Birth of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille enters the world on 17 July 1738, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom of France: the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, where for eight hundred years the dead had been carted and tossed into long ditches. The heat of that day was leaden, squeezing a putrefying vapour—a blend of rotting melon and fetid burnt animal horn—into the nearby alleys. His mother, a young woman barely in her mid-twenties, still quite pretty and with almost all her teeth, stood at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted. The fish, ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odour of corpses. Her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, and her belly hurt; she only wanted the pain to stop, to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths, or semi-stillbirths—the bloody meat that emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already, nor had lived much longer. By evening the whole mess had been shovelled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river. She wished that it were already over. When the final contractions began, she squatted down under the gutting table and gave birth, as she had done four times before, and cut the newborn thing's umbilical cord with her gutting knife. Then, on account of the heat and the stench—which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable, numbing something, like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many narcissi—she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there knife in hand. Tumult and turmoil followed. The crowd stood in a circle around her, staring; someone hailed the police. When she came to, she claimed the blood on her skirt came from the fish, tossed the knife aside, and walked off to wash. But then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table began to squall. Beneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads, they discovered a newborn child. They pulled it out. As prescribed by law, they gave it to a wet nurse and arrested the mother. She confessed, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had with those other four. She was tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weeks later decapitated at the Place de Grève. The child, meanwhile, had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucking as much as two babies, depriving the other sucklings of milk and the wet nurses of their livelihood. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. But a series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties—the child had neither been baptized nor received a name to inscribe on the certificate of transport—led La Fosse to revoke his decision. He gave instructions for the boy to be handed over to some ecclesiastical institution, where they could baptize him and decide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste. Because the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they pampered him at the cloister's expense, giving him to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis, to receive three francs per week for her trouble. The birth thus sets in motion a chain of rejection, legal intervention, and bureaucratic chance that defines Grenouille's earliest moments: born in filth, unwanted by his mother, nearly shunted into a deadly transport system, and finally deposited into the care of a reluctant wet nurse and a cloister that will soon find him equally unbearable.