He wanted to acquire the human-being odour – if only in the form of an inferior temporary surrogate – that he did not possess of himself. True, the odour of human being did not exist, any more than the human countenance. Every human being smelled differently, no one knew that better than Grenouille, who recognized thousands upon thousands of individual odours and could sniff out the difference of each human being from birth on. And yet – there was a basic perfumatory theme to the odour of humanity, a rather simple one, incidentally: a sweaty-oily, sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive basic
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