WHEN THE House of Giuseppe Baldini collapsed, Grenouille was already on the road to Orleans. He had left the enveloping haze of the city behind him; and with every step he took away from it, the air about him grew clearer, purer, and cleaner. It became thinner as well. Gone was the roiling of hundreds, thousands of changing odors at every pace; instead, the few odors there were-of the sandy road, meadows, the earth, plants, water-extended across the countryside in long currents, swelling slowly, abating slowly, with hardly an abrupt break.

For Grenouille, this simplicity seemed a deliverance. The leisurely odors coaxed his nose. For the first time in his life he did not have to prepare himself to catch the scent of something new, unexpected, hostile -or to lose a pleasant smell-with every breath. For the first time he could almost breathe freely, did not constantly have to be on the olfactory lookout. We say “almost,” for of course nothing ever passed truly freely through Grenouille’s nose. Even when there was not the least reason for it, he was always alert to, always wary of everything that came from outside and had to be let inside. His whole life long, even in those few moments when he had experienced some inkling of satisfaction, contentment, and perhaps even happiness, he had preferred exhaling to inhaling-just as he had begun life not with a hopeful gasp for air but with a bloodcurdling scream. But except for that one proviso, which for him was simply a constitutional limitation, the farther Grenouille got from Paris, the better he felt, the more easily he breathed, the lighter his step, until he even managed sporadically to carry himself erect, so that when seen from a distance he looked almost like an ordinary itinerant journeyman, like a perfectly normal human being.

Most liberating for him was the fact that other people were so far away. More people lived more densely packed in Paris than in any other city in the world. Six, seven hundred thousand people lived in Paris. Its streets and squares teemed with them, and the houses were crammed full of them from cellars to attics. There was hardly a corner of Paris that was not paralyzed with people, not a stone, not a patch of earth that did not reek of humans.

As he began to withdraw from them, it became clear to Grenouille for the first time that for eighteen years their compacted human effluvium had oppressed him like air heavy with an imminent thunderstorm. Until now he had thought that it was the world in general he wanted to squirm away from. But it was not the world, it was the people in it. You could live, so it seemed, in this world, in this world devoid of humanity.

On the third day of his journey he found himself under the influence of the olfactory gravity of Orleans. Long before any visible sign indicated that he was in the vicinity of a city, Grenouille sensed a condensation of human stuff in the air and, reversing his original plan, decided to avoid Orleans. He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon by the sultry climate of humans. He circled the city in a giant arc, came upon the Loire at Chateauneuf, and crossed it at Sully. His sausage lasted that far. He bought himself a new one and, leaving the river behind, pushed on to the interior.

He now avoided not just cities, but villages as well. He was almost intoxicated by air that grew ever more rarefied, ever more devoid of humankind. He would approach a settlement or some isolated farm only to get new supplies, buying his bread and disappearing again into the woods. After a few weeks even those few travelers he met on out-of-the-way paths proved too much for him; he could no longer bear the conce............