Maison vide dans l'abîme

Chapitre 23

Meanwhile, outwardly, Grenouille was also asleep on his coarse wool blanket. He slept as soundly as inwardly...

Both were as heavy as Grenouille, for extraordinary achievements and indulgence had exhausted them both; after all, they were one and the same.

people.

But in any case, when he woke up, he wasn't in the purple salon of his purple palace, nor was he lying down...

Beyond the seven stone walls, there was not the spring-like fragrance of his soul, but rather him alone in the cave at the end of the tunnel.

Inside the cave, on the hard, dark ground, he was hungry and thirsty, so uncomfortable he felt nauseous, like someone severely ill with alcoholism.

The drunkard felt cold and pained after a night of heavy drinking. He crawled on the ground out of the pit.

It was sometime of day outside, mostly nightfall or just before dawn, but even in the middle of the night, the stars...

The brightness of the light stung his eyes just as much as it had outside. He felt there was a lot of dust in the air, and the smell was strong; his lungs felt heavy from inhaling it.

They seemed to be burning. The surrounding area was hard; he was next to rocks. Even the mildest scents were stimulating him.

The nose, no longer accustomed to the world, is like Grenouille, a tick, now exposed and molted, like a naked body in the sea.

As sensitive as a swimming shrimp.

He walked to the flowing water and licked it from the stone wall, doing so for one or two hours at a time. It was torture, a reality of the world.

The burning sensation on his skin seemed endless. He tore off a few pieces of moss from the rock, stuffed them into his mouth, and swallowed.

Squat down, while pulling on the rail, Li Yi called out, "Whatever you need to do, do it quickly!" HAN is a soft, fleshy little animal, and...

A flock of eagles circled overhead, and he ran as if being chased into his cave, until he found a rough blanket lying there.

At the end of the tunnel. Here, he could finally rest easy again.

He leaned back against the pebbles, stretching out his legs and waiting. He had to keep his body still.

Absolute stillness descended; he slowly controlled his breathing. His agitated heart pounded more steadily, the waves of emotion within him crashing.

The loneliness had subsided. Suddenly, it washed over him like a black mirror. He closed his eyes. A gaze swept into his heart.

The dark door had opened, and he stepped inside. The next performance in Grenouille's mind had begun.

And so, day after day, week after week, month after month passed. And so, it all came to an end.

Seven years in total.

During this period, war broke out in the outside world, and it was a world war. In Silesia and Saxony, in

In Hanover and Belgium, in Bohemia and Pomerania, people were fighting each other. The king's army was not on its way.

To die of typhoid fever means to die in Hesse, Westphalia, the Balearic Islands, India, the Mississippi River region, and...

Canada. The war claimed a million lives, cost the French king his colonies, and caused losses to all the participating nations.

They spent so much money that they finally made the painful decision to end the war.

During this period, Grenouille nearly froze to death one winter without anyone noticing. He was lying in the Purple Salon at the time.

After five days, when he awoke in the tunnel, he was so cold he could barely move. He immediately closed his eyes, preparing to...

He died in his sleep. But then the climate changed drastically, and he was melted away, thus saving him.

Once, the snow piled up very high. He devised a plan to dig up lichen from the snowdrifts and use the frozen fabric to stave off hunger.

Once, a dead crow lay at the entrance of its burrow. He ate it. This was his understanding of the outside world over seven years.

Events that occur in the world. In other circumstances, he lives only in the mountains, only in the mental kingdom he created for himself.

If it weren't for a disaster that drove him out of the mountains and pushed him back into the world, he would probably have stayed...

He stayed there until his death, because he lacked no one.

Section 7

This disaster was not an earthquake, not a forest fire, not a landslide, not a tunnel collapse. It was not at all...

It was not an external disaster, but a psychological one, which made it all the more painful, because it blocked Grenouille's path.

The escape route that Jehovah preferred. It happened while he slept, or rather, in his dream; more precisely,

It was in his imagined dream.

He was asleep on a sofa in the purple salon. Empty bottles surrounded him. He had drunk too much.

Finally, he drank two bottles of the Red-Haired Girl's Fragrance. This was probably too much, because although his sleep was as deep as death...

This time, it wasn't that I didn't dream at all, but rather that bizarre, ghostly dreams permeated my entire sleep. These dreams were very clear...

It was clearly part of the scent. At first, they merely drifted past Grenouille's nose with faint trails, then they transformed...

It thickened, like clouds. The situation was akin to him standing in a swamp, where mist was rising. The mist slowly...

He rose higher and higher. Grenouille was soon completely enveloped in fog, soaked through, and almost invisible between the fog clouds.

The air of freedom. He must inhale this mist to avoid suffocating. And the mist, as mentioned, is a kind of air.

The smell. Grenouille knew what it was. The mist was his own smell. Grenouille's smell was...

It's fog.

The terrible truth is that, although Grenouille knows the smell is his, he cannot smell it.

He completely disappeared into his own heart, unable to smell his own scent for the sake of everything in the world.

When he realized this, he screamed as if he were being burned alive. His screams pierced the purple salon.

The walls, the palace walls, rose from his heart, crossing ditches, swamps, and deserts, like a raging fire sweeping across his soul.

The night view, shrieked from his mouth, traveled through the winding tunnels, and reached the world, far beyond Saint-Flouriel.

The high plateau seemed to be calling out from the mountains. Grenouille was awakened by his own cry, and upon waking, he looked around at himself.

He flailed wildly, as if trying to drive away the suffocating, odorless mist. He was terrified, completely consumed by the horror of death.

His body trembled. If his shouts couldn't dispel the fog, he himself would drown—a terrible death.

The thought sent chills down his spine. He sat trembling, trying to catch his chaotic, fearful thoughts.

He was perfectly clear about this: he would change his life, even if only because he didn't want to do that terrible thing again.

He couldn't bear to have that dream again.

He slung the rough blanket over his shoulders and climbed out of the hole. It was morning outside, a late February morning. Sunlight.

Brilliant. The earth exudes the scent of damp rocks. The smell of moss and water. A hint of anemone fragrance already lingers in the air.

He crouched on the ground in front of the cave. He breathed in the fresh air. He recalled the fog he had escaped and still felt...

A chill ran down his spine; as he felt warmth on his back, he shivered with comfort. This external world still existed.

Even a vanishing point would be good. If he didn't find the world again at the tunnel exit, then...

The horror is unimaginable! If there were no light, no smell, nothing at all—inside and out, everywhere there was only…

This terrifying fog...

The initial fear gradually subsided. His grip loosened, and Grenouille began to feel much safer. Around noon,

He regained his composure. He placed the index and middle fingers of his left hand under his nose, breathing through them. He inhaled...

The air was damp and fragrant with anemones in spring. He couldn't smell anything on his fingers; he turned his hand over.

He sniffed his palm. He felt the warmth of his hand, but smelled nothing. He tossed the tattered sleeve of his shirt high into the air.

He buried his nose in the crook of his nose. He knew that was where everyone exuded their scent. But he found nothing.

He smelled it. Under his armpits, on his feet. He couldn't smell anything. He bent down as low as he could to sniff his genitals, but nothing.

He smelled it. It was ridiculous; he, Grenouille, could smell anyone else miles away, yet...

He could smell the odor of his own lower body not far away! Despite this, he didn't panic, but calmly considered the situation.

He himself said the following: "I am not without smell, for everything has smell. More precisely: I..."

I can't smell my own scent because I've been smelling my own scent every day since I was born, therefore my nose has...

I've become numb. If only I could separate my scent, or at least a portion of it, from myself, for a period of time.

Then I'll go back to it, and then I'll be able to smell it very well—that is, me.

He put down the rough blanket and took off his clothes, or rather, the tattered rags and scraps that remained on his original clothes.

He wore these clothes for seven years without ever taking them off. They naturally absorbed his scent. He threw them into the cave.

He immediately walked away from the pile of waste at the entrance. Then, for the first time in seven years, he climbed back to the summit. There,

He stood in the same spot where he had stood when he arrived, nose to the west, letting the wind howl around his naked body.

And so it went. His intention was to blow away all his scent, using the westerly winds as much as possible—that is, the sea and…

The scent of damp grass—to fill the air, to make that scent surpass the scent of his own body, he hoped that it would thus fill him.

—Grenouille—and his clothes created a scent difference that allowed him to perceive it clearly.

To minimize his own scent, he bent forward, stretching his neck as far as possible into the wind.

He stretched his arms back. He looked exactly like a swimmer about to dive into the water.

For hours on end, he maintained this utterly ridiculous posture, even though the sunlight was still weak.

His skin, which had long been unaccustomed to the light and was as white as a maggot, had been tanned as red as a lobster. He returned to the cave in the evening.

He had seen the pile of clothes from afar. A few meters away, he covered his nose, until he brought it almost touching his face.

He only released his hand when he touched the clothes. He performed the smell test he had learned from Baldini, taking a deep breath.

Then he released the airflow in stages. To capture the scent, he made a bell shape with both hands above the clothing.

He then inserted his nose like a bell tongue. He tried everything he could to get his scent out of his clothes.

I could smell it, but the clothes didn't have that scent. It's definitely not in there. There are a thousand other scents in there.

The smell of stones, sand, moss, resin, and crow's blood—even the sausages he bought near Sully a few years ago.

The scent is still clearly audible. There's also a notebook about smelling things that I've kept for the past seven or eight years inside the clothes.

The smell. They had no scent of his own, no scent of the person who had been wearing those clothes all along.

odor.