WHEN HE again came to, he was lying in Laure Richis’s bed. The reliquary of clothes and hair had been removed. A candle was burning on the night table. The window was ajar, and he could hear the exultation of the town’s revels in the distance. An-toine Richis was sitting on a footstool beside the bed watching him. He had placed Grenouille’s hand in his own and was stroking it.

Even before he opened his eyes, Grenouille had checked the atmosphere. Everything was quiet within him. There was no more boiling or bursting. His soul was again dominated as usual by cold night, just what he needed for a frosty and clear conscious mind to be directed to the outside world: there he smelled his perfume. It had changed. Its peaks had leveled off so that the core of Laure’s scent emerged more splendidly than ever-a mild, dark, glowing fire. He felt secure. He knew that he was unassailable for a few hours yet, and he opened his eyes.

Richis’s gaze rested on him. An infinite benevolence lay in that gaze: tenderness, compassion, the empty, fatuous profundity of a lover.

 He smiled, pressed Grenouille’s hand more tightly, and said, “It will all turn out all right. The magistrate has overturned the verdict. All the witnesses have recanted. You are free. You can do whatever you want. But I would like you to stay here with me. I have lost a daughter, but I want to gain you as my son. You’re very much like her. You are beautiful like her, your hair, your mouth, your hand ... I have been holding your hand all this time, your hand is like hers. And when I look into your eyes, it’s as if she were looking at me. You are her brother, and I want you to become my son, my friend, my pride and joy, my heir. Are your parents still alive?”

Grenouille shook his head, and Richis’s face turned beet red for joy. “Then will you be my son?” he stammered, jumping up from his stool to sit on the edge of the bed and clasp Grenouille’s other hand as well. “Will you? Will you? Will you have me for a father?-Don’t say anything! Don’t speak! You are still too weak to talk. Just nod”

Grenouille nodded. And joy erupted from Richis’s every pore like scarlet sweat, and he bent down to Grenouille and kissed him on the mouth.

“Sleep now, my dear son!” he said, standing back up again. “I will keep watch over you until you have fallen asleep.” And after he had observed him in mute bliss for a long time: “You have made me very, very happy.”

Grenouille pulled the corners of his mouth apart, the way he had noticed people do when they smile. Then he closed his eyes. He waited a while before letting his respiration grow easy and deep like a sleeper’s. He could feel Richis’s loving gaze on his face. At one point he felt Richis bending forward again to kiss him, but then refraining for fear of waking him. Finally the candle was blown out, and Richis slipped on tiptoe from the room.

Grenouille lay there until he could no longer hear a sound in the house or the town. When he got up, it was already dawn. He dressed and stole away, softly down the hall, softly down the stairs, and through the salon out onto the terrace.

From there you could see over the city wall, out across the valley surrounding Grasse-in clear weather probably as far as the sea. A light fog, or better a haze, hung now over the fields, and the odors that came from them-grass, broom, and rose-seemed washed clean, comfortably plain and simple. Grenouille crossed the garden and climbed over the wall.

Out on the parade grounds he had to fight his way through human effluvia before he reached open country. The whole area and the slopes looked like a gigantic, debauched army camp. Drunken forms by the thousands lay all about, exhausted by the dissipations of their nocturnal festivities, many of them naked, many half exposed, half covered by their clothes, which they had used as a sort of blanket to creep under. It stank of sour wine, of brandy, of sweat and piss, of baby shit and charred meat. The camp-fires where they had roasted, drunk, and danced were still smoking here and there. Now and then a murmur or a snigger would gurgle up from the thousands of snores. It was possible that a few people were still awake, guzzling away the last scraps of consciousness from their brains. But no one saw Grenouille, who carefully but quickly climbed over the scattered bodies as if moving across a swamp. And those who saw him did not recognize him. He no longer had any scent. The miracle was over.

Once he had crossed the grounds, he did not take the road toward Grenoble, nor the one ............