AND SO IT WENT, day in day out, week in week out, month in month out. So it went for seven long years.

Meanwhile war raged in the world outside, a world war. Men fought in Silesia and Saxony, in Hanover and the Low Countries, in Bohemia and Pomerania. The king’s troops died in Hesse and Westphalia, on the Balearic Islands, in India, on the Mississippi and in Canada, if they had not already succumbed to typhoid on the journey. The war robbed a million people of their lives, France of its colonial empire, and all the warring nations of so much money that they finally decided, with heavy hearts, to end it.

One winter during this period, Grenouille almost froze to death, without ever noticing it. For five days he lay in his purple salon, and when he aw............