Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer Read Online Free PDF

why should earth, landscape, air—each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity—still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.
    At the age of six he had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object in Madame 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 recognize again by holding its uniqueness firmly in his memory. He had gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odours that did not exist in the real world. It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odours that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences—and at an age when other children stammer words, so painfully drummed into them, to formulate their first very inadequate sentences 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 now composes 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 of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no other than himself.
    To the world he appeared to grow ever more secretive. What he loved most was to rove alone through the northern parts of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, through vegetable gardens and vineyards, across meadows. Sometimes he did not come home in the evening, remained missing for days. The rod of punishment awaiting him he bore without a whimper of pain. Confining him to the house, denying him meals, sentencing him to hard labour—nothing could change his behaviour. Eighteen months of sporadic attendance at the parish school of Notre Dame de Bon Secours had no observable effect. He learned to spell a little and to write his own name, nothing more. His teacher considered him feeble-minded.
    Madame Gaillard, however, noticed that he had certain abilities and qualities that were highly unusual, if not to say supernatural: and childish fear of darkness and night seemed to be totally foreign to him. You could send him at any time on an errand to the cellar, where other children hardly dared go even with a lantern, or out to the shed to fetch wood on the blackest night. And he never took a light with him and still found his way around and immediately brought back what was demanded, without making one wrong move—not a stumble, not one thing knocked over. More remarkable still, Madame Gaillard thought she had discovered his apparent ability to see right through paper, cloth, wood, even through brick walls and locked doors. Without ever entering the dormitory, he knew how many of her wards—and which ones—were in there. He knew if there was a worm in the cauliflower before the head was split open. And once, when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn’t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places), he pointed without a second’s search to a spot behind a fireplace beam—and there it was! He could even see into the future, because he would