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He would often just stand there, leaning against a wall or crouching in a dark corner, his eyes closed, his mouth half open and nostrils flaring wide, quiet as a feeding pike in a great, dark, slowly moving current. And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way, he would lunge at it and not let go. Then he would smell at only this one odor, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odor might be an old acquaintance, or a variation on one; it could be a brand-new one as well, with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled, let alone seen, till that moment: the odor of pressed silk, for example, the odor of a wild-thyme tea, the odor of brocade embroidered with silver thread, the odor of a cork from a bottle of vintage wine, the odor of a tortoiseshell comb. 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.
When he had smelled his fill of the thick gruel of the streets, he would go to airier terrain, where the odors were thi
Or he would go to the spot where they had beheaded his mother, to the place de Greve, which stuck out to lick the river like a huge tongue. Here lay the ships, pulled up onto shore or moored to posts, and they smelled of coal and grain and hay and damp ropes.
And from the west, via this one passage cut through the city by the river, came a broad current of wind bringing with it the odors of the country, of the meadows around Neuilly, of the forests between Saint-Germain and Versailles, of far-off cities like Rouen or Caen and sometimes of the sea itself. The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt, and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odors into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit in his memory, relishing it whole. The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea-which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells-dissolving with pleasure in that breath. But it was never to be, for Grenouille, who stood there on the riverbank at the place de Greve steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose, would never in his life see the sea, the real sea, the immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell. He had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hotel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night. And so he expanded his hunting grounds, first westward to the Faubourg Saint-Honore, then out along the rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and finally across to the other bank of the river into the quarters of the Sorbo
He knew many of these ingredients already from the flower and spice stalls at the market; others were new to him, and he filtered them out from the aromatic mixture and kept them u
He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of the hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud, the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat’s kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations. He fashioned grotes-queries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks-inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.
Eight
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1753, the a
Grenouille stood silent in the shadow of the Pavilion de Flore, across from the Pont-Neuf on the right bank. He did not stir a finger to applaud, did not even look up at the ascending rockets. He had come in hopes of getting a whiff of something new, but it soon became apparent that fireworks had nothing to offer in the way of odors. For all their extravagant variety as they glittered and gushed and crashed and whistled, they left behind a very monotonous mixture of smells: sulfur, oil, and saltpeter.