Perfume. The story of a murderer

For little Grenouille, Madame Gaillard’s establishment was a blessing. He probably could not have survived anywhere else. But here, with this small-souled woman, he throve. He had a tough constitution. Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again. He could eat watery soup for days on end, he managed on the thinnest milk, digested the rottenest vegetables and spoiled meat. In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest. True, he bore scars and chafings and scabs from it all, and a slightly crippled foot left him with a limp, but he lived. He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before. He required a minimum ration of food and clothing for his body. For his soul he required nothing. Security, attention, tenderness, love-or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require— were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille. Or rather, so it seems to us, he had totally dispensed with them just to go on living-from the very start. The cry that followed his birth, the cry with which he had brought himself to people’s attention and his mother to the gallows, was not an instinctive cry for sympathy and love. That cry, emitted upon careful consideration, one might almost say upon mature consideration, was the newborn’s decision against love and nevertheless for life. Under the circumstances, the latter was possible only without the former, and had the child demanded both, it would doubtless have abruptly come to a grisly end. Of course, it could have grabbed the other possibility open to it and held its peace and thus have chosen the path from birth to death without a detour by way of life, sparing itself and the world a great deal of mischief. But to have made such a modest exit would have demanded a modicum of native civility, and that Grenouille did not possess. He was an abomination from the start.

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice.

Obviously he did not decide this as an adult would decide, who requires his more or less substantial experience and reason to choose among various options. But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be.

Or like that tick in the tree, for which life has nothing better to offer than perpetual hibernation. The ugly little tick, 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, lets not the tiniest bit of perspiration escape. The tick, which makes itself extra small and inconspicuous so that no one will see it and step on it. The lonely tick, which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind, deaf, and dumb, and simply sniffs, sniffs all year long, for miles around, for the blood of some passing animal that it could never reach on its own power. The tick could let itself drop. 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, God knows. But the tick, stubborn, sullen, and loathsome, huddles there and lives and waits. Waits, for that most improbable of chances that will bring blood, in animal form, directly beneath its tree. And only then does it abandon caution and drop, and scratch and bore and bite into that alien flesh…

The young Grenouille was such a tick. He lived encapsulated in himself and waited for better times. He gave the world nothing but his dung-no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent. Every other woman would have kicked this monstrous child out. But not Madame Gaillard. She could not smell that he did not smell, and she expected no stirrings from his soul, because her own was sealed tight.