Retreat in the Plomb du Cantal

The Retreat in the Plomb du Cantal is the longest and most radical phase of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's withdrawal from human society, a seven-year self-imposed exile inside a volcanic cave on the Plomb du Cantal in the Auvergne. It represents the culmination of his lifelong strategy of tick-like hibernation and the most extreme attempt to escape the oppressive human effluvium that had suffocated him since birth. During this period, Grenouille abandons all external goals and lives entirely within the vast, self-created empire of his olfactory memory, experiencing a kind of solitary ecstasy that ultimately collapses when he confronts the terrifying truth that he himself has no scent.

Causes and Background

Grenouille's retreat was the logical endpoint of a journey that began as a flight from humanity. After leaving Paris in 1756, he had gradually shed all contact with people, traveling only by night and avoiding even isolated farms. The human odour that had oppressed him for eighteen years in Paris—where six to seven hundred thousand people lived packed together—had become unbearable. As he withdrew, he discovered that it was not the world in general he wanted to escape, but the people in it. The air grew purer, and he felt increasingly liberated, until he was driven by an almost magnetic pull toward the point of greatest possible solitude. That point was the Plomb du Cantal, a six-thousand-foot-high volcano in the Massif Central, surrounded by a barren, god-forsaken highland where even the bandit Lebrun had preferred capture and execution over a solitary living death. For miles around, no human being lived, and no one had scaled the peak for decades.

Life on the Mountain

Grenouille reached the peak on an August night in 1756. As dawn broke, he turned full circle and smelled the vast panorama: to the east the high plain of Saint-Flour, to the north the limestone mountains he had crossed, to the west only stone and tough grass, to the south the dark gorges of the Truyère. In every direction, humanity lay equally remote. His olfactory compass, which had always pointed him away from people, now spun without orientation. He was at his goal. For a long time he could not believe that he was not smelling any human trace—only the drifting, homogeneous odour of dead stones, grey lichen, and withered grasses. When he finally accepted it, he erupted with thundering jubilation, dancing, shouting his own name, and shaking his fists triumphantly at the setting sun.

He settled into the mountain with minimal resources. He found water seeping from a crevasse, which he licked for an hour each day to quench his thirst. He ate small salamanders, ring snakes, dry lichen, grass, and mossberries. Near his watering spot, he discovered a natural tunnel that led a hundred feet into the mountain, ending in a rock slide. The tunnel was so narrow that his shoulders touched the rock and so low that he could only walk hunched over, but he could sit and, curled up, lie down. The air was moist, salty, and cool, and he smelled at once that no living creature had ever entered the place. He spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down, feeling blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France, as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure—certainly not in his mother's belly. He began to cry softly, not knowing whom to thank for such good fortune.

For the first weeks, he occasionally climbed back to the peak to sniff the horizon, but soon he gave up even these excursions. For well over twenty hours a day, in total darkness and total silence and total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks. He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be nearer to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.

The Inner Empire of Scents

The setting for Grenouille's solitary debaucheries was the innermost empire where he had stored every odour encountered since birth. To enhance the mood, he would first conjure up the earliest and most remote scents: the hostile, steaming vapours of Madame Gaillard's bedroom; the bone-dry leathery bouquet of her hands; the vinegary breath of Father Terrier; the hysterical, hot maternal sweat of the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie; the carrion stench of the Cimetière des Innocents; the homicidal odour of his mother. He wallowed in disgust and loathing, his hair standing on end at the delicious horror. Sometimes he would add a detour to Grimal's tannery for the stench of raw hides and tanning broths, or imagine the collective effluvium of six hundred thousand Parisians in the sultry heat of late summer.

Then the pent-up hate would erupt with orgasmic force. Like a thunderstorm, he rolled across these odours that had dared offend his patrician nose, thrashing them like hail thrashes a grain field, scattering the rabble and drowning them in a grand purifying deluge of distilled water. His body writhed with voluptuous delight, arching so high that he slammed his head against the roof of the tunnel, only to sink back slowly, lolling in satiation. This volcanic act that extinguished all obnoxious odours imparted a wonderful sense of righteous exhaustion, as after truly grand heroic deeds.

After resting, he would stretch out on the cleanly swept mats of his soul and let delicate scents play about his nose: a spicy gust from springtime meadows, a mild May wind through green beech leaves, a sea breeze with the bitterness of salted almonds. Then he would rise up as Grenouille the Great, a giant planting himself in all his glory, and look about his empire. He would sow fragrance of all kinds, wastefully here, sparingly there, in plantations of endless dimension and in small, intimate parcels. He would command a shower of rectified spirit to fall, and the seeds would germinate and sprout, bringing forth shoots. He would send the gentle sun of his smile upon the land, and the hosts of blossoms would unfold their glory, creating a single rainbowed carpet woven from myriad precious capsules of fragrance. He would cause the wind of his breath to blow, and the blossoms would spill over with scent, intermingling into one constantly changing scent that merged into the odour of universal homage to Him, Grenouille the Great.

After these divine labours, he would return to his heart, a purple castle with a thousand private rooms and a thousand underground chambers. The private rooms were shelved from floor to ceiling with all the odours he had collected in his life—several million of them. In the cellars, the best scents were stored in casks, drawn off into bottles that lay in miles of damp, cool corridors, arranged by vintage and estate. He would order imaginary servants to fetch this or that volume from the great library of odours or to bring him something to drink from the cellars. He would drink a glass of cool scent from the year 1752, sniffed up in spring before sunrise on the Pont-Royal—the fresh odour of the approaching day, of the first daybreak he had ever known in freedom. That odour was for him the odour of hope, and he drank of it daily. He would read from the book of revolting odours, and when his disgust outweighed his interest, he would slam the book shut and pick up another. He would drink bottle after bottle—the warm scent of wood from outside Madame Gaillard's house, the scent of a summer evening from a park in Saint-Germain-des-Prés—until he was scent-logged, his mind wonderfully fogged. Finally, he would drink the most splendid of all: the scent of the girl from the rue des Marais, drinking reverently, glass after glass, growing sadder and sadder, until he toppled sideways into a numbed sleep.

The Catastrophe and Return

This cycle continued for seven years. Meanwhile, war raged in the world outside—a world war that robbed a million people of their lives—but Grenouille noticed nothing. One winter he almost froze to death without ever realizing it; another time snow was so deep he fed on the stiff carcasses of frozen bats; once a dead raven lay at the mouth of the cave, and he ate it. These were the only events in the outside world of which he took notice for seven years. He would have remained there until his death, lacking for nothing, if catastrophe had not struck.

The catastrophe was internal. In a dream, he lay on his sofa in the purple salon, having drunk an enormous amount, including two whole bottles of the scent of the red-haired girl. His sleep was threaded with ghostly wisps of dreams—scraps of odours that grew thicker and more cloudlike until he was standing in the middle of a moor from which fog was rising. The fog climbed higher, wrapping him completely, and he could not get his breath. The fog was an odour—his own body odour. And the awful thing was that although he knew it was his odour, he could not smell it. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself. He gave a scream as dreadful as if he were being burned alive, a scream that smashed through the walls of the purple salon, hurtled across the nocturnal landscape of his soul, howled out of his mouth, down the winding tunnel, and far across the high plains of Saint-Flour, as if the mountain itself was screaming. He awoke at his own scream, thrashing as if to drive off the odourless fog, his whole body shaking with the raw fear of death.

He knew one thing for sure: he would change his life, if only because he did not want to dream such a frightening dream a second time. He threw his horse blanket over his shoulders and crept out into the open. It was a late February morning; the sun was shining, the earth smelled of moist stones, moss, and water. He squatted before his cave, and whenever he thought of the fog, a shudder passed over him. Gradually the shock subsided, and towards noon he was his old cold-blooded self. He began to test himself for his own odour, sniffing his fingers, his palm, the crook of his elbow, his armpits, his feet, his genitals—but could smell nothing. He could not smell his own genitals not a handspan away. He tried to separate his odour from himself by airing his naked body on the mountaintop, then sniffing his clothes, which he had worn continuously for seven years. The clothes contained an olfactory diary of the last seven or eight years—stone, sand, moss, resin, raven's blood, even the odour of a sausage bought years before—but not a trace of his own odour. He went back into the tunnel, to the spot where he had lain for seven years, and smelled. The place smelled exactly as it had seven years before: stony and moist, salty, cool, and so pure that no living creature could ever have entered it. He was odourless. He pulled on his rags, threw the horse blanket over his shoulders, and that same night left the Plomb du Cantal, heading south.

Narrative Role and Evaluation

The retreat on the Plomb du Cantal is the most extreme expression of Grenouille's tick-like nature—his ability to encapsulate himself, to live on minimal sustenance, and to wait indefinitely. It is also the fullest realization of his inner world, where he becomes both creator and destroyer of an olfactory universe. Yet the retreat ultimately fails because it cannot resolve the fundamental paradox of his existence: he possesses a genius for scent but has no scent of his own. The dream of suffocating on his own odourless fog reveals that his inner empire, however magnificent, is a prison. The retreat is not a return to innocence or a spiritual transformation; it is a dead end. Grenouille's decision to leave the mountain is not a rebirth but a reluctant re-entry into the world he despises, driven by a fear more profound than any he has ever known. The seven years on the Plomb du Cantal mark the midpoint of his life and the turning point of his quest: having achieved perfect solitude, he discovers that solitude cannot give him what he truly lacks—a self that can be smelled, and therefore known, by others or by himself.