The execution was scheduled for five in the afternoon. The first spectators had arrived by morning and secured themselves places. They brought chairs and footstools with them, pillows, food, wine and their children. Around noon, masses of country people streamed in from all directions, and the parade grounds were soon so packed that new arrivals had to camp along the road to Grenoble and on the terracelike gardens and fields that rose at the far end of the area. Vendors were already doing a brisk business – people ate, people drank, everything hummed and simmered as at a country fair. Soon there were a good ten thousand people gathered, more than for the crowning of the Queen of the Jasmine, more than for the largest guild procession, more than Grasse had ever seen before. They stood far up to the slopes. They hung in the trees, they squatted atop walls and on the roofs, they pressed together ten or twelve to a window. Only in the centre of the grounds, protected by the fence barricade, as if stamped and cut from the dough of the crowd, was there still an open space for the grandstand and the scaffold, which suddenly appeared very small, like a toy or the stage of a puppet theatre. And one pathway was left open, leading from the place of execution to the porte du Cours and into the rue Droite.
Shortly after three, Monsieur Papon and his henchmen appeared. The applause swept forward like thunder. They carried two wooden beams forming a St Andrew’s cross to the scaffold and set it at a good working height by propping it up on four carpenter’s horses. A journeyman carpenter nailed it down. Every move, every gesture of the deputy executioners and the carpenter was greeted by the crowd’s applause. And when Papon stepped forward with his iron rod, walked around the cross, measuring his steps, striking an imaginary blow now on one side, now on the other, there was an eruption of downright jubilation.
At four, the grandstand began to fill. There were many fine folk to admire, rich gentlemen with lackeys and fine manners, beautiful women, big hats, shimmering clothes. The whole of the nobility from both town and country was on hand. The gentlemen of the council appeared in closed rank, the two consuls at their head. Richis was dressed in black, with black stockings and a black hat. Behind the council the magistrates marched in, led by the presiding judge of the court. Last of all, in an open sedan chair came the bishop, wearing gleaming purple vestments and a little green hat. Whoever still had his cap on doffed it now, to be sure. This was awe-inspiring.
Then nothing happened for about ten minutes. The lords and ladies had taken their places, the common folk waited impassively; no one was eating now, they all waited. Papon and his henchmen stood on the scaffold platform as if they too had been nailed down. The sun hung large and yellow over the Estérel. From the valley of Grasse a warm wind came up, bearing with it the scent of orange blossoms. It was very warm and almost implausibly still.
Finally, when it seemed the tension could last no longer without its bursting into a thousand-voiced scream, into a tumult, a frenzy, or into some other mob scene, above the stillness they heard the clatter of horses and the creaking of wheels.
Down the rue Droite came a carriage drawn by a pair of horses, the police lieutenant’s carriage. It drove through the city gate and reappeared for all to see in the narrow path leading to the scaffold. The police lieutenant had insisted on this manner of arrival, since otherwise he could not guarantee the safety of the convicted man. It was certainly not the customary practice. The prison was hardly five minutes away from the place of execution, and if a condemned man, for whatever reason, could not have managed the short distance on foot, then he would have travelled it in an open donkey cart. That a man should be driven to his own execution in a coach, with a driver, liveried footmen and a mounted guard – no one had ever seen anything like that.
And nevertheless, there was no sign of unrest or displeasure among the crowd – on the contrary. People were satisfied that at least something was happening, considered the idea of the coach a clever stroke, just as at the theatre people enjoy a familiar play when it is presented in some surprisingly new fashion. Many even thought the grand entrance appropriate. Such an extraordinarily abominable criminal deserved extraordinary treatment. You couldn’t drag him to the scaffold in chains like a common thief and kill him. There would have been nothing sensational about that. But to lead him from his upholstered equipage to the St Andrew’s cross – that was an incomparably imaginative bit of cruelty.
The carriage stopped midway between the scaffold and the grandstand. The footmen jumped down, opened the carriage door and folded down the steps. The police lieutenant climbed out, behind him an officer of the guard, and finally Grenouille. He was wearing a blue frock coat, a white shirt, white silk stockings and buckled black shoes. He was not bound. No one led him by the arm. He got out of the carriage as if he were a free man.
And then a miracle occurred. Or something very like a miracle, or at least something so incomprehensible, so unprecedented and so unbelievable that everyone who witnessed it would have called it a miracle afterwards if they had taken the notion to speak of it at all – which was not the case, since afterwards every single one of them was ashamed to have had any part in it whatever.
What happened was that from one moment to the next, the ten thousand people on the parade grounds and on the slopes surrounding it felt themselves infused with the unshakeable belief that the man in the blue frock coat who had just climbed out of the carriage could not possibly be a murderer. Not that they doubted his identity! The man standing there was the same one whom they had seen just a few days before at the window of the provost court on the church square and whom, had they been able to get their hands on him, they would have lynched with savage hatred. The same one who only two days before had been lawfully condemned on the basis of overwhelming evidence and his own confession. The same one whose slaughter at the hands of the executioner they had eagerly awaited only a few minutes before. It was he – no doubt of it!
And yet – it was not he either, it could not be he, he could not be a murderer. The man who stood at the scaffold was innocence personified. All of them – from the bishop to the lemonade vendor, from the marquis to the little washerwoman, from the presiding judge to the street urchin – knew it in a flash.
Papon knew it too. And his great hands, still clutching the iron rod, trembled. All at once his strong arms were as weak, his knees as wobbly, his heart as anxious, as a child’s. He would not be able to lift that rod, would never in his life have the strength to lift it against this little, innocent man – oh, he dreaded the moment when they would lead him forward; he tottered, had to prop himself up with his death-dealing rod to keep from sinking feebly to his knees, the great, the mighty Papon! The ten thousand men and women, children and patriarchs assembled there felt no different – they grew weak as young maidens who have succumbed to the charms of a lover. They were overcome by a powerful sense of goodwill, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love for this little homicidal man, and they were unable, unwilling to do anything about it. It was like a fit of weeping you cannot fight down, like tears that have been held back too long and rise up from deep within you, dissolving whatever resists them, liquefying it, and flushing it away. These people were now pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous fluid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them, and they laid those hearts, each man, each woman, in the hands of the little man in the blue frock coat, for better or worse. They loved him.
Grenouille had been standing at the open carriage door for several minutes now, not moving at all. The footman next to him had sunk to his knees, and sank further still until achieving the fully prostrate position customary in the Orient before a sultan or Allah. And even in this posture, he still quivered and swayed, trying to sink even further, to lie flat upon the earth, to lie within it, under it. He wanted to sink to the opposite side of the world out of pure subservience. The officer of the guard and the police lieutenant, doughty fellows both, whose duty it was now to lead the condemned man to the scaffold and hand him over to his executioner, could no longer manage anything like a coordinated action. They wept and removed their hats, put them back on, cast themselves to the ground, fell into each other’s arms, withdrew again, flapped their arms absurdly in the air, wrung their hands, twitched and grimaced like victims of St Vitus’s dance.
The noble personages, being somewhat further away, abandoned themselves to their emotions with hardly more discretion. Each gave free rein to the urges of his or her heart. There were women who with one look at Grenouille thrust their fists into their laps and sighed with bliss; and others who, in their burning desire for this splendid young man – for so he appeared to them – fainted dead away without further ado. There were gentlemen who kept springing up and sitting down and leaping up again, snorting vigorously and grasping the hilts of their swords as if to draw them, and then when they did, each thrusting his blade back in so that it rattled and clattered; and others who cast their eyes mutely to heaven and clenched their hands in prayer; and there was Monseigneur the Bishop, who, as if he were taken ill, slumped forward and banged his forehead against his knees, sending his little green hat rolling – when in fact he was not ill at all, but rather for the first time in his life basking in religious rapture, for a miracle had occurred before their very eyes, the Lord God had personally stayed the executioner’s hand by disclosing as an angel the very man who had for all the world appeared a murderer. Oh, that such a thing had happened, here in the eighteenth century. How great was the Lord! And how small and petty was he himself, who had spoken his anathema, without himself believing it, merely to pacify the populace! Oh, what presumption! Oh, what a lack of faith! And now the Lord had performed a miracle! Oh, what splendid humiliation, what sweet abasement, what grace to be a bishop thus chastised by God.
Meanwhile the masses on the other side of the barricade were giving themselves over ever more shamelessly to the uncanny rush of emotion that Grenouille’s appearance had unleashed. Those who at the start had merely felt sympathy and compassion were now filled with naked, insatiable desire, and those who had at first admired and desired were now driven to ecstasy. They all regarded the man in the blue frock coat as the most handsome, attractive and perfect creature they could imagine: to the nuns he appeared to be the Saviour in person, to the satanists as the shining Lord of Darkness, to the those who were citizens of the Enlightenment as the Highest Principle, to young maidens as a fairytale prince, to men as their ideal image of themselves. And they all felt as if he had seen through them at their most vulnerable point, grasped them, touched their erotic core. It was as if the man had ten thousand invisible hands and had laid a hand on the genitals of the ten thousand people surrounding him and fondled them in just the way that each of them, whether man or woman, desired in his or her most secret fantasies.
The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. The men’s gazes stumbled madly over this landscape of straddling flesh; with quivering fingers they tugged to pull from their trousers their members frozen stiff by some invisible frost; they fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, odd-jobber with lawyer’s spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with freemason’s wife – all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odour of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts and moans from ten thousand human beasts. It was infernal.
Grenouille stood there and smiled. Or rather, it seemed to the people who saw him that he was smiling, the most innocent, loving, enchanting, and at the same time most seductive smile in the world. But in fact it was not a smile, but an ugly, cynical smirk that lay upon his lips, reflecting both his total triumph and his total contempt. He, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with no odour of his own on the most stinking spot in the world, amid garbage, dung and putrefaction, raised without love, with no warmth of a human soul, surviving solely on impudence and the power of loathing, small, hunchbacked, lame, ugly, shunned, an abomination within and without – he had managed to make the world admire him. To hell with admire! Love him! Desire him! Idolize him! He had performed a Promethean feat. He had persevered until, with infinite cunning, he had obtained for himself that divine spark, something laid gratis in the cradle of every other human being but withheld from him alone. And not merely that! He had himself actually struck that spark upon himself. He was even greater than Prometheus. He had created an aura more radiant and more effective than any human being had ever possessed before him. And he owed it to no one – not to a father, nor a mother, and least of all to a gracious God – but to himself alone. He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid god than the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches. A flesh-and-blood bishop was on his knees before him, whimpering with pleasure. The rich and the mighty, proud ladies and gentlemen, were fawning in adoration, while the common folk all around – among them the fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters of his victims – celebrated an orgy in his honour and in his name. A nod of his head and they would all renounce their God and worship him, Grenouille the Great.
Yes, he was Grenouille the Great! Now it had become manifest. It was he, just as in his narcissistic fantasies of old, but now in reality. And in that moment he experienced the greatest triumph of his life. And he was terrified.
He was terrified because he could not enjoy one second of it. In that moment as he stepped out of the carriage into the bright sunlight of the parade grounds, clad in the perfume that made people love him, the perfume on which he had worked for two years, the perfume that he had thirsted to possess his whole life long … in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him – in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for – that other people should love him – became at the moment of its achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred – in hating and in being hated.
But the hate he felt for people remained without an echo. The more he hated them at this moment, the more they worshipped him, for they perceived only his counterfeit aura, his fragrant disguise, his stolen perfume, and it was indeed a scent to be worshipped.
He would have loved right now to have exterminated these people from the earth, every stupid, stinking, eroticized one of them, just as he had once exterminated alien odours from the world of his raven-black soul. And he wanted them to realize how much he hated them and for them, realizing that it was the only emotion that he had ever truly felt, to return that hate and exterminate him just as they had originally intended. For once in his life, he wanted to empty himself. For once in his life, he wanted to be like other people and empty himself of what was inside him – what they did with their love and their stupid adoration, he would do with his hate. For once, just for once, he wanted to be apprehended in his true being, for other human beings to respond with an answer to his only true emotion, hatred.
But nothing came of that. Nothing could ever come of it. And most certainly not on this day. For after all, he was masked with the best perfume in the world, and beneath his mask there was no face, but only his total odourlessness. Suddenly he was sick to his stomach, for he felt the fog rising again.
Just as it had back then in his cave, in his dream, in his sleep, in his heart, in his fantasy, all at once fog was rising, the dreadful fog from his own odour, which he could not smell, because he was odourless. And just as then, he was filled with boundless fear and terror, felt as if he were going to suffocate. But this time it was different, this was no dream, no sleep, but naked reality. And different, too, because he was not lying alone in a cave, but standing in a public place before ten thousand people. And different because here no scream would help to wake and free him, no flight would rescue him and bring him into the good, warm world. For here and now, this was the world, and this, here and now, was his dream come true. And he had wanted it thus.
The horrible, suffocating fog rose up from the morass of his soul, while all around him people moaned in orgiastic and orgasmic rapture. A man came running up to him. He had leaped up out of the first row of the notables’ grandstand so violently that his black hat toppled from his head, and now, with his black frock coat billowing, he fluttered across the parade grounds like a raven or an avenging angel. It was Richis.
He is going to kill me, thought Grenouille. He is the only one who has not let himself be deceived by my mask. He won’t let himself be deceived. The scent of his daughter is clinging to me, betraying me as surely as blood. He has got to recognize me and kill me. He has got to do it.
And he spread his arms wide to receive the angel storming down upon him. He already could feel the thrust of the dagger or sword tickling so wonderfully at his breast, and the blade passing through his armour of scent and the suffocating fog, right to the middle of his cold heart – finally, finally, something in his heart, something other than himself! And he sensed his deliverance already at hand.
And then, suddenly, there was Richis at his breast, no avenging angel, but a shaken, pitiably sobbing Richis, who threw his arms around him, clutching him very tight, as if he could find no other footing in a sea of bliss. No liberating thrust of the dagger, no prick to the heart, not even a curse or a cry of hatred. Instead, Richis’s cheek wet with tears glued to his, and quivering lips that whimpered to him: ‘Forgive me, my son, my dear son, forgive me!’
With that, everything within him went white before his eyes, while the world outside went raven-black. The trapped fog condensed to a raging liquid, like frothy, boiling milk. It inundated him, pressed its unbearable weight against the inner shell of his body, could find no way out. He wanted to flee, for God’s sake, to flee, but where … He wanted to burst, to explode, to keep from suffocating on himself. Finally he sank down and lost consciousness.