Paris

Hurlow and Lillio

• Chapter 1• Used as a background and setting for

Grenouille’s later murders.• ‘Seen’ through the sense of smell.• Portrayed as disgusting, filthy, dirty and

repulsive.• Grenouille is born amid a pile of fish guts in the

city as the fifth unwanted child of his mother.• Main description of Paris is not what Grenouille

experiences- rather what he would in theory feel and smell if he were to be present.

• In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the

unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.

The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from

their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The

rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the

priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and

the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition,

and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not

accompanied by stench.

• 17 ‘stench’ or ‘stank’ repeated in first paragraph.• Conjures imagery of muck and putrefaction

despite being a description of purely the smells.• Contrasts greatly with the scents from the

women and murders later on.• Grenouille, having no smell, can be seen as

neutral and between sin and virtue.• Seen as a metaphor for sin or corruption.• Grenouille does not experience these in Chapter

1, but is affected later on as Paris is described through his senses and his ‘eyes’, which in this case is the nose.

IT WAS LIKE living in Utopia….He would often just stand there, leaning against a wall or crouching in a dark

corner, his eyes closed, his mouth half open and nostrils flaring wide, quiet as a feeding pike in a great, dark, slowly moving current. And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way, he would

lunge at it and not let go. Then he would smell at only this one odor, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odor might be an old acquaintance, or a variation on one; it could be a

brand-new one as well, with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled, let alone seen, till that moment: the odor of pressed silk, for

example, the odor of a wild-thyme tea, the odor of brocade embroidered with silver thread, the odor of a cork from a bottle of vintage wine, the odor of a tortoiseshell comb. Grenouille was out to find such odors still

unknown to him; he hunted them down with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him.

• Chapter 7 – Paris described as the perfect place for Grenouille• Not because of ‘stench’, but because of the other odors and the

abundance of different scents.• None are described as to be pleasurable to Grenouille – he discovers

these without specific liking yet with interest, like that of an artist.

The source was the girl. For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life

seen anything so beautiful as this girl-although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight. He meant, of course, he had never smelled

anything so beautiful. But since he knew the smell of humans, knew it a thousandfold, men, women, children, he could not conceive of how such an

exquisite scent could be emitted by a human being. Normally human odor was nothing special, or it was ghastly. Children smelled insipid, men urinous, all sour

sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Totally uninteresting, repulsive-that was how humans smelled.... And so it happened that

for the first time in his life, Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for assistance if he was to believe what he smelled. This confusion of senses

did not last long at all. Actually he required only a moment to convince himself optically-then to abandon himself all the more ruthlessly to olfactory perception.

And now he smelled that this was a human being, smelled the sweat of her armpits, the oil in her hair, the fishy odor of her genitals, and smelied it all with the greatest

pleasure. Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms... and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume

so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless. A hundred thousand odors seemed

worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.

• Repeated in less detail in Chapter 8• Used to contrast the scent of the victim and

the city.• Thus accentuates beauty with the smell of

putrefaction.• Later on leaves Paris in pursue of this scent (to

Orleans) in Chapter 23.• If Grenouille was exposed to this smell in a

different city, his reaction and desire to preserve this could have been different.

• Therefore, Paris is utilized as the location in which he discovers true beauty.