GRENOULLE TRAVELED by night. As he had done at the beginning of his journeys, he steered clear of cities, avoided highways, lay down to sleep at daybreak, arose in the evening, and walked on. He fed on whatever he found on the way: grasses, mushrooms, flowers, dead birds, worms. He marched through the Provence; south of Orange he crossed the Rhone in a stolen boat, followed the Ardeche deep into the Cevennes and then the Allier northwards.
In the Auvergne he drew close to the Plomb du Cantal. He saw it lying to the west, huge and silver gray in the moonlight, and he smelled the cool wind that came from it. But he felt no urge to visit it. He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experience-life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all. He wanted to go to Paris and die. That was what he wanted.
From time to time he reached in his pocket and closed his hand around the little glass flacon of his perfume. The bottle was still almost full. He had used only a drop of it for his performance in Grasse. There was enough left to enslave the whole world. If he wanted, he could be feted in Paris, not by tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands of people; or could walk out to Versailles and have the king kiss his feet; write the pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new Messiah; be anointed in Notre-Dame as Supreme Emperor before kings and emperors, or even as God come to earth-if there was such a thing as God having Himself anointed...
He could do all that, if only he wanted to. He possessed the power. He held it in his hand. A power stronger than the power of money or the power of terror or the power of death: the invincible power to command the love of mankind. There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself. And though his perfume might allow him to appear before the world as a god-if he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume.
The hand that had grasped the flacon was fragrant with a faint scent, and when he put it to his nose and sniffed, he grew wistful and forgot to walk on and stood there smelling. No one knows how good this perfume really is, he thought. No one knows how well made it is. Other people are merely conquered by its effect, don’t even know that it’s a perfume that’s working on them, enslaving them. The only one who has ever recognized it for its true beauty is me, because I created it myself. And at the same time, I’m the only one that it cannot enslave. I am the only person for whom it is meaningless.
And on another occasion-he was already in Burgundy: When I was standing there at the wall below the garden where the redheaded girl was playing and her scent came floating down to me ... or, better, the promise of her scent, for the scent she would carry later did not even exist yet-maybe what I felt that day is like what the people on the parade grounds felt when I flooded them with my perfume... ? But then he cast the thought aside: No, it was something else. Because I knew that I desired the scent, not the girl. But those people believed that they desired me, and what they really desired remained a mystery to them.
Then he thought no more, for thinking was not his strong point, and then, too, he was already in the Orleanais.
He crossed the Loire at Sully. The next day he had the odor of Paris in his nose. On June 25, 1766, at six in the morning, he entered the city via the rue Saint-Jacques.
It turned out to be a hot day, the hottest of the year thus far. The thousands of odors and stenches oozed out as if from thousands of festering boils. Not a breeze stirred. The vegetables in the market stalls shriveled up. Meat and fish rotted. Tainted air hung in the narrow streets. Even the river seemed to have stopped flowing, to have stagnated. It stank. It was a day like the one on which Grenouille was born.
He walked across the Pont-Neuf to the right bank, and then down to Les Halles and the Cimetiere des Innocents. He sat down in the arcades of the charnel house bordering the rue aux Fers. Before him lay the cemetery grounds like a cratered battlefield, burrowed and ditched and trenched with graves, sown wit............