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the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.
And with her nose no less! With the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses!
That cry, emitted upon careful consideration, one might almost say upon mature consideration, was the newborn’s decision against love and nevertheless for life.
The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of the cord came a mossy aroma; and in the warm sun, bits of resin odor crumbled from the pinewood planking of the shed.
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 if language made any sense at all;
His discerning nose unraveled the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors that could not be unthreaded further.
When he had smelled his fill of the thick gruel of the streets, he would go to airier terrain, where the odors were thinner, mixing with the wind as they unfurled, much as perfume does—to
Strangely enough, the scent was not much stronger. It was only purer, and in its augmented purity, it took on an even greater power of attraction.
distillation is nothing more than a process for separating complex substances into volatile and less volatile components and that it is only useful in the art of perfumery because the volatile essential oils of certain plants can be extracted from the rest, which have little or no scent.
The more Grenouille had become accustomed to purer air, the more sensitive he was to human odor, which suddenly, quite unexpectedly, would come floating by in the night, ghastly as the stench of manure, betraying the presence of some shepherd’s hut or charcoal burner’s cottage or thieves’ den.
The sun was shining. The earth smelled of moist stones, moss, and water.
He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool—though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild.
He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
The perfume smelled clearly of dog—moist, fresh, tallowy, and a bit pungent.
For although the migrant workers were in fact not responsible for the actual murder, they could have been responsible for it on principle, and so it was better to be on one’s guard.
Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high.
