Five LOOKED AT objectively, however, there was nothing at all about him to instil terror. As he grewolder, he was not especially big, nor strong--ugly, true, but not so extremely ugly that peoplewould necessarily have taken fright at him. He was not aggressive, nor underhanded, nor furtive,he did not provoke people. He preferred to keep out of their way. And he appeared to possessnothing even approaching a fearful intelligence. Not until age three did he finally begin to stand ontwo feet; he spoke his first word at four, it was the word "fishes," which in a moment of suddenexcitement burst from him like an echo when a fishmonger coming up the rue de Charonne criedout his wares in the distance. The next words he parted with were "pelargonium,""goat stall,""savoy cabbage," and "Jacqueslorreur," this last being the name of a gardener's helper from theneighbouring convent of the Filles de la Croix, who occasionally did rough, indeed very rough workfor Madame Gaillard, and was most conspicuous for never once having washed in all his life. He wasless concerned with verbs, adjectives, and expletives. Except for "yes" and "no"--which, by theway, he used for the first time quite late--he used only nouns, and essentially only nouns forconcrete objects, plants, animals, human beings--and only then if the objects, plants, animals, orhuman beings would subdue him with a sudden attack of odour.One day as he sat on a cord of beechwood logs snapping and cracking in theMarch sun, he first uttered the word "wood." He had seen wood a hundred times before, hadheard the word a hundred times before. He understood it, too, for he had often been sent to fetchwood in winter. But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to troublehimself to speak its name. It happened first on that March day as he sat on the cord of wood, Thecord was stacked beneath overhanging eaves and formed a kind of bench along the south side ofMadam Gaillard's shed. The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of thecord came a mossy aroma; and in the warm sun, bits of resin odour crumbled from the pinewoodplanking of the shed.Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed. Hehad closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing. He onlysmelled the aroma of the wood rising up around him to be captured under the bonnet of theeaves. He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores,until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, asif dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half hour or more, he gagged up the word "wood." Hevomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as ifhis stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood. And that brought him to himself,rescued him only moments before the overpowering presence of the wood, its aroma, was aboutto suffocate him. He shook himself, slid down off the logs, and tottered away as if on wooden legs.Days later he was still completely fuddled by the intense olfactory experience, and whenever thememory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, "wood, wood."And so he learned to speak. With words designating nonsmelling objects, with abstract ideas andthe like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature, he had the greatest difficulty. He could notretain them, confused them with one another, and even as an adult used them unwillingly andoften incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude, etc.--what thesewere meant to express remained a mystery to him.On the other hand, everyday language soon would prove inadequate for designating all theolfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling merewood, but kinds of wood: maple wood, oak wood, pinewood, elm wood, pearwood, old, young,rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips, and splinters--and could clearlydifferentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was thesame with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards eachday, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouilie's senses it smelled andtasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had comefrom, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on... Or whyshould smoke possess only the name "smoke," when from minute to minute, second to second,the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as thesmoke rose from the fire... or why should earth, landscape, air--each filled at every step and everybreath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity--still be designated by justthose three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the worldperceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt iflanguage made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when hiscontact with others made it absolutely necessary.At age six he had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object inMadame Gaillard's house, no place along the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person,no stone, tree, bush, or picket fence, no spot be it ever so small, that he did not know by smell,could not recognise again by holding its uniqueness firmly in his memory. He had gathered tens ofthousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so, randomly, at hisdisposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actuallysmell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imaginationto arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odours that did not exist inthe real world. It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odours thatenabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences--and at an age when other childrenstammer words, so painfully drummed into them, to formulate their first very inadequatesentences describing the world. Perhaps the closest analogy to his talent is the musical wunderkind,who has heard his way inside melodies and harmonies to the alphabet of individual tones and nowcomposes completely new melodies and harmonies all on his own. With the one difference,however, that the alphabet of odours is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that oftones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkindtook place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself.To the world he appeared to grow ever more secretive. What he loved most was to rove alonethrough the northern parts of the Faubourg Saint--Antoine, through vegetable gardens andvineyards, across meadows. Sometimes he did not come home in the evening, remained missingfor days. The rod of punishment awaiting him he bore without a whimper of pain. Confining him tothe house, denying him meals, sentencing him to hard labour--nothing could change hisbehaviour. Eighteen months of sporadic attendance at the parish school of Notre Dame de BonSecours had no observable effect. He learned to spell a bit and to write his own name, nothingmore. His teacher considered him feebleminded.Madame Gaillard, however, noticed that he had certain abilities and qualities that were highlyunusual, if not to say supernatural: the childish fear of darkness and night seemed to be totallyforeign to him. You could send him anytime on an errand to the cellar, where other children hardlydared go even with a lantern, or out to the shed to fetch wood on the blackest night. And henever took a light with him and still found his way around and immediately brought back what wasdemanded, without making one wrong move--not a stumble, not one thing knocked over. Moreremarkable still, Madame Gaillard thought she had discovered his apparent ability to see rightthrough paper, cloth, wood, even through brick walls and locked doors. Without ever entering thedormitory, he knew how many of her wards--and which ones--where in there. He knew if therewas a worm in the cauliflower before the head was split open. And once, when she had hidden hermoney so well that she couldn't find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places), he pointedwithout a second's search to a spot behind a fireplace beam--and there it was! He could even seeinto the future, because he would infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the personarrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky. Of course, he couldnot see any of these things with his eyes, but rather caught their scents with a nose that from dayto day smelled such things more keenly and precisely: the worm in the cauliflower, the moneybehind a beam, and people on the other side of a wall or several blocks away. But Madame Gaillardwould not have guessed that fact in her wildest dream, even if that blow with the poker had lefther olfactory organ intact. She was convinced that, feebleminded or not, the lad had second sight.And since she also knew that people with second sight bring misfortune and death with them, hemade her increasingly nervous. What made her more nervous still was the unbearable thought ofliving under the same roof with someone who had the gift of spotting hidden money behind wallsand beams; and once she had discovered that Grenouille possessed this dreadful ability, she setabout getting rid of him. And it just so happened that at about the same time--Grenouille hadturned eight--the cloister of Saint--Merri, without mention of the reason, ceased to pay its yearlyfee. Madame did not dun them. For appearances' sake, she waited an additional week, and whenthe money owed her still had not appeared, she took the lad by the hand and walked with him intothe city.She was acquainted with a tanner named Grimal--, who lived near the river in the rue de laMortellerie and had a notorious need for young labourers--not for regular apprentices andjourneymen, but for cheap coolies. There were certain jobs in the trade--scraping the meat offrotting hides, mixing the poisonous tanning fluids and dyes, producing the caustic lyes--so perilous,that, if possible, a responsible tanning master did not waste his skilled workers on them, but insteadused unemployed riffraff, tramps, or, indeed, stray children, about whom there would be noenquiry in dubious situations. Madame Gaillard knew of course that by al! normal standardsGrenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal's tannery. But she was not a woman whobothered herself about such things. She had, after all, done her duty. Her custodianship wasended. What happened to her ward from here on was not her affair. If he made it through, welland good. If he died, that was well and good too--the main thing was that it all be done legally. Andso she had Monsieur Grimal provide her with a written receipt for the boy she was handing over tohim, gave him in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, and set out again for homein the rue de Charonne. She felt not the slightest twinge of conscience. On the contrary, shethought her actions not merely legal but also just, for if a child for whom no one was paying wereto stay on with her, it would necessarily be at the expense of the other children or, worse, at herown expense, endangering the future of the other children, or worse, her own future--that is, herown private and sheltered death, which was the only thing that she still desired from life.Since we are to leave Madame Gaillard behind us at this point in our story and shall not meet heragain, we shall take a few sentences to describe the end of her days. Although dead in her heartsince childhood, Madame unfortunately lived to be very, very old. In 1782, just short of herseventieth birthday, she gave up her business, purchased her annuity as planned, sat in her littlehouse, and waited for death. But death did not come. What came in its place was something not asoul in the world could have anticipated: a revolution, a rapid transformation of all social, moral,and transcendental affairs. At first this revolution had no effect on Madame Oaillard's personal fate.But then--she was almost eighty by now--all at once the man who held her annuity had toemigrate, was stripped of his holdings, and forced to auction off his possessions to a trousermanufacturer. For a while it looked as if even this change would have no fatal effect on MadameGaillard, for the trouser manufacturer continued to pay her annuity punctually. But then came theday when she no longer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printedpaper, and that marked the beginning of her economic demise.Within two years, the annuity was no longer worth enough to pay for her firewood. Madame wasforced to sell her house--at a ridiculously low price, since suddenly there were thousands of otherpeople who also had to sell their houses. And once again she received in return only these stupidslips of paper, and once again within two years they were as good as worthless, and by 1797 (shewas nearing ninety now) she had lost her entire fortune, scraped together from almost a centuryof hard work, and was living in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles. And only then--ten,twenty years too late--did death arrive, in the form of a protracted bout with a cancer thatgrabbed Madame by the throat, robbing her first of her appetite and then of her voice, so that shecould raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hotel--Dieu. There they put her ina ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill, the same ward in which her husband had died,laid her in a bed shared with total strangers, pressing body upon body with five other women, andfor three long weeks let her die in public view. She was then sewn into a sack, tossed onto atumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses, to the faint tinkle of a bell driven to thenewly founded cemetery of Clamart, a mile beyond the city gates, and there laid in her final restingplace, a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime.That was in the year 1799. Thank God Madame had suspected nothing of the fate awaiting her asshe walked home that day in 1746, leaving Grenouille and our story behind. She might possiblyhave lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning that she could make of life.