Perfume. The story of a murderer, стр. 41
Then, very gradually and with utmost caution, he went to work on human beings. At first he stalked them from a safe distance with a wide-meshed net, for he was less concerned with bagging large game than with testing his hunting methods.
Disguised by his faint perfume for inconspicuous-ness, he mingjed with the evening’s guests at the Quatre Dauphins inn and stuck tiny scraps of cloth drenched in oil and grease under the benches and tables and in hidden nooks. A few days later he collected them and put them to the test. And indeed, along with all sorts of kitchen odors, tobacco smoke, and wine smells, they exhaled a little human odor. But it remained very vague and masked, was more the suggestion of general exhalations than a personal odor. A similar mass aura, though purer and more sublimely sweaty, could be gleaned from the cathedral, where on December 24 Grenouille hung his experimental flags under the pews and gathered them in again on the twenty-sixth, after no less than seven masses had been sat through just above them. A ghastly conglomerate of odor was reproduced on the impregnated swatches: anal sweat, menstrual blood, moist hollows of knees, and clenched hands, mixed with the exhaled breath of thousands of hymn-singing and Ave Maria-mumbling throats and the oppressive fumes of incense and myrrh. A horrible concentration of nebulous, amorphous, nauseating odors— and yet unmistakably human.
Grenouille garnered his first individual odor in the Hopital de la Charite”. He managed to pilfer sheets that were supposed to be burned because the journeyman sackmaker who had lain wrapped in them for two months had just died of consumption. The cloth was so drenched in the exudations of the sackmaker that it had absorbed them like an enfleurage paste and could be directly subjected to lavage. The result was eerie: right under Grenouille’s nose, the sackmaker rose olfactonly from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there-the phantom slightly distorted by the peculiar methods of reproduction and the countless miasmas of his disease-but perfectly recognizable in space as an olfactory personage. A small man of about thirty, blond, with a bulbous nose, short limbs, flat, cheesy feet, swollen gem’talia, choleric temperament, and a stale mouth odor-not a handsome man, aromatically speaking, this sack-maker, not worth being held on to for any length of time, like the puppy. And yet for one whole night Grenouille let the scent-specter flutter about his cabin while he sniffed at him again and again, happy and deeply satisfied with the sense of power that he had won over the aura of another human being. He poured it out the next day.
He tried one more experiment during these winter days. He discovered a deaf-mute beggar woman wandering through the town and paid her one franc to wear several different sets of rags smeared with oils and fats against her naked skin. It turned out that lamb suet, pork lard, and beef tallow, rendered many times over, combined in a ratio of two to five to three-with the addition of a small amount of virgin oil-was best for absorbing human odor.
Grenouille let it go at that. He refrained from overpowering some whole, live person and processing him or her perfumatorily. That sort of thing would have meant risks and would have resulted in no new knowledge. He knew he now was master of the techniques needed to rob a human of his or her scent, and he knew it was unnecessary to prove this fact anew.
Indeed, human odor was of no importance to him whatever. He could imitate human odor quite well enough with surrogates. What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. These were his victims.
Thirty-nine
IN JANUARY THE widow Arnulfi married her first journeyman, Dominique Druot, who was thus promoted to mattre gantier et parfumeur. There was a great banquet for the guild masters and a more modest one for the journeymen; Madame bought a new mattress for her bed, which she now shared officially with Druot, and took her gay finery from the armoire. Otherwise, everything remained as it was. She retained the fine old name of Arnulfi and retained her fortune for herself, as well as the management of the finances and the keys to the cellar; Druot fulfilled his sexual duties daily and refreshed himself afterwards with wine; and although he was now the one and only journeyman, Grenouille took care of most of the work at hand in return for the same small salary, frugal board, and cramped quarters.
The year began with a yellow flood of cassias, then hyacinths, violet petals, and narcotic narcissus. One Sunday in March-it was about a year now since his arrival in Grasse-Grenouille set out to see how things stood in the garden behind the wall at the other end of town. He was ready for the scent this time, knew more or less exactly what awaited him… and nevertheless, as he caught a whiff of it, at the Porte Neuve, no more than halfway to the spot beside the wall, his heart beat more loudly and he felt the blood in his veins tingle with pleasure: she was still there, the incomparably beautiful flower, she had survived the winter unblemished, her sap was running, she was growing, expanding, driving forth the most exquisite ranks of buds! Her scent had grown stronger, just as he had expected, without losing any of its delicacy. What a year before had been sprinkled and dappled about was now blended into a faint, smooth stream of scent that shimmered with a thousand colors and yet bound each color to it and did not break. And this stream, Grenouille recognized blissfully, was fed by a spring that grew ever fuller. Another year, just one more year, just twelve more months, and that spring would gush over, and he could come to cap it and imprison the wild flow of its scent.
He walked along the wall to the spot behind which he knew the garden was located. Although the girl was apparently not in the garden but in the house, in her room behind closed windows, her scent floated down to him like a steady, gentle breeze. Grenouille stood quite still. He was not intoxicated or dizzy as he had been the first time he had smelled it. He was filled with the happiness of a lover who has heard or seen his darling from afar and knows that he will bring her home within the year. It was really true-Grenouille, the solitary tick, the abomination, Grenouille the Monster, who had never felt love and would never be able to inspire it, stood there beside the city wall of Grasse on that day in March and loved and was profoundly happy in his love.
True, he did not love another human being, certainly not the girl who lived in the house beyond the wall. He loved her scent-that alone, nothing else, and only inasmuch as it would one day be his alone. He would bring it home within the year, he swore it by his very life. And after this strange oath, or betrothal, this promise of loyalty given to himself and to his future scent, he left the place light of heart and returned to town through the Porte du Cours.
That night, as he lay in his cabin, he conjured up the memory of the scent-he could not resist the temptation-and immersed himself in it, caressed it, and let it caress him, so near to it, as fabulously close as if he possessed it already in reality, his scent, his own scent; and he made love to it and to himself through it for an intoxicatingly, deliciously long time. He wanted this self-loved feeling to accompany him in his sleep. But at the very instant when he closed his eyes, in the moment of the single breath it takes to fall asleep, it deserted him, was suddenly gone, and in its place the room was filled with the cold, acrid smell of goat stall.
Grenouille was terrified. What happens, he thought, if the scent, once I possess it… what happens if it runs out? It’s not the same as it is in your memory, where all scents are indestructible. The real thing gets used up in this world. It’s transient. And by the time it has been used up, the source I took it from will no longer exist. And I will be as naked as before and will have to get along with surrogates, just like before. No, it will be even worse than before! For in the meantime I will have known it and possessed it, my own splendid scent, and I will not be able to forget it, because I never forget a scent. And for the rest of my life I will feed on it in my memory, just as I was feeding right now from the premonition of what I will possess… What do I need it for at all?