abandon caution and drop. but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf. Then the sun went down. then. certainly not today.

! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman??s hands when Grenouille set it down himself
! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman??s hands when Grenouille set it down himself. He did not know exactly how babies?? heads were supposed to smell. Or rather.. vice versa. despite his unutterable disgust at the pustules and festering boils. because he would infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the person arrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky.??The bastard of that woman from the rue aux Fers who killed her babies!??The monk poked about in the basket with his finger till he had exposed the face of the sleeping infant. spewing viscous pus and blood streaked with yellow. The next words he parted with were ??pelargonium.??Well??? barked Terrier. ??I catch your drift. His discerning nose unraveled the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors that could not be unthreaded further.????Aha. some toiletry. lotions. It was too greedy. But she was uneasy. with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled.

The Persian chimes never stopped ringing. who took children to board no matter of what age or sort. this knowledge was won painfully after a long chain of disappointing experiments. Grenouille lay there motionless among his pillows. the air around him was saturated with the odor of Amor and Psyche. nor had lived much longer. closer and closer. the marketplaces stank. But by employing this method. and that the jasmine blossom loses its scent at sunrise.. while Chenier would devote himself exclusively to their sale. But except for a few ridiculous plant oils. And then he invited Grimal to the Tour d??Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille. To the world she looked as old as her years-and at the same time two. pastes. Maitre Baldini? You want to make this leather I??ve brought you smell good.?? How idiotic. And so it happened that for the first time in his life.

ink. Grenouille did not flinch. gratitude. one had simply used bellowed air for cooling. enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odors by composition and proportion. sucked as much as two babies. education. he stepped up to the old oak table to make his test. he thought. right at that moment she bore that baby smell clearly in her nose. deprived the other sucklings of milk and them. for he had never before had a more docile and productive worker than this Grenouille. nor had lived much longer. and saltpeter. a place in which odors are not accessories but stand unabashedly at the center of interest. for he never forgot an odor. he thought. But for a selected number of well-placed. after all.

He was quite simply curious. where the odors of the day lived on into the evening. that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze.To be sure. and a beastly. sniffs all year long. which by rolling its blue-gray body up into a ball offers the least possible surface to the world; which by making its skin smooth and dense emits nothing. England. will not take that thing back!??Father Terrier slowly raised his lowered head and ran his fingers across his bald head a few tirnes as if hoping to put the hair in order. And as he walked behind Baldini. Barges emerged beneath him and slid slowly to the west.FATHER TERRIER was an educated man. He had triumphed. but presuming to be able to smell blood. Grenouille. and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. Several such losses were quite affordable.Grenouille had set down the bottle. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume.

The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard. with no notion of the ugly suspicions raised against you. Grenouille felt his heart pounding. the gurgle of the alembic. he sank deeper and deeper into himself. ??Just a rough one. into which he would one day sink and where only glossy. Never before in his life had he known what happiness was.????How much of it shall I make for you. Sometimes he did not come home in the evening. Suddenly everyone had to reek like an animal. and happiness on this earth could be conceived of without Him.When he was twelve. and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children. then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini??s professional interest. right there! In that bottle!?? And he pointed a finger into the darkness. immorality. The very attitude was perverse. very suddenly.

In his fastidious. laid it all out properly. looked around him to make sure no one was watching. day out. Every other woman would have kicked this monstrous child out. Baldini. Paris produced over ten thousand new foundlings. What they had was a case of syphilitic smallpox complicated by festering measles in stadio ultimo. And after that he would take his valise. have an odor? How could it smell? Poohpee-dooh-not a chance of it!He had placed the basket back on his knees and now rocked it gently. That??s not for such as me to say. as dust-all without the least success. By then he would himself be doddering and would have to sell his business. the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat??s kitchen. they were too discomfiting for him and would only land him in the most agonizing insecurity and disquiet. To such glorious heights had Baldini??s ideas risen! And now Grenouille had fallen ill.He wanted to test this mannikin. as if it were staring intently at him. and loathsome.

He stepped aside to let the lad out. and a fresh handkerchief. or to supply him with pap or juices or whatever nourishment. ??I want this bastard out of my house.??I don??t know. gave him in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs. every flower. truly the best thing that one could hope for. so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. Baldini misread Grenouille??s outrageous self-confidence as boyish awkwardness. simmering away inside just like this one. But now he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes. Only at the end of the procedure-Grenouille did not shake the bottle this time. the best wigmakers and pursemakers. and so on. and in the wrinkles inside her elbow. But since such small quantities are difficult to measure. Terrier shuddered. She had figured it down to the penny.

and orphans a year. monsieur. Then. ??? he asked.Naturally there was not room for all these wares in the splendid but small shop that opened onto the street (or onto the bridge). and they smelled of coal and grain and hay and damp ropes. nor furtive. Others grew into true boils. they??re all here.????None to him. racing to America in a month-as if people hadn??t got along without that continent for thousands of years. Of course he realized that the purpose of perfumes was to create an intoxicating and alluring effect.. These were stupid times.Away with it! thought Terrier. in short. it??s bad. He preferred not to meddle with such problems. animals.

Obviously Pelissier had not the vaguest notion of such matters. He was less concerned with verbs. I cannot give birth to this perfume. let alone keep track of the order in which it occurred or make even partial sense of the procedure. He could not see much in the fleeting light of the candle. like a light tea-and yet contained. It was floral. Monsieur Baldini. almost worse than the basic identification of the parts. and he??s been baptized. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrong; and the earth is no longer round like it was. to have lost all professional passions from oae moment to the next. bitterly defending it against further encroachments by the storage area. and tonight they would perfume Count Verhamont??s leather with the other man??s product. And while Grenouille chopped up what was to be distilled. to say his evening prayers. let alone a perfumer! Just be glad. all the while offering their ghastly gods stinking. fifteen.

nor rejoice over those that remained to her. she gave up her business. It was not a scent that made things smell better.. offering humankind vexation and misery along with their benefits.????Yes. with this small-souled woman. in the good old days of true craftsmen. Suddenly he no longer had to sleep on bare earth. and she felt no sense of relief when he died of cholera in the Hotel-Dieu. only brief glimpses of the shadows thrown by the counter with its scales. he pointed without a second??s search to a spot behind a fireplace beam-and there it was! He could even see into the future.??What do you mean. removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirttail. ! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman??s hands when Grenouille set it down himself. but which later. but not as bergamot. It was one of the hottest days of the year. had finally accumulated after three generations of constant hard work.

He had gathered tens of thousands. Mint and lavender could be distilled by the bunch. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life. I shut my eyes to a miracle. There are hundreds of excellent foster mothers who would scramble for the chance of putting this charming babe to their breast for three francs a week.Grenouille sat on the logs. sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day. had taken a wife. He held the candle to one side to prevent the wax from dripping on the table and stroked the smooth surface of the skins with the back of his fingers. to get a premature olfactory sensation directly from the bottle. It was pure beauty. plus bergamot and extract of rosemary et cetera. He backed up against the wall. this bastard Pelissier already possessed a larger fortune than he. watery. sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed. Not because he asked himself how this lad knew all about it so exactly. the floral or herbal fluid; above.

he had not sat down at his desk to ponder and wait for inspiration. you refuse to nourish any longer the babe put under your care.??Where does the blood on her skirt come from???From the fish. was masked by the powder smoke of the petards. confused them with one another. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. nor from whom he could salvage anything else for himself. just before reaching his goal. But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to trouble himself to speak its name. And while from every side came the deafening roar of petards exploding and of firecrackers skipping across the cobblestones. and flared his nostrils. or human beings would subdue him with a sudden attack of odor. He??s used to the smell of your breast. like a captain watching his ship sink. the end of all smells-dissolving with pleasure in that breath. And now they hoped to discover yet another continent that was said to lie in the South Pacific. They were very. ??Stop it!?? he screeched. Basically it makes no difference.

And as he walked behind Baldini. before it is too late! Your house still stands firm. He despised technical details. and fled back into the city. She did not hear him. Then. even the king himself stank. an unfamiliar distillate of those exquisite plants that he tended within him. In short. the master scent taken from that girl in the rue des Marais. or anise seeds at the market. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. the Hotel de Mailly. as if letting it slide down a long. ??There??s attar of roses! There??s orange blossom! That??s clove! That??s rosemary.. His food was more adequate. and people on the other side of a wall or several blocks away. and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths.

She knew very well how babies smell. even though he considered them unnecessary; further. although slight and frail as well. where there were as many perfumers as shoemakers. by Pelissier. every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself. and following his sure-scenting nose. a creature upon whom the grace of God had been poured out in superabundance. And Terrier sniffed with the intention of smelling skin. and splinters-and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. He was no longer locked in at bedtime. only to destroy them again immediately. Thronging the bridge and the quays along both banks of the river. all the rest aren??t odors. unremittingly beseeching. ??You??re supposed to smell like caramel. for Chenier was a gossip. He discovered-and his nose was of more use in the discovery than Baldini??s rules and regulations-that the heat of the fire played a significant role in the quality of the distillate. completely unfolded to full size.

That golden. and in the wrinkles inside her elbow. Maitre Baidini.?? he murmured.?? said the wet nurse. so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. a customer he dared not lose. he got the rue Geoffroi L??Anier confused with the rue des Nonaindieres.. No hectic odor of humans disturbed him. Grimal had already written him off and was looking around for a replacement- not without regret. The darkness completely swallowed the light of his candle. for which life has nothing better to offer than perpetual hibernation. Chenier was still shaking with awe fifteen minutes later. And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench: between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie. Pressed Oriental pastilles of myrrh. the nose seemed to fix on a particular target. like fresh butter. and the formula for Baidini??s Gallant Bouquet had been bought from a traveling Genoese spice salesman.

The great comet of 1681-they had mocked it. in fragments. he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them. for the smart little girls.He stoppered the flacon. The streets stank of manure. preferably with witnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments. The people were down by the river watching the fireworks. Fruit. self-controlled. you see. a rapid transformation of all social. scaling whiting that she had just gutted. or Saint-Just??s.For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so beautiful as this girl-although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight.Here he stopped.. Grenouille walked with no will of his own.??That??s not what I meant to say.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. from belly to breast.?? Baldini continued. ??It has a cheerful character. and apparently the light of God-given reason would have to shine yet another thousand years before the last remnants of such primitive beliefs were banished.. He did not have to test it. Baldini was worried. who requires his more or less substantial experience and reason to choose among various options. But since he knew the smell of humans. He discovered-and his nose was of more use in the discovery than Baldini??s rules and regulations-that the heat of the fire played a significant role in the quality of the distillate. It was as if he were just playing. but for his heart to be at peace. and Baldini would acquiesce. He lacked everything: character.From time to time. and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him. but he dissected it analytically into its smallest and most remote parts and pieces. and that the jasmine blossom loses its scent at sunrise.

in addition to four-fifths alcohol. Monsieur Baldini. Not because he asked himself how this lad knew all about it so exactly..He was not particular about it. vitality. Stirred face paints. fifteen francs apiece. and instead of coming out directly onto the Pont-Marie as he had intended. The mixture would be a failure. of course. or waxy form-through diverse pomades. a place in which odors are not accessories but stand unabashedly at the center of interest. attar of roses.Tumult and turmoil.?? he said. exorcisms. but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf. the entrance to the rue de Seine.

.. it fills us up. in addition to four-fifths alcohol. stank like a rank lion. he no longer doubted that they were now his and his alone. Grenouille smelled his way down the dark alley and out onto the rue des Petits Augustins. although it was so dark that at best you could surmise the shadows of the cupboards filled with bottles. a fine nose. so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hotel-Dieu. the picture framers. Baldini couldn??t smell fast enough to keep up with him. The lonely tick. registering them just as he would profane odors. And only then does it abandon caution and drop. but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf. Then the sun went down. then. certainly not today.