Perfume: Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The narrator indicates that objectively, there was nothing scary about Grenouille, as he was never big, strong, exceptionally ugly, or seemed particularly smart. He didn't begin walking until age two and began to speak at age three. His first words were concrete nouns that were especially odorous.

One day, Grenouille sits on a cord of wood and says the word "wood" for the first time. He already understood the idea of wood, but it had never truly captured his interest. But on this day, he closes his eyes and simply smells the wood for a half hour and gets lost in the smell. The experience is confusing and intense, and he mutters "wood" over and over again for the next few days.

Grenouille learns to speak in this way, but never fully grasps the concepts of words that express objects that don't smell, particularly words that express abstract or moral ideas. Even as an adult he will use them incorrectly. The language he does possess at this point soon becomes inadequate to express his olfactory experiences. He is able to differentiate between milk from different cows, or smoke from different burning materials, and since language doesn't provide enough words to describe these differences, he soon begins to doubt if language makes sense at all.

By age six, Grenouille has grasped his entire surroundings by smell. He has tens of thousands of smells in his memory and can imagine how different scents combine. The narrator likens him to a musical wunderkind (child prodigy), but for scent. He grows more secretive and disappears for days to smell the meadows and vineyards. Punishments have little effect on him.

Madame Gaillard begins to notice that Grenouille has potentially supernatural qualities, such as being able to detect worms in uncut vegetables and an apparent ability to see through walls. At one point, Madame Gaillard forgets where she hid her money, and he finds it within seconds. He also seems to be able to tell the future, as he can predict storms hours away. While we know that he could simply smell all these things, Madame Gaillard believes he has the “second sight” and therefore will bring misfortune and death. She decides he has to go, and coincidentally, the cloister of Saint-Merri ceases their payments when Grenouille is eight.

Madame Gaillard walks Grenouille to the tanner Grimal, who is always in need of cheap labor to do the most dangerous parts of the job. She knows that Grenouille will likely not survive, but feels no responsibility or remorse. She walks home satisfied.

The narrator says that since Madame Gaillard will not appear again, we should find out how she dies. She lived to be very old and gave up her business and purchased her annuity in 1782, and set about waiting for death. However, the French Revolution came first, and while it didn't affect her at first, she was later forced to auction off her belongings and then her home. By 1797 she'd lost her entire fortune and contracted cancer. She spent her last three weeks in the Hôtel-Dieu in a communal bed with five other women, and was buried in a mass grave in 1799.