Foundling Transport Regulation

The Foundling Transport Regulation was a bureaucratic rule in eighteenth-century Paris that governed the shipment of foundlings and orphans to the great public orphanage in Rouen. It required that only baptized infants with an official certificate of transport be conveyed, and it was this regulation that indirectly saved Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from being sent on a deadly convoy and instead led to his placement at the cloister of Saint-Merri.

Definition and Purpose

The regulation governed the transport of children from the halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine to the great public orphanage in Rouen. The convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time. Because the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily high, the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen.

Application to Grenouille

When the police officer La Fosse wearied of the matter of the newborn Grenouille and wanted to have him sent to the halfway house, the regulation created a series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties. The babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received even so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate of transport. Moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously to set a child at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to save the other formalities. Because of these difficulties and because time was short, La Fosse revoked his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution, where they could baptize him and decide his further fate.

Consequences

The regulation thus diverted Grenouille from the deadly transport to Rouen and led him to the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste, and because the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they pampered him at the cloister's expense rather than shipping him to Rouen. This chain of events, set in motion by the transport regulation, determined the course of Grenouille's early life and his eventual placement with the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie.