Король расхитителей гробниц - Глава 4
The crowd rushed towards the outskirts of Saint-Antoine, heading east along the Seine, out of the city, walking and running, running and running.
Arrive at Via Charuna, at the end of the street, near the Madeleine de Trenal Abbey, he...
I know the address of someone named Mrs. Galar. For money, Mrs. Galar is available to children of any age and race.
The child accepted. Thalie handed the constantly crying child over to her, paid a year's worth of child support in advance, and then fled back to the city.
He returned to the monastery, immediately took off his clothes as if throwing away something dirty, then washed himself from head to toe, and ran back to his bedchamber.
He climbed into bed. On the bed, he made the sign of the cross many times, prayed for a long time, and finally drifted off to sleep peacefully.
Although Mrs. Galar was not yet thirty, she had already experienced much hardship. Her appearance seemed to contradict her true nature.
Their actual age is highly disproportionate, equivalent to two, three, or even a hundred times their actual age, resembling a mummy with the appearance of a young girl.
In her inner world, she was already dead. When she was a child, her father once beat her with a fire poker.
On her forehead, just above the bridge of her nose. From then on, she lost her sense of smell and her ability to sense temperature.
To the point of no passion. With this, tenderness and hatred, joy and despair, all have become foreign to her.
Later, a man slept with her, and she felt nothing; she was similarly numb when she gave birth. She was unmoved by death.
The child who died felt no sorrow, nor was she happy for the child who survived. She didn't move when her husband whipped her.
She was restless, and even when her husband died of cholera in the main palace hospital, she felt no relief. She had only two feelings:
When her monthly migraines struck, her mood would become slightly gloomy, but as the migraines gradually disappeared, her mood would...
She became slightly more cheerful. Besides that, the woman, who had been like a dead person, felt nothing at all.
On the other hand… or perhaps precisely because she had completely lost her emotional impulses, Mrs. Galar possessed a
She possessed an uncompromising sense of discipline and justice. She showed no favoritism towards the children entrusted to her care, nor did she mistreat any of them.
She only gave the baby three meals a day, never giving him even a tiny bit more. She changed the baby's diapers three times a day.
They wet their pants until they turned one year old. After they turned one, if any of them still wet their pants, they didn't get scolded, but instead got a slap.
She was punished by having to skip a meal. Half of her food expenses went to the children she was fostering, and the other half went to her, not a penny less.
When things are cheap, she doesn't increase her income; even in difficult times, she never spends an extra penny.
Even when it came to a matter of life and death, she wouldn't add a single penny. Because she felt that wouldn't be a worthwhile business deal. She needed the money.
She was incredibly precise with money. She wanted to buy a pension fund when she got old and save a lot of money so she could die comfortably.
At home, unlike her husband who died in the hospital. She was indifferent to her husband's death itself. But she was devoted to him.
The thought of thousands of strangers dying together was chilling. She longed to die alone, and for that, she needed...
All the profits came from the food expenses. In winter, three or four of the twenty-odd children fostered by her would die, but...
Her situation was always much better than most other private babysitting households, and far better than large national babysitting homes or
Church orphanages often have infant mortality rates as high as nine out of ten. Of course, many more will come to supplement them. (Bar)
Lebanon produces more than 10,000 new abandoned children, illegitimate children, and orphans every year. Therefore, some losses need not be taken to heart.
The orphanage run by Madame Gallard was a godsend for young Grenouille. Had he been elsewhere, he might have survived...
He wouldn't come down. But with this emotionless woman, he thrived. He had a strong physique. Like...
Someone like him, who can survive in a garbage dump, won't be so easily eliminated by the world. He can...
He survived on thin soup for several days in a row, and could even digest rotten vegetables and spoiled meat.
During that period, he contracted measles, dysentery, chickenpox, and cholera. He also fell into a six-meter-deep well, and his chest...
His body had been scalded with boiling water, but he survived. Although these injuries left him with scars, cuts, and sores, making his life...
His foot was slightly deformed, making him walk with a dragging gait, but he was alive. He was as tenacious as a resistant bacterium.
Qiang, as easily satisfied as a tick, perched quietly on the tree, resting on a tiny drop of blood it had acquired years before.
To sustain life. His body required very little nutrition and clothing. His soul needed nothing.
West. To be sheltered, cared for, and loved—or everything a child needs—for childhood.
For Grenouille, it was completely unnecessary. More precisely, we feel that his views were ingrained from the outset.
These things are not needed; their purpose is simply to survive.
His cries after he was born, the cries that echoed beneath the slaughtering platform—with these cries, he was transported back to the past.
In my memory, sending my mother to the guillotine was not an instinctive cry for sympathy or love. It was a result of careful consideration.
A carefully considered, almost deliberate cry. With this cry, the newborn decides to give up.
Love, but survival. In that situation, these two were irreconcilable, like fire and water; if the child demanded...
If he could have both, he would undoubtedly perish quickly and painfully. Of course, the child at that time could have chosen to open his eyes to him...
The second possibility is to remain silent, or to avoid this detour and choose the path directly from life to death.
He could thus save the world and himself from much misfortune. And for such a simple departure, a minimum is required.
Grenouille possessed a natural friendliness, which Grenouille lacked. He was a regrettable fellow from the start. He was driven by pure...
They chose life out of pure rebellion and sheer malice.
It's understandable that he doesn't make choices like an adult; adults, to varying degrees, need more and more...
He needs reason and experience to make choices among various options. However, his choices have the characteristics of plant growth.
Quality, like a discarded bean, is a choice: either sprout or remain a bean.
Or perhaps it's like that tick on the tree, whose only life provides is a continuous cycle of overwintering. The ugly little tick...
The louse molds its lead-gray body into a sphere to minimize the surface area it exposes to the outside world; it makes its skin...
Smooth and solid, the purpose is to prevent anything from flowing out or secreting from its body. Tick.
They make themselves extremely small and shabby, so as not to be seen or stepped on. This lonely tick gathers its attention.
The divine creature perched on its tree; it was blind, deaf, and mute, its only skill being its sniff, year after year, sniffing for miles.
It can smell the blood of passing animals, but it can never reach those animals on its own. The tick can...
Let its body fall onto the forest floor, crawl a few millimeters here or there on its six little legs, and lie down
It dies beneath the leaves, unnoticed by God, and there's no reason to feel sorry for it. But the tick is stubborn and persistent, which is quite endearing.
Disgusted, it crouched there, alive, waiting. It waited until a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity presented itself to deliver an animal...
It let it suckle under the tree. Losing all restraint, it fell down, clutching the animal's flesh tightly, stabbing...
Go in, bite in...
Grenouille was like that tick. He lived silently, waiting for his time to come. He gave his life to the world.
His world is nothing but his excrement; there is no smile, no cry, no brilliance in his eyes, and no fragrance of his own.
Any other woman would have driven the deformed child out of the newly opened house, but Mrs. Ralph did not. She couldn't smell the child...
The boy had no scent, and she did not expect to gain any spiritual inspiration from him, for her own soul had withered away.
In contrast, the other children immediately realized that Grenouille was extraordinary. From day one, they all felt...
The newcomer was frightening. They tried to avoid his bunk, and when they slept, they huddled close together as if...
The room grew cold. The younger children sometimes cried out at night; they felt a draft blowing through the bedroom.
Others dreamed that Grenouille took away some of the air they breathed. On one occasion, the older children banded together...
They wanted to suffocate him. They piled tattered clothes, blankets, and straw on his face, then weighed it down with bricks and tiles. The next day...
When Mrs. Galar dragged him out in the morning, he was covered in bruises, but he wasn't dead.
He tried several more times, but all attempts failed. As for strangling him to death with his own hands…
Or they could plug his mouth or nose, which would naturally be a more reliable way to kill him, but they didn't have that option.
Courage. They didn't want to touch him. They loathed him as much as they loathed a large spider, a spider that people...
I want to kill it myself.
He grew older, and they abandoned their murder plan. They probably realized that he couldn't be eliminated.
They avoided him, ran past him, and avoided contact with him under any circumstances. They didn't hate him.
She felt no jealousy or envy towards him. At home, Mrs. Galar sensed nothing amiss. Actually, the matter was quite simple.
They felt he was getting in their way. They couldn't smell him. They were afraid of him.
Objectively speaking, he wasn't frightening at all. He grew up to be unremarkable in appearance.
He was tall, but not strong; though ugly, he wasn't so ugly as to frighten others. He wasn't combative, left-wing, or treacherous.
He provokes others. He prefers to stand by and do nothing. Even his intelligence doesn't seem alarming. He didn't grow legs until he was three years old.
He stood up, and at the age of four, he uttered his first word, the word "fish," in a sudden moment of excitement.
It came out like the distant echo of a fishmonger shouting his wares on Charlene Street. Then he said...
The words that came up were "geranium," "goat pen," "wrinkled cabbage," and "jacroll," the latter being from the nearby area.
The name of a gardener's assistant at a monastery, who sometimes did heavy and rough work for Madame Galar; his...
What makes him stand out is that he has never washed his face in his entire life. As for verbs, adjectives, and function words, Grenouille rarely uses them. Except...
"Yes" and "no"—he said it very late at night—he only used nouns, and only specific ones at that.
Proper nouns for things, plants, animals, and people, and referring to the moment when he suddenly smelled these things, plants, animals, or...
When it comes to the smell of people.
In the March sun, he sat on a pile of firewood, which crackled and popped from the heat. At that moment, he...
This was the first time he had uttered the word "wood." Before this, he had seen wood no less than a hundred times and heard it hundreds of times.
He'd encountered this word before. He understood its meaning; he himself was often called outside to fetch wood in winter. But wood...
This thing didn't interest him enough to prompt him to put in the effort to name it. On that day in March, he...
She only spoke up while sitting on the woodpile. At the time, the woodpile was located on a protruding roof on the south side of Mrs. Galar's warehouse.
The firewood was piled up like a bench. The top layer of firewood emitted a sweet, burnt smell, while a rich aroma wafted from the depths of the pile.