La Fosse

La Fosse is the Paris police officer who handles the immediate aftermath of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's birth on 17 July 1738. When Grenouille's mother is arrested for infanticide after abandoning the newborn under a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, La Fosse is the officer in charge of the case. He quickly wearies of the matter and wants 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 are dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. However, a series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties prevents this: the convoys use porters who carry bark baskets into which up to four infants are placed at a time, and the mortality rate on the road is extraordinarily high; the porters are urged to convey only baptized infants with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; Grenouille has neither been baptized nor received a name to inscribe on the certificate; and it would not be good form for the police anonymously to set a child at the gates of the halfway house. Because time is short, La Fosse revokes his original decision and gives instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution, so that they can baptize him and decide his further fate. He gets rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptize him with the name Jean-Baptiste, and because the prior is in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund is not yet exhausted, they pamper the child at the cloister's expense, giving him to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie. La Fosse's decision, born of administrative expediency rather than any concern for the child, thus determines that Grenouille will not be shipped to Rouen with the high-mortality foundling transports but will instead remain in Paris, where his extraordinary olfactory gifts will eventually unfold. The officer's role is brief but pivotal: he is the first authority figure to encounter Grenouille after his mother's arrest, and his choice to bypass the standard bureaucratic channels sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Grenouille's survival and his subsequent trajectory through the world of perfumery.