Retreat to Plomb du Cantal

After leaving Paris in the spring of 1756, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille undertook a journey that became less a directed march toward Grasse and more a flight from humanity itself. The further he got from the capital, the more the air cleared of the dense, oppressive human effluvium that had smothered him for eighteen years. He avoided cities, then villages, then isolated farms, and finally traveled only by night, sleeping during the day in thickets with his horse blanket pulled over his head, his nose wedged in the crook of his elbow to keep out foreign odors. The world he accepted was one of moonlight, which "knew no colors" and traced the terrain only softly, covering the land in a dirty grey that matched the world of his soul. His nose, his delicate compass, drove him ever further from human beings, toward the magnetic pole of the greatest possible solitude.

The Discovery of Solitude

That pole was located in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, on the peak of a six-thousand-foot-high volcano named Plomb du Cantal. The mountain was a giant cone of blue-grey rock surrounded by an endless, barren highland studded with a few trees charred by fire and overgrown with grey moss and grey brush. Even by daylight the region was so dismal that the poorest shepherd would not have driven his animals here; by moonlight it seemed not of this world. For miles around, not a single human being lived, nor even a respectable mammal — only a few bats, beetles, and adders. No one had scaled the peak for decades. Grenouille reached the mountain one August night in 1756. As dawn broke, he stood on the peak and turned full circle, letting his nose move across the vast panorama. In every direction, humanity lay equally remote. The compass spun about; it no longer provided orientation. Grenouille was at his goal. He needed a very long time to believe that he was not smelling — that there was no human scent anywhere. He stood fast in the blazing heat the whole day, waiting in vain for the slightest evidence of human presence. Only as the sun set did his mistrust fade before an ever-increasing sense of euphoria. He had escaped the abhorrent taint. He was truly completely alone. He erupted with thundering jubilation, casting aside his rucksack, blanket, and walking stick, stamping his feet, throwing his arms to the sky, dancing in circles, and roaring his own name to the four winds.

Life in the Cave

Near his watering spot he discovered a natural tunnel leading back into the mountain by many twists and turns, until after a hundred feet or so it came to an end in a rock slide. The back of the tunnel was so narrow that his shoulders touched the rock and so low that he could walk only hunched down. It was pitch-black even during the day, deathly quiet, and the air was moist, salty, cool. Grenouille could smell 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. 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. He subsisted on minimal food: water from a thin film running across the rock in a crevasse, which he licked for an hour to quench his daily need; small salamanders and ring snakes, whose heads he pinched off before devouring them whole; dry lichen, grass, and mossberries. Such a diet did not disgust him in the least. He had no use for sensual gratification unless it consisted of pure incorporeal odors. 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 and enjoyed himself.

The Inner Empire

Grenouille's retreat was not a penance or a waiting for divine inspiration. 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 setting for his debaucheries was the innermost empire where he had buried the husks of every odor encountered since birth. He would first conjure up the earliest and most remote odors — the hostile, steaming vapors of Madame Gaillard's bedroom, the vinegary breath of Father Terrier, the carrion stench of the Cimetière des Innocents — and wallow in disgust and loathing. Then he would erupt with orgasmic force, thrashing at these odors like a thunderstorm, scattering them in a grand purifying deluge. Afterward, 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, a sea breeze with the bitterness of salted almonds. He became Grenouille the Great, striding across the fallow fields of his soul and sowing fragrance of all kinds, creating a single rainbowed carpet woven from myriad precious capsules of fragrance. His heart was a purple castle with a thousand private rooms and a thousand underground chambers, where the best scents of his life were stored in casks and drawn off into bottles. There he would drink the odour of hope — the fresh odour of the first daybreak he had ever known in freedom, sniffed up on the Pont-Royal in 1752 — and the scent of the girl from the Rue des Marais, drinking glass after glass until he grew sadder and sadder and finally toppled sideways into a numbed sleep.

The Catastrophe and Departure

This life continued for seven years. Meanwhile war raged in the world outside, robbing a million people of their lives. Grenouille almost froze to death one winter without ever noticing it; once the 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. He would have remained there until his death if catastrophe had not struck — an internal catastrophe that blocked his favorite means of escape. In a dream, he lay on his sofa in the purple salon and slept, having drunk two whole bottles of the scent of the red-haired girl. Ghostly wisps of dreams appeared as scraps of odors, growing thicker and more cloudlike until he was completely wrapped in fog. The fog was his own body odour. And the awful thing was that although he knew this odour was his, 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, and awoke. 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 gradually the shock subsided. He laid his fingers under his nose and breathed — and smelled nothing. He could not smell his own hand, his armpits, his feet, his genitals. He stripped off his rags, saturated with seven years of his own odour, and climbed to the top of the mountain to air himself. He held his nose to the west and let the wind whistle around his naked body for several hours. Then he climbed back down and made the sniffing test he had learned from Baldini, forming a bell around his clothes with his hands. There were a thousand other odours — stone, sand, moss, resin, raven's blood, even the sausage he had bought years before near Sully — but his own odour was not there. He went back into the tunnel, to the spot where he had lain for seven years, and squatted there for a quarter of an hour. His memory was infallible: the spot smelled exactly as it had seven years before — stony, moist, salty, cool, and so pure that no living creature had ever entered it. He nodded gently, turned around, and that same night left the Plomb du Cantal, heading south.