Grenouille's apprenticeship under Grimal

Grenouille's apprenticeship under Grimal began when Madame Gaillard, having discovered that the eight-year-old could locate hidden money by smell and fearing his uncanny abilities, decided to rid herself of him. She knew a tanner named Grimal who lived near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and had a notorious need for cheap young laborers—not regular apprentices, but coolies to perform the most perilous jobs: scraping meat off rotting hides, mixing poisonous tanning fluids, and producing caustic lyes. Madame Gaillard understood that by all normal standards Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal's tannery, but she did not bother herself about such things. She had Monsieur Grimal provide her with a written receipt for the boy, gave him in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, and set out for home in the rue de Charonne, feeling not the slightest twinge of conscience.

Life in the Tannery

From his first glance at Grimal—or rather, from the first breath that sniffed in the odour enveloping him—Grenouille knew that this man was capable of thrashing him to death for the least infraction. His life was worth precisely as much as the work he could accomplish and consisted only of whatever utility Grimal ascribed to it. Grenouille came to heel without resistance, bottling up his defiance and expending it solely to survive. He became a paragon of docility, frugality, and diligence, obeying implicitly and appearing satisfied with every meal offered. In the evening, he meekly let himself be locked up in a closet off the tannery floor, where tools were kept and raw, salted hides hung. There he slept on the hard, bare earthen floor. During the day he worked as long as there was light—eight hours in winter, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours in summer. He scraped meat from bestially stinking hides, watered them down, plucked them, limed, bated, and fulled them, rubbed them down with pickling dung, chopped wood, stripped bark from birch and yew, climbed down into tanning pits filled with caustic fumes, layered hides and pelts as the journeymen ordered, spread them with smashed gallnuts, and covered this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth. Years later, he would have to dig them up again and retrieve the mummified hide carcasses—now tanned leather—from their grave. When he was not burying or digging up hides, he hauled water from the river, always in two buckets, hundreds of bucketfuls a day, leaving him without a dry stitch on his body; by evening his clothes were dripping wet and his skin was cold and swollen like a soaked chamois.

Anthrax and Rising Value

After one year of an existence more animal than human, Grenouille contracted anthrax, a disease feared by tanners and usually fatal. Grimal had already written him off and was looking for a replacement—not without regret, for he had never before had a more docile and productive worker. But contrary to all expectation, Grenouille survived. All he bore from it were scars from large black carbuncles behind his ears and on his hands and cheeks, leaving him disfigured and even uglier than before. The illness also left him immune to anthrax, an invaluable advantage, so that he could now strip the foulest hides with cut and bleeding hands and still run no danger of reinfection. This set him apart not only from the apprentices and journeymen but also from his own potential successors. Because he could no longer be so easily replaced, the value of his work and thus the value of his life increased. Suddenly he no longer had to sleep on bare earth but was allowed to build himself a plank-bed in the closet, given straw to scatter over it and a blanket of his own. He was no longer locked in at bedtime. His food became more adequate. Grimal no longer kept him as just any animal, but as a useful house pet.

First Freedom and the End of Apprenticeship

When Grenouille was twelve, Grimal gave him half of Sunday off, and at thirteen he was even allowed to go out on weekend evenings for an hour after work and do whatever he liked. He had triumphed, for he was alive, and he possessed a small quantum of freedom sufficient for survival. The days of his hibernation were over. Grenouille the tick stirred again. He caught the scent of morning and was seized with an urge to hunt. The greatest preserve for odours in the world stood open before him: the city of Paris. This apprenticeship ended when Giuseppe Baldini, having witnessed Grenouille's miraculous ability to replicate the perfume "Amor and Psyche" by Pélissier, went straight to Grimal the next morning. He first paid for his goat leather in full, without haggling, then invited Grimal to the Tour d'Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille. Baldini offered twenty livres as recompense for the inconvenience the loss would cause Grimal—an enormous sum. Grimal immediately accepted. They walked to the tannery, where Grenouille was waiting with his bundle already packed. Baldini paid the twenty livres and took him along at once, well aware that he had just made the best deal of his life. Grimal, convinced that he had made the best deal of his life, returned to the Tour d'Argent, drank two more bottles of wine, moved to the Lion d'Or around noon, and got so rip-roaring drunk that late that night he confused the rue Geoffroi L'Anier with the rue des Nonaindières and fell into the Seine at the Quai des Ormes, drowning instantly. As Grimal's soaked carcass floated past the Pont au Change the next morning, sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed in his new bunk in Baldini's laboratory, rolling himself up into a little ball like a tick and dreaming of an odoriferous victory banquet.