Perfume - the First Murder

Perfume– The First Murder

In the previous chapters, we have seen the birth of Grenouille in Rue Aux Fers, who is an unwanted child to his mother, and is thus abandoned by her mother. He is then entrusted in the care of first, Father Terrier who baptizes him and gives him the name Jean Baptiste and in the care of the wet nurse; Jeanne Bussie. She also dumps him at Saint-Merri Convent on account of being a glutton bastard and to be possessed by the devil since he has no smell an ordinary baby should be having.

"But it's the bastard himself, he doesn't smell."

"Because he's stuffed himself on me. Because he's pumped me dry down to the bones. But I've put a stop to that. Now you can feed him yourselves with goat's milk, with pap, with beet juice. He'll gobble up anything, that bastard will."

"He's possessed by the devil."

"By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprived the other sucklings of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood, for it was impossible to make a living nursing just one babe."

Father Terrier gives him fatherly love and affection. But when Grenouille turns around in his sleep and smells Father Terrier, suggesting that he is trying to smell the priest, Father Terrier takes the child directly to a woman named Madame Gaillard who is paid to bring up children in her home. He pays for the child's care a year in advance, and he leaves quickly, never to return.

At Madame Gaillard's place, Grenouille is given the necessities of life; he is kept warm, meagerly fed, and reasonably safe. Yet, he is given no love of any kind. Madame Gaillard is mentally disabled, having been hit on the head as a child, and has no emotional life whatsoever.

"On the other hand ... or perhaps precisely because of her total lack of emotion... Madame Gaillard had a merciless sense of order and justice. She showed no preference for any one of the children entrusted to her nor discriminated against any one of them. She served up three meals a day and not the tiniest snack more. She diapered the little ones three times a day, but only until their second birthday."

When he is at the age of eight, the cloister stops paying for Grenouille's upkeep, and Madame Gaillard brings Grenouille to the tanner, Grimal, who takes him as an apprentice. He is allowed a small amount of time off each week to roam the city of Paris. He contracts anthrax but magically survives it even though due to the unhealthy sanitation facilities at France as well as the tannery. Grenouille comes alive on his walks in the city, literally following his