Perfume. The story of a murderer

HE LOOKED AWFUL. His hair reached down to the hollows of his knees, his scraggly beard to his navel. His nails were like talons, and the skin on his arms and legs, where the rags no longer covered his body, was peeling off in shreds.

The first people he met, farmers in a field near the town of Pierrefort, ran off screaming at the sight of him. But in the town itself, he caused a sensation. By the hundreds people came running to gape at him. Many of them believed he was an escaped galley slave. Others said he was not really a human being, but some mixture of man and bear, some kind of forest creature. One fellow, who had been to sea, claimed that he looked like a member of a wild Indian tribe in Cayenne, which lay on the other side of the great ocean. They led him before the mayor. There, to the astonishment of the assembly, he produced his journeyman’s papers, opened his mouth, and related in a few gabbled but sufficiently comprehensible words— for these were the first words that he had uttered in seven years-how he had been attacked by robbers, dragged off, and held captive in a cave for seven years.

He had seen neither daylight nor another human being during that time, had been fed by an invisible hand that let down a basket in the dark, and finally set free by a ladder-without his ever knowing why and without ever having seen his captors or his rescuer. He had thought this story up, since it seemed to him more believable than the truth; and so it was, for similar attacks by robbers occurred not infrequently in the mountains of the Auvergne and Languedoc, and in the Cevennes. At least the mayor recorded it all without protest and passed his report on to the marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, liege lord of the town and member of parliament in Toulouse.

At the age of forty, the marquis had turned his back on life at the court of Versailles and retired to his estates, where he lived for science alone. From his pen had come an important work concerning dynamic political economy. In it he had proposed the abolition of all taxes on real estate and agricultural products, as well as the introduction of an upside-down progressive income tax, which would hit the poorest citizens the hardest and so force them to a more vigorous development of their economic activities. Encouraged by the success of his little book, he authored a tract on the raising of boys and girls between the ages of five and ten. Then he turned to experimental agriculture. By spreading the semen of bulls over various grasses, he attempted to produce a milk-yielding animal-vegetable hybrid, a sort of udder flower. After initial successes that enabled him to produce a cheese from his milk grass-described by the Academy of Sciences of Lyon as “tasting of goat, though slightly bitter”— he had to abandon his experiments because of the enormous cost of spewing bull semen by the hundreds of quarts across his fields. In any case, his concern with matters agro-biological had awakened his interest not only in the plowed clod, so to speak, but in the earth in general and its relationship to the biosphere in particular.

He had barely concluded his work with the milk-yielding udder flower when he threw himself with great elan into unflagging research for a grand treatise on the relationship between proximity to the earth and vital energy. His thesis was that life could develop only at a certain distance from the earth, since the earth itself constantly emits a corrupting gas, a so-called fluidum letale, which lames vital energies and sooner or later totally extinguishes them. All living creatures therefore endeavor to distance themselves from the earth by growing-that is, they grow away from it and not, for instance, into it; which is why their most valuable parts are lifted heavenwards: the ears of grain, the blossoms of flowers, the head of man; and therefore, as they begin to bend and buckle back toward the earth in old age, they will inevitably fall victim to the lethal gas, into which they are in turn finally changed once they have decomposed after death.