Grimal

Grimal is a tanner who lives near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie in Paris. He is notorious for his need for cheap, expendable young laborers—not regular apprentices or journeymen, but coolies who can be used for the most dangerous jobs in the trade: scraping meat off rotting hides, mixing poisonous tanning fluids and dyes, and producing caustic lyes. These tasks are so perilous that a responsible tanning master would not waste skilled workers on them, instead using unemployed riff-raff, tramps, or stray children about whom there would be no inquiry in dubious situations. Madame Gaillard, knowing that Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal's tannery by normal standards, hands him over to Grimal with a written receipt, receiving in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs.

Life and Work Under Grimal

From his first glance at Grimal—or rather, from the first breath that sniffs in the odour enveloping him—Grenouille knows that this man is capable of thrashing him to death for the least infraction. His life is worth precisely as much as the work he can accomplish and consists only of whatever utility Grimal ascribes to it. Grenouille comes to heel, never once attempting to resist, and becomes a paragon of docility, frugality, and diligence. He obeys implicitly and appears satisfied with every meal offered. In the evening, he meekly lets himself be locked up in a closet off to one side of the tannery floor, where tools are kept and raw, salted hides are hung. There he sleeps on the hard, bare earthen floor. During the day he works as long as there is light—eight hours in winter, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours in summer. He scrapes meat from bestially stinking hides, waters them down, plucks them, limes, bates, and fulls them, rubs them down with pickling dung, chops wood, strips bark from birch and yew, climbs down into tanning pits filled with caustic fumes, layers hides and pelts as the journeymen order him, spreads them with smashed gallnuts, and covers this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth. Years later, he will have to dig them up again and retrieve these mummified hide carcasses—now tanned leather—from their grave. When he is not burying or digging up hides, he is hauling water from the river, always in two buckets, hundreds of bucketfuls a day, for months on end, leaving him without a dry stitch on his body.

Change in Status and Death

After one year of an existence more animal than human, Grenouille contracts anthrax, a disease feared by tanners and usually fatal. Grimal has already written him off and is looking around for a replacement—not without regret, for he has never before had a more docile and productive worker. But contrary to all expectation, Grenouille survives the illness, bearing only scars from the large black carbuncles behind his ears and on his hands and cheeks, leaving him disfigured and even uglier than before. The illness also leaves him immune to anthrax, an invaluable advantage, so that he can now strip the foulest hides with cut and bleeding hands and still run no danger of reinfection. This sets him apart not only from the apprentices and journeymen but also from his own potential successors. Because he can no longer be so easily replaced, the value of his work and thus the value of his life increases. Suddenly he no longer has to sleep on bare earth but is allowed to build himself a plank-bed in the closet, given straw to scatter over it and a blanket of his own. He is no longer locked in at bedtime. His food is more adequate. Grimal no longer keeps him as just any animal but as a useful house pet. When Grenouille is twelve, Grimal gives him half of Sunday off, and at thirteen he is even allowed to go out on weekend evenings for an hour after work and do whatever he likes. Baldini later goes straight to Grimal, first paying for his goat leather in full without a grumble or the least bit of haggling, then inviting Grimal to the Tour d'Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille. Baldini offers twenty livres as recompense for the inconvenience the loss of Grenouille will cause Grimal, an enormous sum. Grimal immediately takes him up on it. They walk to the tannery, where, strangely enough, Grenouille is waiting with his bundle already packed. Baldini pays the twenty livres and takes him along at once. Grimal, convinced that he has just made the best deal of his life, returns to the Tour d'Argent, drinks two more bottles of wine, moves over to the Lion d'Or on the other bank around noon, and gets so rip-roaring drunk that when he decides to go back to the Tour d'Argent late that night, he confuses the rue Geoffroi L'Anier with the rue des Nonaindières and instead of coming out directly on to the Pont-Marie as he intended, he is brought by ill fortune to the Quai des Ormes, where he splashes lengthwise and face-first into the water like a soft mattress. He is dead in an instant. The river drags him out from the shallows, past the barges moored there, into the stronger main current, and not until the early morning hours does Grimal's soaked carcass float briskly down river towards the west, passing the Pont au Change soundlessly, without bumping against the bridge piers, sixty feet directly overhead where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is going to bed in Baldini's laboratory.