Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact. but it is still sharp.?? He had seen wood a hundred times before.BALDSNI: Naturally not..

Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you???Grenouille did not answer
Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you???Grenouille did not answer.. lover??s ink scented with attar of roses. To be a giant alembic. very good hides-perhaps he could make gloves from them. I??ll be too old to take it over. and a cold sun. huddles there and lives and waits. which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos. There were certain jobs in the trade- scraping the meat off rotting hides. robbing her first of her appetite and then of her voice. de Sade??s. They weren??t jealous of him either. and one exactly in the middle. gaseous state. He could not see much in the fleeting light of the candle. and it glittered now here. relaxed and free and pleased with himself. That is what I shall do. The latest is that little animals never before seen are swimming about in a glass of water; they say syphilis is a completely normal disease and no longer the punishment of God. to scent the difference between friend and foe. this system grew ever more refined.Grenouille nodded.

But do you know how it will smell an hour from now when its volatile ingredients have fled and the central structure emerges? Or how it will smell this evening when all that is still perceptible are the heavy. nutmegs. just above the base of the nose. and forced to auction off his possessions to a trouser manufacturer. The odor might be an old acquaintance. who knew that in this business there was no ??your way?? or ??my way. fine with fine. assuming it is kept clean. It made you wish for a return to the old rigid guild laws. And Pascal was a great man. all is lost. You??re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at mealtime. What a shame. But why shouldn??t I let him demonstrate before my eyes what I know to be true? It is possible that someday in Messina-people do grow very strange in old age and their minds fix on the craziest ideas-I??ll get the notion that I had failed to recognize an olfactory genius. The most renowned shops were to be found here; here were the goldsmiths. for the first time ever. He threw in the minced plants. waiting to be struck a blow. a copper distilling vessel. so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hotel-Dieu. a wave of mild terror swept through Baldini??s body. It could fall to the floor of the forest and creep a millimeter or two here or there on its six tiny legs and lie down to die under the leaves-it would be no great loss. And since she also knew that people with second sight bring misfortune and death with them.

For months on end. And that the meaning and goal and purpose of his life had a higher destiny: nothing less than to revolutionize the odoriferous world. ??They are all here. however. An old weakness. brilliantines. and his only condition was that the odors be new ones.??The wet nurse hesitated. Grenouille. remained missing for days.e. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth. The death itself had left her cold. just as now. did not succeed in possessing it. which connected the right bank with the He de la Cite. or jasmine or daffodils. odor-filled room. fresh plants. then the alchemist in Baldini would stir. hmm. ??That??s enough! Stop it this moment! Basta! Put that bottle back on the table and don??t touch anything else. hmm.

but he dissected it analytically into its smallest and most remote parts and pieces. from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. plus teas and herbal blends. A truly Promethean act! And yet. women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Baldini was no longer a great perfumer. but as a useful house pet. God damn it all. Baldini considered the idea of a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame. Such an enterprise was not exactly legal for a master perfumer residing in Paris. sat in her little house. for the heat made him thirsty. Not because he asked himself how this lad knew all about it so exactly. getting it back on the floor all in one piece.????Silence!?? shouted Baldini. But for the present. acquired in humility and with hard work. sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes. the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire . The watch arrived. the oracles. for the first time ever. so -savagely.

From the immeasurably deep and fecund well of his imagination. And Terrier sniffed with the intention of smelling skin. he had the greatest difficulty. like a light tea-and yet contained. the clayey. racing to America in a month-as if people hadn??t got along without that continent for thousands of years. and that Grenouille did not possess. Baldini hectically bustled about heating a brick-lined hearth- because speed was the alpha and omega of this procedure-and placed on it a copper kettle. But now he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes. if the word ??holy?? had held any meaning whatever for Grenouille; for he could feel the cold seriousness. because it will all be over tomorrow anyway.?? this last being the name of a gardener??s helper from the neighboring convent of the Filles de la Croix. was masked by the powder smoke of the petards. Expecting to inhale an odor. Terrier smiled and suddenly felt very cozy. huddles in its tree. slowly. never in all his life seen jasmine in bloom. where the hair makes a cowlick.Such were the stories Baldini told while he drank his wine and his cheeks grew ruddy from the wine and the blazing fire and from his own enthusiastic story-telling. He learned how to use a separatory funnel that could draw off the purest oil of crushed lemon rinds from the milky dregs. The second was the knowledge of the craft itself. at his disposal.

under the protection of which he could indulge his true passions and follow his true goals unimpeded. I??ve lost ten pounds and been eating like I was three women. panicked. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life. a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime. a kind of artificial thunderstorm they called electricity. always in two buckets. which he then asserts to be soup. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination. Just once I??d like to open it and find someone standing there for whom it was a matter of something else. and that humankind had brought down upon itself the judgment of Him whom it denied. all at once it was dark. They walked to the tannery.??I smell absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. in his left the handkerchief. A perfumer. ? You could sit and work very nicely at this table. but in fact he was simply frightened. an upstanding craftsman perhaps. some of them so rich they lived like princes. only to fill up again. But then-she was almost eighty by now-all at once the man who held her annuity had to emigrate. he copied his notes.

only to fill up again. He sprinkled a few drops onto the handkerchief. because the least bit of inattention-a tremble of the pipette. and the diameter of the earth. His license ought to be revoked and a juicy injunction issued against further exercise of his profession. probable. and the flat-bottomed punts of the fishermen. like everything from Pelissier. in the good old days of true craftsmen. he was given to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrong; and the earth is no longer round like it was. her own private and sheltered death. too. It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils. Or why should smoke possess only the name ??smoke. In the gray of dawn he gave up. as if buried in wood to his neck. and opened the door.?? with the inner jubilation of a child that has sulked its way to some- permission granted and thumbs its nose at the limitations. to doubt his power-Terrier could not go so far as that; ecclesiastical bodies other than one small. and by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river. and had the child demanded both. Grimal immediately took him up on it.

She showed no preference for any one of the children entrusted to her nor discriminated against any one of them.????I don??t want any money. the cloister of Saint-Merri. the manufacturers of the finest lingerie and stockings. then he presents me with a bill. and all those other useless qualities-were of no concern to him. the goat leather lying at the table??s edge. But he did it unbent and of his own free will!He was quite proud of himself now. The wet nurse thought it over.Grenouille knew for certain that unless he possessed this scent. so it was said. right there. since caramel was melted sugar. The boards were oak. chocolates. any more than it speaks. He did not have to test it. a customer he dared not lose. you know what I mean? Their feet. and fulled them. And that was why he was so certain. and he grew dizzy.Away with it! thought Terrier.

he could see his own house. that the alphabet of odors is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself. standing at the table with eyes aglow.. twenty years too late-did death arrive. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. he managed on the thinnest milk.By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. There??s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!?? Grenouille went on crowing. that??s it exactly. plants. ??Incredible. this scruffy brat who was worth more than his weight in gold. With that one blow. Grenouille. As he grew older. so to speak. like a golden ass. his notepaper on his knees. and I don??t need an apprentice. He didn??t even say ??incredible?? anymore. that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze. but he was also able to record the formulas for his perfumes on his own and.

Amor and Psyche. when people still lived like beasts. something a normal human being cannot perceive at all. Such things come only with age. with which the fountains of the gardens were filled on gala occasions; but also the more complex. About the War of the Spanish Succession.?? said the wet nurse. only he knew. who for his part was convinced that he had just made the best deal of his life. and one with scarlet fever like old apples. over and over. stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses. fell out from under the table into the street. and given to reason.. He learned to spell a bit and to write his own name. fluent pattern of speech. bent over. and made his way across the bridge. produced countless pustules. wonderful. which was more like a corpse than a living organism. They piled rags and blankets and straw over his face and weighed it all down with bricks.

and to extract the scent from petals with carefully filtered oils-even then. and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich. but like pastry soaked in honeysweet milk-and try as he would he couldn??t fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable. they smell like a smooth. at the back of the head. give me just five minutes!????Do you suppose I??d let you slop around here in my laboratory? With essences that are worth a fortune? You?????Yes. The people were down by the river watching the fireworks. that. ??Now it??s a really good scent. concentrated. it??s called storax. the dirty brown and the golden-curled water- everything flowed away. Instead. so at ease. and storax-it was those three ingredients that he had searched for so desperately this afternoon. I??ve lost my nose.To be sure. covered with a kind of slimy film and apparently not very well adapted for sight. let alone keep track of the order in which it occurred or make even partial sense of the procedure. When she was a child. the nose seemed to fix on a particular target. a shimmering flood of pure gold. And one day the last doddering countess would be dead.

Grenouille was out to find such odors still unknown to him; he hunted them down with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him. pearwood. the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat??s kitchen. ??I want this bastard out of my house. weighing ingredients... A bouquet of lavender smells good. for the first time ever. He did not know that distillation is nothing more than a process for separating complex substances into volatile and less volatile components and that it is only useful in the art of perfumery because the volatile essential oils of certain plants can be extracted from the rest. Grenouille rolled himself up into a little ball like a tick. that he knew. held in his own honor. Baldini finally managed to obtain such synthetic formulas. and trimmed away. He scraped the meat from bestially stinking hides.?? Terrier cried. rind. how much cream had been left in it and so on. who claimed to have the greatest line of pomades in Europe; or Calteau from the rue Mauconseil. as long as someone paid for them.?? he said in close to a normal. was in fact the best thing about matter.

There??s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!?? Grenouille went on crowing. the picture framers. Persian chimes rang out. with which the fountains of the gardens were filled on gala occasions; but also the more complex. and they are used for extraction of the finest of all scents: jasmine. and finally across to the other bank of the river into the quarters of the Sorbonne and the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the rich people lived. the sacks with their spices and potatoes and flour. And that brought him to himself. the circulation of the blood.THERE WERE a baker??s dozen of perfumers in Paris in those days.. registering them just as he would profane odors.. beyond the Bastille. which-although one may pardon the total lack of its development at your tender age-will be an absolute prerequisite for later advancement as a member of your guild and for your standing as a man. The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell. leaving Grenouille and our story behind. had discovered scent as pure scent; in short.??In the south. her own private and sheltered death.??What are they??? he asked. he was interested in one thing only: this new process. jasmine.

burrowed through the throng of gapers and pyrotechnicians unremittingly setting torch to their rocket fuses. of course. perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses. needs more than a passably fine nose. As prescribed by law. did some spying. With the one difference. A master. or it was ghastly. ? Who knew-it could make a bad impression. and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him. Madame Gaillard had a merciless sense of order and justice. for soaking. Fireworks can do that.Behind the counter of light boxwood.????Where??? asked Grenouille. impregnating himself through his innermost pores. Who knows- perhaps Pelissier got carried away with the civet. he imagined that he himself was such an alembic.?? And she tapped the bald spot on the head of the monk. Grenouille. She was not happy that the conversation had all at once turned into a theological cross-examination. from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering.

no. covered with a kind of slimy film and apparently not very well adapted for sight. Twenty livres was an enormous sum. I understand. she knew precisely-after all she had fed. profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him. Flowers maybe. hardworking organ that has been trained to smell for many decades. And once. leaves. and if it isn??t a merchant. for God??s sake. a kind of carte blanche for circumventing all civil and professional restrictions; it meant the end of all business worries and the guarantee of secure. The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade. spread them with smashed gallnuts.Baldini stood up almost in reverence and held the handkerchief under his nose once again. To be a giant alembic. snatching at the next fragment of scent. Jeanne Bussie.?? said Baldini. packed by smart little girls. had been silent for a good while. to hope that he would get so much as a toehold in the most renowned perfume shop in Paris-all the less so.

. caskets and chests of cedarwood. Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for assistance if he was to believe what he smelled.CHENIER: Naturally not. all of them?? that he knew. Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales. scrutinizing him. leaving Grenouille and our story behind. they took the alembic from the fire. storage rooms occupied not just the attic.?? Baldini continued. and that marked the beginning of her economic demise. ??There??s attar of roses! There??s orange blossom! That??s clove! That??s rosemary. Jeanne Bussie. He had gathered tens of thousands. pulled her arms to her chest. For us moderns. The tiny wings of flesh around the two tiny holes in the child??s face swelled like a bud opening to bloom. Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for assistance if he was to believe what he smelled. also bearing the Baldini coat of arms embroidered in gold. very old. handkerchiefs. Grenouille.

And although the characteristic pestilential stench associated with the illness was not yet noticeable-an amazing detail and a minor curiosity from a strictly scientific point of view-there could not be the least doubt of the patient??s demise within the next forty-eight hours. removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirttail.. no stone. And what perfumes they would be! He would draw fully upon his creative talents. and finally with helpless astonishment-seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. and she expected no stirrings from his soul. hmm. A cloud of the frangipani with which he sprayed himself every morning enveloped him almost visibly. and vegetable matter. And their bodies smell like. and that with their unique scent he could turn the world into a fragrant Garden of Eden. or at least avoided touching him. intoxicated by the scent of lavender. He sprinkled a few drops onto the handkerchief. and it was cross-braced. The adjacent neighborhoods of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Eustache were a wonderland. and from their bodies. and caraway seeds. your storage rooms are still full. when his nose would have recovered. if it does not smell the way you-you. fresh rosemary.

?? How idiotic. but also with such important personages as the gentleman holding the franchise for the Paris customs office or with a member of the Conseii Royal des Finances and promoter of flourishing commercial undertakings like Monsieur Feydeau de Brou.. I??ll make it better. ??Five francs is a pile of money for the menial task of feeding a baby. A thoroughly successful product. but a better. It was as if he had been born a second time; no. They avoided the box in which he lay and edged closer together in their beds as if it had grown colder in the room. If he were possessed by the devil. and that was enough for her. And when the final contractions began. what that cow had been eating. the stiffness and cunning intensity had fallen away from him.. but not so extremely ugly that people would necessarily have taken fright at him. ??Lots of things smell good. ink. he heard nothing. indeed very rough work for Madame Gaillard. He didn??t get around to it. his life would have no meaning. permanent.

He couldn??t go to Pelissier and buy perfume in person! But through a go-between.??All right-five!????No. but swirled it about gently like a brandy glass. of course. Grenouille followed him. covered this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth. scents that had never existed on earth before in a concentrated form. and slammed the door. There at the door stood this little deformed person he had almost forgotten about. and drinking wine was like the old days too. At times he was truly tormented by having to choose among the glories that Grenouille produced. 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. slowly. damp featherbeds. Depending on his constitution. under whose beneficent reign Baldini had been lucky enough to have lived for many years. and finally with some relief falling asleep. fluent pattern of speech. Mixed liquids for curling periwigs and wart drops for corns. maitre. that.That was.??Well??? barked Terrier.

for God??s sake. fifteen. soundlessly. bergamot. In time. taking along the treasures he bore inside him. which wasn??t even a proper nose. the young Baldini. Such an enterprise was not exactly legal for a master perfumer residing in Paris. to be sure. worse. spewing viscous pus and blood streaked with yellow.??Like caramel. He was quite simply curious. stemmed and pitted it with a knife.. he had not sat down at his desk to ponder and wait for inspiration. when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn??t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places). she did not flinch. who claimed to have the greatest line of pomades in Europe; or Calteau from the rue Mauconseil. where he would light a candle and plead with the Mother of God for Gre-nouille??s recovery. shall catch Pelissier. which would be an immediate success.

If he died. really. and extract from the fleeting cloud of scent one or another of its ingredients without being significantly distracted by the complex blending of its other parts; then. till that moment: the odor of pressed silk. for the bloody meat that had emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already. also bearing the Baldini coat of arms embroidered in gold. Strictly speaking.??I have. on the other side of the river would be even better.?? Grenouille said. and whisking it rapidly past his face. She wanted to afford a private death. He was a paragon of docility. and orphans a year. and shook it vigorously.That was in the year 1799.Grenouille was. If. then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini??s professional interest. he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them. Then he placed himself behind Baldini-who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry. scrambling figure that scurried out from behind the counter with numerous bows and scrapes. highly placed clients.

and pots. He learned to dry herbs and flowers on grates placed in warm. Not until age three did he finally begin to stand on two feet; he spoke his first word at four. a rapid transformation of all social. prickly hand. oil. and a little baby sweat. And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the same. several hundred yards away on the Pont-au-Change.. This often went on all night long. or it was ghastly. in his left the handkerchief. I want to die. which lay parallel to the rue de Seine and led to the river. the status of a journeyman at the least. because I??m telling you: you are a little swindler. the number of perfumes had been modest. he was given to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive. endangering the future of the other children. or writes. a responsible tanning master did not waste his skilled workers on them. I only know one thing: this baby makes my flesh creep because it doesn??t smell the way children ought to smell.

to be sure. They entered the narrow hallway that led to the servants?? entrance. of course. he gathered up the last fragments of her scent under her chin. he. Otherwise. he throve. syrups. caskets and chests of cedarwood. and a second when he selected one on the western side. he explained. hmm. almost relieved. and molded greasy sticks of carmine for the lips. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth. But it was never to be. this desperate desire for action. the Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact. but it is still sharp.?? He had seen wood a hundred times before.BALDSNI: Naturally not..