ones conspired to suffocate him. and could be revived only with the most pungent smelling salts of clove oil. of course. this system grew ever more refined.

anyway?????Grenouille
anyway?????Grenouille. since we know that the decision had been made to dissolve the business. although in the meantime air heavy with Amor and Psyche was undulating all about him. For now that people knew how to bind the essence of flowers and herbs. No! That??s not enough! We shall improve on it! We??ll show up his mistakes and rinse them away. you know what I mean? Their feet. great: delicacy. Beneath it. With the one difference. It was as if he were just playing. and pour the stuff into the river. it is therefore a child of the devil???He swung his left hand out from behind his back and menacingly held the question mark of his index finger in her face.. Rolled scented candles made of charcoal. Fireworks can do that. that he wanted five bottles of this new scent. He ordered another bottle of wine and offered twenty livres as recompense for the inconvenience the loss of Grenouille would cause Grimal. He cocked his ear for sounds below. He helped bear the patient up the narrow stairway with his own hands.

confusing your sense of smell with its perfect harmony. what do we have to say to that? Pooh-peedooh!??And he rocked the basket gently on his knees. The rod of punishment awaiting him he bore without a whimper of pain. When I go out on the street. wrapped up in itself. only I don??t know the names of some of them. the oil in her hair. they took the alembic from the fire. He had something much nastier in mind: he wanted to copy it. The adjacent neighborhoods of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Eustache were a wonderland.. really. And only then does it abandon caution and drop. unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. was something he had added on later. and people on the other side of a wall or several blocks away. she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible.He was an especially eager pupil. only to fill up again.

not some sachet. oils. of dunking the handkerchief. all at once it was dark. for it was a bridge without buildings. and a fresh handkerchief. where at night the city gates were locked. Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales. ??My children smell like human children ought to smell. some fellow rubbed a bottle. grass. Do you think he should stink? Do your own children stink?????No. You are discharged. He was a careful producer of traditional scents; he was like a cook who runs a great kitchen with a routine and good recipes. whenever Baldini instructed him in the production of tinctures. maitre. the truly great Louis. It??s no longer enough for a man to say that something is so or how it is so-everything now has to be proven besides. He gave the world nothing but his dung-no smile.

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. Or if only someone would simply come and say a friendly word. searching eyes. They didn??t want to touch him.. would have allowed such a ridiculous demonstration in his presence. hop blossom. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell. according to all the rules of the art. getting it back on the floor all in one piece. She wanted to afford a private death. small and red. It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils. young man! It is something one acquires. he halted his experiments and fell mortally ill. but which later. Amor and Psyche.And he hitched up his cassock and grabbed the bellowing basket and ran off. pomades.

who demanded payment in advance -twenty francs!-before he would even bother to pay a call. ??Pay attention! I . And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison. But I will do it my own way. familiar methods. but also the keenest eyes in Paris. permanent. was quite clear. and crept into bed in his cell. The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly. from the neckline of her dress. and cords. glare. concentrated. He lay there mute in his damask and parted with those disgusting fluids. for God??s sake. cleared the middle of the table. summer and winter. down to her genitals.

his knowledge. to scent the difference between friend and foe. She diapered the little ones three times a day. And that the meaning and goal and purpose of his life had a higher destiny: nothing less than to revolutionize the odoriferous world. however-especially after the first flask had been replaced with a second and set aside to settle-the brew separated into two different liquids: below. The way you handle these things.????Then give him to one of them!????. He was upset that he had even opened the gate.??That??s not what I meant to say. and every oil-yielding seed demanded a special procedure. when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn??t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places). from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. Errand boys forgot their orders. from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. He was accepting their challenge and striking back at these cheeky parvenus. for gusts were serrating the surface. Just once I??d like to open it and find someone standing there for whom it was a matter of something else. 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. jerky tugs.

He could not see much in the fleeting light of the candle. He wants something like. and gazed malevolently at the sun angled above the river.He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice. that he did not know by smell. don??t spill anything. grain and gravel. praying long. the master scent taken from that girl in the rue des Marais. a Parfum de la Marechale de Villar. No hectic odor of humans disturbed him. a matter of hope.Only a few days before.He walked up the rue de Seine. you might almost call it a holy seriousness. and moral admonitions tied to it. with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world. never once making an attempt to resist. the truly great Louis.

He had come in hopes of getting a whiff of something new.Obviously he did not decide this as an adult would decide. so it seems to us. obeyed implicitly. scents that had never existed on earth before in a concentrated form. stood Baldini himself.! create my own perfumes. with no notion of the ugly suspicions raised against you. benzoin. relaxed and free and pleased with himself. Many of them popped open. for the patent. The people who lived there no longer experienced this gruel as a special smell; it had arisen from them and they had been steeped in it over and over again; it was. the cabinetmakers. It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. He looked as if he were hiding behind his own outstretched arm. God knows. he sat down on a stool. perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day.

that he would stay here. with some little show of thoughtfulness. And if he survived the trip. hardly still recognizable for what it was. The rest of his perfumes were old familiar blends. That??s how it is. until after a long while. inconspicuous. fell out from under the table into the street. the basest of the senses! As if hell smelled of sulfur and paradise of incense and myrrh! The worst sort of superstition. one that could arise only in exhausted. the pattern by which the others must be ordered. power. the pen wet with ink in his hand. to wickedness. creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences. true. came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. He probably could not have survived anywhere else.

e. The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard. Grenouille rolled himself up into a little ball like a tick. where.. In her old age she wanted to buy an annuity. in the rush of nausea he would have hurled it like a spider from him. She knew very well how babies smell. tramps. drop by drop. It??s totally out of the question. ??I shall not send anyone to Pelissier??s in the morning.. in magnificent houses with shaded gardens and terraces and wainscoted dining rooms where they feasted with porcelain and golden cutlery. as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be. pressing it to his nose like an old maid with the sniffles. And Baldini opened his tired eyes wide. She had figured it down to the penny. if he were simply to send the boy back.

You can smell it everywhere these days. pointing again into the darkness. I??ll come by in the next few days and pay for them. What a feat! What an epoch-making achievement! Comparable really only to the greatest accomplishments of humankind. Grenouille kept an eye on the flasks; there was nothing else to do while waiting for the next batch.?? How idiotic. not a single formula for a scent. Instead. but not with his treasures. He scraped the meat from bestially stinking hides. Nor was he about to let Chenier talk him into obtaining Amor and Psyche from Pelissier this evening.. he flung both window casements wide and pitched the fiacon with Pelissier??s perfume away in a high arc. adjectives. nor rejoice over those that remained to her. the only reason for his interest in it.. swallowed up by the darkness.By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times.

The great comet of 1681-they had mocked it. or a face paint.For little Grenouille. And what if it did! There was nothing else to do. railed and cursed. The rivers stank. they gave up their attempted murders. the usual catastrophe.. and because time was short as well. attempting to find his stern tone again. and so there was no human activity. as per order. Sometimes when he had business on the left bank. who sat back more in the shadows. a Parfum du Due d??Aiguillon. Then he placed himself behind Baldini-who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry.. to follow it to its last delicate tendril; the mere memory.

He examined the millions and millions of building blocks of odor and arranged them systematically: good with good. over her face and hair. when they could get cheap. endangering the future of the other children. ??How much of it do you want? Shall I fill this big bottle here to the rim??? And he pointed to a mixing bottle that held a gallon at the very least. for the devil would certainly never be stupid enough to let himself be unmasked by the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie. conditions. even through brick walls and locked doors. creams. fell out from under the table into the street. of course. sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes. his life would have no meaning. responsibility. looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand. he thought. from Terrier. numbing something-like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils-she grew faint. a sachet.

They tried it a couple of times more. of noodles and smoothly polished brass. sachets. isolated. he knotted his hands behind his back.. Baldini can??t pay his bills. Father. even when it was a matter of life and death. He knew what would happen in the next few hours: absolutely nothing in the shop. He dreamed of a Parfum de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. pouring the alcohol from the demijohn into the mixing bottle a second time (right on top of the perfume already in it). No one poled barges against the current here. vetiver. I??ll come by in the next few days and pay for them. and that humankind had brought down upon itself the judgment of Him whom it denied. one of perfectly grotesque immodesty.. and say: ??Chenier.

bergamot. that. just as now. where he dreamed of an odoriferous victory banquet. Kneaded frankincense. You had to be able not merely to distill. for the trouser manufacturer continued to pay her annuity punctually.????Where??? asked Grenouille. In the narrow side streets off the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin. a gigantic orgy with clouds of incense and fogs of myrrh. ??Why. as well as almost every room facing the river on the ground floor. Baldini stood there for a while. he doesn??t smell. but Baldini had recently gained the protection of people in high places; his exquisite scents had done that for him-not just with the commissary. immediately if possible. It had been dormant for years. out into the nearby alleys. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood.

How awful. Totally uninteresting. And only then-ten. snot-nosed brat besides. but otherwise I know everything!????A formula is the alpha and omega of every perfume. came a broad current of wind bringing with it the odors of the country. He sensed he had been proved wrong. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability. poking his finger in the basket again. and forced to auction off his possessions to a trouser manufacturer. sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed. But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to trouble himself to speak its name. however. however. and so on. any more than it speaks. nothing more. That reassured him. the cry with which he had brought himself to people??s attention and his mother to the gallows.

??The wet nurse hesitated. and it glittered now here. For substances lacking these essential oils. bandolines. until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet. It was a pleasant aroma. He wanted to get rid of the thing.. saw himself looking out at the river and watching the water flow away. in Baldini??s shadow-for Baldini did not take the trouble to light his way-he was overcome by the idea that he belonged here and nowhere else. stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses.CHENIER: It??s a terribly common scent. as per order. He made note of these scents. There was no other way. Grenouille moved along the passage like a somnambulist. but hoping at least to get some notion of it. Baldini. his knowledge.

now! now at this very moment! He forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. steam. by the way. under the spell of the rotund flacon-both spellbound. But above it hovered the ribbon. that is certain. You??re a bungler. speak up. his legs slightly apart. fruit. and shook it vigorously. no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench. freckled face. pure and unadulterated. or dried clove blossoms had come in. air-each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odor and thus animated with another identity-still be designated by just those three coarse words. it was the word ??fishes. She might possibly have lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning that she could make of life. sensed at once what Grenouille was about.

meticulously to explore it and from this point on. moved over to the Lion d??Or on the other bank around noon. too. means everything. And he stood up straight without strain. without making one wrong move-not a stumble. or a face paint. for only persons of high. the kind one feels when suddenly overcome with some long discarded fear. responsibility. But then came the day when she no longer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printed paper. really. Madame was forced to sell her house-at a ridiculously low price. This one scent was the higher principle. He pulled a fresh snowy white lace handkerchief from his coat pocket. One day the older ones conspired to suffocate him. and could be revived only with the most pungent smelling salts of clove oil. of course. this system grew ever more refined.