WHEREAS GRENOUILLE had needed seven years for the first stage of his journey through France, he put the second behind him in less than seven days. He no longer avoided busy roads and cities, he made no detours. He had an odor, he had money, he had self-confidence, and he had no time to lose.
By evening of the day he left Montpellier, he had arrived at Le Grau-du-Roi, a small harbor town southwest of Aigues-Mortes, where he boarded a merchant ship for Marseille. In Marseille he did not even leave the harbor, but immediately sought out a ship that brought him farther along the coast to the east. Two days later he was in Toulon, in three more in Cannes. The rest of the way he traveled on foot. He followed a back road that led up into the hills, northward into the interior.
Two hours later he was standing on a rise and before him was spread a valley several miles wide, a kind of basin in the landscape-its surrounding rim made up of gently rising hills and a ridge of steep mountains, its broad bowl covered with fields, gardens, and olive groves. The basin had its own special, intimate climate. Although the sea was so near that one could see it from the tops of the hills, there was nothing maritime, nothing salty and sandy, nothing expansive about this climate; instead, it possessed a secluded tranquillity as if you were many days’ journey distant from the coast. And although to the north the high mountains were covered with snow that would remain for a good while yet, it was not in the least raw or barren and no cold wind blew. Spring was further advanced than in Montpellier. A mild haze lay like a glass bell over the fields. Apricot and almond trees were in bloom, and the warm air was infused with the scent of jonquils.
At the other end of the wide basin, perhaps two miles off, a town lay among-or better, clung to-the rising mountains. From a distance it did not make a particularly grand impression. There was no mighty cathedral towering above the houses, just a little stump of a church steeple, no commanding fortress, no magnificent edifice of note. The walls appeared anything but defiant-here and there the houses spilled out from their limits, especially in the direction of the plain, lending the outskirts a somewhat disheveled look. It was as if the place had been overrun and then retaken so often that it was weary of offering serious resistance to any future intruders- not out of weakness, but out of indolence, or maybe even out of a sense of its own strength. It looked as if it had no need to flaunt itself. It reigned above the fragrant basin at its feet, and that seemed to suffice.
This equally homely and self-confident place was the town of Grasse, for decades now the uncontested center for production of and commerce in scents, perfumes, soaps, and oils. Giuseppe Baldini had always uttered the name with enraptured delight. The town was the Rome of scents, the promised land of perfumes, and the man who had not earned his spurs here did not rightfully bear the title of perfumer.
Grenouille gazed very coolly at the town of Grasse. He was not seeking the promised land of perfumers, and his heart did not leap at the sight of this small town clinging to the far slopes. He had come because he knew that he could learn about several techniques for production of scent there better than elsewhere. And he wanted to acquire them, for he needed them for his own purposes. He pulled the flacon with his perfume from his pocket, dabbed himself lightly, and continued on his way. An hour and a half later, around noon, he was in Grasse.
He ate at an inn near the top of the town, on the place aux Aires, The square was divided lengthwise by a brook where tanners washed their hides and afterwards spread them out to dry. The odor was so pungent that many a guest lost his appetite for his meal. But not Grenouille. It was a familiar odor to him; it gave him a sense of security. In every city he always sought out the tanning district first. And then, emerging from that region of stench to explore the other parts of the place, he no longer felt a stranger.
He spent all that afternoon wandering about the town. It was unbelievably filthy, despite-or perhaps directly because of-all the water that gushed from springs and wells, gurgling down through the town in unchanneled rivulets and brooks, undermining the streets or flooding them with muck. In some neighborhoods the houses stood so close together that only a yard-wide space was left for passageways and stairs, forcing pedestrians to jostle one another as they waded through the mire. And even in the squares and along the few broader streets, vehicles could hardly get out of each other’s way.
Nevertheless, however filthy, cramped, and slovenly, the town was bursting with the bustle of commerce. During his tour, Grenouille spotted no less than seven soapworks, a dozen master perfumers and glovers, countless small distilleries, pomade studios, and spice shops, and finally some seven wholesalers in scents.
These were in fact merchants who completely controlled the wholesale supply of scent. One would hardly know it by their houses. The facades to the street looked modestly middle class. But what was stored behind them, in warehouses and in gigantic cellars, in kegs of oil, in stacks of finest lavender soaps, in demijohns of floral colognes, wines, alcohols, in bales of scented leather, in sacks and chests and crates stuffed with spices-GrenouilSe smelled out every detail through the thickest walls-these were riches beyond those of princes. And when he smelled his way more penetratingly through the prosaic shops and storerooms fronting the streets, he discovered that at the rear of these provincial family homes were buildings of the most luxurious sort. Around small but exquisite gardens, where oleander and palm trees flourished and fountains bordered by ornamental flowers leapt, extended the actual residential wings, usually built in a U-shape toward the south: on the upper floors, bedchambers drenched in sunlight, the walls covered with silk; on the ground floor wainscoted salons and dining rooms, sometimes with terraces built out into the open air, where, just as Baldini had said, people ate from porcelain with golden cutlery. The gentlemen who lived behind these modest sham facades reeked of gold and power, of carefully secured riches, and they reeked of it more strongly than anything Grenouille had smelled thus far on his journey through the provinces.
He stopped and stood for a good while in front of one of these camouflaged palazzi. The house was at the beginning of the rue Droite, a main artery that traversed the whole length of the city, from west to east. It was nothing extraordinary to look at, perhaps the front was a little wider and ampler than its neighbors’, but certainly not imposing. At the gateway stood a wagon from which kegs were being unloaded down a ramp. A second vehicle stood waiting. A man with some papers went into the office, came back out with another man, both of them disappeared through the gateway. Grenouille stood on the opposite side of the street and watched the comings and goings. He was not interested in what was happening. And yet he stood there. Something else was holding him fast.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on the odors that came floating to him from the building across the way. There were the odors of the kegs, vinegar and wine, then the hundredfold heavy odors of the warehouse, then the odors of wealth that the walls exuded like a fine golden sweat, and finally the odors of a garden that had to lie on the far side of the building. It was............