THAT POLE, the point of the kingdom most distant from humankind, was located in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, about five days’ journey south of Clermont, on the peak of a six-thousand-foot-high volcano named Plomb du Cantal.

The mountain consisted of a giant cone of blue-gray rock and was surrounded by an endless, barren highland studded with a few trees charred by fire and overgrown with gray moss and gray brush, out of which here and there brown boulders jutted up like rotten teeth. Even by light of day, the region was so dismal and dreary that the poorest shepherd in this poverty-stricken province would not have driven his animals here. And by night, by the bleaching light of the moon, it was such a godforsaken wilderness that it seemed not of this world. Even Lebrun, the bandit of the Auvergne, though pursued from all sides, had preferred to fight his way through to the Cevennes and there be captured, drawn, and quartered rather than to hide out on the Plomb du Cantal, where certainly no one would have sought or found him, but where likewise he would certainly have died a solitary, living death that had seemed to him worse still. For miles around the mountain, there lived not one human being, nor even a respectable mammal-at best a few bats and a couple of beetles and adders. No one had scaled the peak for decades.

Grenouille reached the mountain one August night in the year 1756. As dawn broke, he was standing on the peak. He did not yet know that his journey was at an end. He thought that this was only a stopping place on the way to ever purer air, and he turned full circle and let his nose move across the vast panorama of the volcanic wilderness: to the east, where the broad high plain of Saint-Flour and the marshes of the Riou River lay; to the north, to the region from which he had come and where he had wandered for days through pitted limestone mountains; to the west, from where the soft wind of morning brought him nothing but the smells of stone and tough grass; finally to the south, where the foothills of the Plomb stretched for miles to the dark gorges of the Truyere. Everywhere, in every direction, humanity lay equally remote from him, and a step in any direction would have meant ............