Rue de Charonne
Rue de Charonne is the street in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine district of Paris where Madame Gaillard ran her foster home for foundlings and orphans, and where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille spent the formative years of his childhood from the age of eight until he was sold to the tanner Grimal. It was on this street that Grenouille first began to explore the world through scent, learning to speak by naming the odours that overwhelmed him, and where his uncanny olfactory abilities first became apparent to those around him.
Location and Setting
Rue de Charonne was located in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a district east of the Bastille, beyond the city gates that were locked at night. Father Terrier, desperate to be rid of the screaming infant Grenouille, carried him "far off to the east, beyond the Bastille, where at night the city gates were locked" and delivered him to Madame Gaillard's establishment "at an address near the cloister Madeleine de Trenelle" on the rue de Charonne, almost at its very end. The street lay in the northern reaches of the faubourg, an area that included vegetable gardens, vineyards, and meadows where the young Grenouille loved to roam alone.
Grenouille's Childhood on the Rue de Charonne
Grenouille lived on the rue de Charonne from the age of eight until he was sold to the tanner Grimal at around age eight. During this period, he survived measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water, emerging with scars, a slightly crippled foot, and a limp. He was as tough as a tick, requiring nothing for his soul—no security, attention, tenderness, or love—and giving the world nothing but his dung. The other children sensed his sinister presence from the first day, avoiding him and even conspiring to suffocate him, but he could not be destroyed.
It was on the rue de Charonne that Grenouille first began to speak. His first word, uttered at age four, was "fishes," burst from him like an echo when a fishmonger cried out his wares in the distance. He learned to speak by naming objects that overcame him with their odour: "Pelargonium," "goat stall," "savoy cabbage," and "Jacqueslorreur," the name of a gardener's helper. One March day, sitting on a cord of beech-wood logs stacked beneath the overhanging eaves of Madame Gaillard's shed, he first uttered the word "wood" after being overwhelmed by the aroma rising around him. He drank in the scent until he became wood himself, then vomited the word up as if suffocating.
Olfactory Mastery
By the age of six, Grenouille had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object in Madame Gaillard's house, no place along the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person, stone, tree, bush, or picket fence that he did not know by smell. He gathered tens of thousands of specific smells and could recall them at will, even creating new combinations in his imagination. He could smell through paper, cloth, wood, and brick walls, knowing how many wards were in the dormitory without entering, detecting a worm in a cauliflower before it was split open, and pointing to hidden money behind a fireplace beam without a second's search.
Departure from the Rue de Charonne
When the cloister of Saint-Merri ceased paying its yearly fee, Madame Gaillard, made nervous by Grenouille's apparent second sight and his ability to spot hidden money, took him by the hand and walked into the city. She was acquainted with a tanner named Grimal who lived near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and had a notorious need for cheap young labourers. She handed Grenouille over with a written receipt, collected her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, and returned home to the rue de Charonne, feeling not the slightest twinge of conscience. Her custodianship was ended, and what happened to her ward from then on was not her affair.
