Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page B

infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the person arrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky. Of course, he could not see any of these things with his eyes, but rather caught their scents with a nose that from day to day smelled such things more keenly and precisely: the worm in the cauliflower, the money behind a beam, and people on the other side of a wall or several streets away. But Madame Gaillard would not have guessed that fact in her wildest dreams, even if that blow with the poker had left her olfactory organ intact. She was convinced that, feeble-minded or not, the lad had second sight. And since she also knew that people with second sight bring misfortune and death with them, he made her increasingly nervous. What made her more nervous still was the unbearable thought of living under the same roof with someone who had the gift of spotting hidden money behind walls and beams; and once she had discovered that Grenouille possessed this dreadful ability, she set about getting rid of him. And it just so happened that at about the same time—Grenouille had turned eight—the cloister of Saint-Merri, without mention of the reason, ceased to pay its yearly fee. Madame did not dun them. For appearances’ sake, she waited an additional week, and when the money owed her still had not appeared, she took the lad by the hand and walked with him into the city.
    She was acquainted with a tanner named Grimal, who lived near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and had a notorious need for young labourers—not for regular apprentices and journeymen, but for cheap coolies. There were certain jobs in the trade—scraping the meat off rotting hides, mixing the poisonous tanning fluids and dyes, producing caustic lyes—so perilous that, if possible, a responsible tanning master did not waste his skilled workers on them, but instead used unemployed riff-raff, tramps or, indeed, stray children, about whom there would be no inquiry in dubious situations. Madame Gaillard knew of course that by all normal standards Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal’s tannery. But she was not a woman who bothered herself about such things. She had, after all, done her duty. Her custodianship was ended. What happened to her ward from here on was not her affair. If he made it through, well and good. If he died, that was well and good too—the main thing was that it all be done legally. And so she had Monsieur Grimal provide her with a written receipt for the boy she was handing over to him, gave him in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, and set out again for home in the rue de Charonne. She felt not the slightest twinge of conscience. On the contrary, she thought her actions not merely legal but also just, for if a child for whom no one was paying were to stay on with her, it would necessarily be at the expense of the other children or, worse, at her own expense, endangering the future of the other children or, worse, her own future—that is, her own 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 her again, we shall take a few sentences to describe the end of her days. Although dead in her heart since childhood, Madame unfortunately lived to be very, very old. In 1782, just short of her seventieth birthday, she gave up her business, purchased her annuity as planned, sat in her little house, and waited for death. But death did not come. What came in its place was something not a soul 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 Gaillard’s personal fate, but then—she was almost eighty by now—all at once the man who held her annuity had to emigrate, was stripped of his holdings, and forced to auction