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this one odour, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odour 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 odour of pressed silk, for example, the odour of wild-thyme tea, the odour of brocade embroidered with silver thread, the odour of cork from a bottle of vintage wine, the odour of a tortoiseshell comb. Grenouille was out to find such odours still unknown to him; he hunted them down with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him.
    When he had smelled his fill of the thick gruel of the streets, he would go to airier terrain, where the odours were thinner, mixing with the wind as they unfurled, much as perfume does—to the market of Les Halles, for instance, where the odours of the day lived on into the evening, invisibly but ever so distinctly, as if the vendors still swarmed among the crowd, as if the baskets still stood there stuffed full of vegetables and eggs, or the casks full of wine and vinegar, the sacks with their spices and potatoes and flour, the crates of nails and screws, the meat tables, the tables full of cloth and dishes and shoe soles and all the hundreds of other things sold there during the day… the bustle of it all down to the smallest detail was still present in the air that had been left behind. Grenouille saw the whole market smelling, if it can be put that way. And he smelled it more precisely than many people could see it, for his perception was perception after the fact and thus of a higher order: an essence, a spirit of what had been, something undisturbed by the everyday accidents of the moment, like noise, glare or the nauseating press of living human beings.
    Or he would go to the spot where they had beheaded his mother, to the place de Grève, which stuck out to lick the river like a huge tongue. Here lay the ships, pulled up on to shore or moored to posts, and they smelled of coal and grain and hay and damp ropes.
    And from the west, via this one passage cut through the city by the river, came a broad current of wind bringing with it the odours of the country, of the meadows around Neuilly, of the forests between Saint-Germain and Versailles, of far-off cities like Rouen or Caen and sometimes of the sea itself. The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odours into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit in his memory relishing it whole. The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea—which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells—dissolving with pleasure in that breath. But it was never to be, for Grenouille, who stood there on the river bank at the place de Grève steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose, would never in his life see the sea, the real sea, the immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell.
    He had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night. And so he expanded his hunting grounds, first westwards to the faubourg Saint-Honoré, then out along the