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He laid the horse blanket aside and took off his clothes, or at least what remained of them-rags and tatters were what he took off. For seven years he had not removed them from his body. They had to be fully saturated with his own odor. He tossed them into a pile at the cave entrance and walked away. Then, for the first time in seven years, he once again climbed to the top of the mountain. There he stood on the same spot where he had stood on the day of his arrival, held his nose to the west, and let the wind whistle around his naked body. His intention was thoroughly to air himself, to be pumped so full of the west wind-and that meant with the odor of the sea and wet meadows -that this odor would counterbalance his own body odor, creating a gradient of odors between himself and his clothes, which he would then be in a position to smell. And to prevent his nose from taking in the least bit of his own odor, he bent his body forward, stretching his neck out as far as he could against the wind, with his arms stretched behind him. He looked like a swimmer just before he dives into the water.
He held this totally ridiculous pose for several hours, and even by such pale sunlight, his skin, maggot white from lack of sun, was turned a lobster red. Toward evening he climbed back down to the cave. From far off he could see his clothes lying in a pile. The last few yards, he held his nose closed and opened it again only when he had lowered it right down onto the pile. He made the sniffing test he had learned from Baldini, snatching up the air and then letting it out again in spurts. And to catch the odor, he used both hands to form a bell around his clothes, with his nose stuck into it as the clapper. He did everything possible to extract his own odor from his clothes. But there was no odor in them. It was most definitely not there. There were a thousand other odors: the odor of stone, sand, moss, resin, raven’s blood-even the odor of the sausage that he had bought years before near Sully was clearly perceptible. Those clothes contained an olfactory diary of the last seven, eight years. Only one odor was not there-his own odor, the odor of the person who had worn them continuously all that time.
And now he began to be truly alarmed. The sun had set. He was standing naked at the entrance to the tu
He went back into the tu
He continued to squat there for a while, quite calm, simply nodding his head gently. Then he turned around and walked, at first hunched down, but when the height of the tu
Outside he pulled on his rags (his shoes had rotted off him years before), threw the horse blanket over his shoulders, and that same night left the Plomb du Cantal, heading south.
Thirty
HE LOOKED AWFUL. His hair reached down to the hollows of his knees, his scraggly beard to his navel. His nails were like talons, and the skin on his arms and legs, where the rags no longer covered his body, was peeling off in shreds.
The first people he met, farmers in a field near the town of Pierrefort, ran off screaming at the sight of him. But in the town itself, he caused a sensation. By the hundreds people came ru
He had seen neither daylight nor another human being during that time, had been fed by an invisible hand that let down a basket in the dark, and finally set free by a ladder-without his ever knowing why and without ever having seen his captors or his rescuer. He had thought this story up, since it seemed to him more believable than the truth; and so it was, for similar attacks by robbers occurred not infrequently in the mountains of the Auvergne and Languedoc, and in the Ceve
At the age of forty, the marquis had turned his back on life at the court of Versailles and retired to his estates, where he lived for science alone. From his pen had come an important work concerning dynamic political economy. In it he had proposed the abolition of all taxes on real estate and agricultural products, as well as the introduction of an upside-down progressive income tax, which would hit the poorest citizens the hardest and so force them to a more vigorous development of their economic activities. Encouraged by the success of his little book, he authored a tract on the raising of boys and girls between the ages of five and ten. Then he turned to experimental agriculture. By spreading the semen of bulls over various grasses, he attempted to produce a milk-yielding animal-vegetable hybrid, a sort of udder flower. After initial successes that enabled him to produce a cheese from his milk grass-described by the Academy of Sciences of Lyon as “tasting of goat, though slightly bitter”— he had to abandon his experiments because of the enormous cost of spewing bull semen by the hundreds of quarts across his fields. In any case, his concern with matters agro-biological had awakened his interest not only in the plowed clod, so to speak, but in the earth in general and its relationship to the biosphere in particular.