasure, ensuring that no trace of Baldini's empire would survive into the new era.