perfume

Chapter 5

The warehouse's spruce plank walls, when heated, emitted the scent of resin fragments.

Grenouille sat on the woodpile, legs dangling, back against the warehouse wall, eyes closed in repose, not moving an inch.

He didn't move. He saw nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing. He only smelled the scent of the wood, as if covered by a hat.

He was enveloped in the fragrance. He drank in the aroma, submerged in it, every pore of his body permeated with it.

He became like a piece of wood, like a puppet. He lay on the water's edge like Pinocchio, as if dead, for a considerable time, perhaps...

It took him half an hour to finally manage to squeeze out the word "wood." It was as if he were piling wood onto his ears, as if...

The wood was already stuffed up his neck, as if his stomach, throat, and nose were filled with wood, thus making him...

The words were vomited out. This restored him to consciousness and saved his life, shortly before, the pile of wood and its...

The aroma still made him feel suffocated. He struggled to move, sliding down the pile of wood, his steps numb.

He walked away, his legs trembling. Days later, he still couldn't forget that intense olfactory experience; whenever he suddenly recalled it…

When he brought this up, he muttered to himself like a spell, "Wood, wood."

That's how he learned to speak. For those words representing odorless substances, that is, those abstract concepts, first...

First, the concepts of ethics and morality were the most difficult for him to learn. He couldn't remember these words and often confused them.

Even as an adult, I still dislike using these words and often misuse them: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, respect.

He didn't understand what words like "thank you" and "thank you" meant, and he would never be able to figure them out.

On the other hand, Grenouille had collected many concepts related to smell in his mind, and soon, using common language...

This was insufficient to describe these things. Before long, he could not only smell the scent of wood, but also...

Various types of wood, including oak, pine, elm, pear wood, old wood, new wood, rotten wood, and moldy wood.

The smell of wood, moss-covered wood, even individual pieces, chips, and shavings—this wood, used by others...

Even the eyes could hardly distinguish them, but he could clearly differentiate them by smell. The same was true for other things.

It seems so. The white drink that Mrs. Galar gave to the toddler she was caring for every morning was commonly called milk.

However, according to Grenouille's perception, the smell varied from day to day; rather, it was determined by its temperature, indicating which cow it belonged to.

The quality of milk varies depending on factors such as what feed the cow ate and how much milk fat was left in the milk…

Composed of hundreds of individual scents, colorful and constantly changing and forming new mixtures every minute or even every second.

The unit of smell, such as "smoke from fire," also only has the name "smoke"...land, place, air,

Each step, each breath, adds another scent and thus a different character, yet they are still simply using that...

To express in three simple words all these absurd discords between the richness of the world's scents and the poverty of language.

This led Grenouille to question the meaning of language; and he only did so when forced to interact with others.

Using the language with difficulty.

By the age of six, Grenouille had completely mastered his surroundings through his sense of smell. (At Madame Gallard's house...)

Is there anything, nowhere, no person, no stone, on the north side of Charuna Street, that is not there?

Each tree. Which shrub or which fence, no small patch of land, he couldn't recognize or rediscover through his sense of smell.

It's not something you can remember after just one sniff. He has collected ten thousand, even a hundred thousand unique scents, and

He could clearly distinguish them and freely control them. When he smelled these scents again, he not only...

And when he recalled those scents, he actually smelled them again. Not only that, he could even detect them through his own...

Imagine mastering the technique of recombination between scents, creating scents that don't exist in reality. He seemed to understand...

Through self-study, he mastered a vast vocabulary of scents, which enabled him to freely create numerous new scent-related sentences.

Come on—and the reason he can do this is precisely because other children use the vocabulary that others have painstakingly instilled in them, starting with...

He was that age when he first stammered out very imperfect, traditional sentences describing the world. Perhaps his genius...

It can be compared to a musical prodigy who can hear the individual letters of a note in melody and harmony.

After that, he composed entirely new melodies and harmonies—of course, they were different; the letters for scent were more prominent than those for liking.

Much larger and quite different; another difference is that the child prodigy Grenouille's creative activities were only in his

What he was doing inside his mind was something no one but himself could perceive.

From his appearance, he always seemed introverted. He most enjoyed walking alone through the northern suburbs of Saint-Antoine.

He walked through tea plantations and vineyards, across meadows. Sometimes he wouldn't come home at night, disappearing several times in a row. It was time to punish him with a stick.

He always endured the punishment without showing any pain on his face. Solitary confinement, deprivation of food, and punitive labor...

Nothing could change his behavior. He attended the seminary at Notre-Dame Basilica in Bonsoc for a year and a half on and off, but...

The effect was obvious. He learned some spelling and how to write his own name, but nothing else.

The teacher thought he was intellectually challenged.

On the contrary, Mrs. Galar noticed that he had certain talents and characteristics, even if they were not mentioned

It was supernatural and very unusual; for example, he was never afraid of the dark and night like a child, at any time.

Other children could ask him to go to the basement to get something, but other kids wouldn't dare go down even if they had just a lamp.

He would go; or, people could call him to the warehouse to fetch wood in the pitch black, but he never lit a lamp.

But he can recognize the road, immediately get what he needs, never take the wrong thing, and never stumble or knock over anything.

What's even more peculiar is that he could create solid walls and closed systems using paper, cloth, wood, and even paper.

Mrs. Galar had already confirmed his ability to see through the door. He knew what was inside the bedroom without even stepping inside.

He knew how many children were inside, and which children they were. Even before the cauliflower was cut, he already knew that Riley was hiding a caterpillar.

On one occasion, Madame Gallard hid the money (she moved it to a different place), but she could no longer find it. Grenouille even...

Without searching for even a second, he pointed to a spot behind the fireplace mantle, and sure enough, there it was! He could even...

Looking to the future: being able to foretell someone's arrival long before it happens, or when there isn't a single cloud in the sky.

He could accurately predict the arrival of thunderstorms. Of course, he didn't see all of this; he didn't use his eyes.

He didn't see it, but rather smelled it with his increasingly sensitive and precise nose: the caterpillars in the cauliflower, behind the beam.

Money, people a few walls away and a few streets away—these things were irrelevant to Mrs. Galar, even to her father.

She never dreamed that hitting her with a fire poker wouldn't damage her sense of smell. She firmly believed...

This boy—though intellectually disabled—must have a second set of visual organs. Because she knew that there were two sets of visual organs.

She thought such a person would bring misfortune and death, and therefore found him extremely terrifying. When she thought about living in the same building as him...

Inside the house, this person possessed a special ability to see through the walls and beams to find money hidden very well. At that moment, she...

She found it even more terrifying and unbearable. After discovering that Grenouille possessed this terrible ability, she tried to find a way...

They wanted to get rid of him. Later, the opportunity finally arrived; around the time Grenouille turned eight, the Saint-Mérie Abbey...

Without giving any reason, Mrs. Galar stopped paying for Grenouille's upbringing. She did not demand it back. Out of courtesy,

She waited another week, but the money still hadn't arrived, so she took the boy's hand and led him into the city.

Madame Gallard knew a tanner named Grimaldi who lived on Rue de Motlery, not far from the river.

He desperately needed young labor—not formal apprentices or workers, but cheap laborers.

Some jobs in this industry involve scraping meat off rotten animal hides, mixing toxic throat lozenges and dyes, and refining highly corrosive substances.

The plant material—which is life-threatening to humans—is something such a responsible master would try his best not to call his apprentice "Master".

Instead of providing such assistance, the assistants exploit unemployed scumbags, homeless people, or unsupervised children who, once they...

No one paid attention to the problem. Madame Gallar, of course, knew that Grenouille was in the tannery in Grimma, following a...

Most people would have estimated her chances of survival to be extremely slim. But she wasn't a sentimental woman. She had already fulfilled her responsibilities.

The caregiving relationship has ended. What happens to the child in the future is none of her concern. If he survives...

That is of course

Well, if he dies, that's fine too—the key is, everything makes sense. She called Grimaldi.

He wrote a statement acknowledging the boy's return, and then issued a receipt for a 15-franc processing fee before setting off again.

Back home on Rue de Luna, she felt no remorse whatsoever. On the contrary, she believed herself to be...

Not only was what I did reasonable, but it was also incredibly kind and righteous, because I left behind a child for whom no one was willing to pay child support.

This will inevitably become a burden on other children, and even on herself, which could potentially jeopardize her future.

The future of other children, even jeopardizing one's own future, means a secure, solitary death, and such...

Death is the only thing she still hopes for in this life.

Since our account of Mrs. Galar's background ends here, and she will not be mentioned again later, therefore

We would like to describe her later years in a few sentences. Although Madame Galar's spirit had died in childhood,

Unfortunately, she lived to a very old age. In 1782, when she was nearly seventy, she gave up her purchase...

He had planned to buy a pension and was sitting in his little house waiting to die. But death came late.

An event that no one in the world could have predicted and that had never happened before in the country arrived: revolution, which is the beginning of all social change.

A radical transformation of society, morality, and relationships that transcend all categories. Initially, this revolution was significant for Mrs. Galar.

Her experiences had no impact. But later—when she was nearly eighty—it is said that something like this suddenly happened.

Event: Her pensioner was forced into exile, his property was confiscated, and his assets were auctioned off to a pants factory.

The factory owner. This change doesn't yet appear to have any disastrous impact on Mrs. Galar, because the trouser factory...

The factory owner continued to pay her pension on time. But then the hard times finally came; she no longer received coins, but instead...

Receiving banknotes printed from a small piece of paper marked the beginning of her arduous life.

Two years later, her pension wasn't even enough to buy her a box of matches. Mrs. Galar was forced to sell her house, but the house...

The price was pitifully low because, at that time, besides her, suddenly thousands of other people also had to sell their belongings.