While working for Baldini, Grenouille makes the best scents Paris has ever smelled, and Baldini becomes very rich. Baldini is so impressed with the scent that Grenouille creates that he buys his apprenticeship from Grimal. He begs the old man to let him work for him, after showing the master that he has a wonderful nose and a great memory for mixing perfumes. One night he delivers some goatskins to Baldini the perfumer. He then takes the opportunity to smell her scent to his heart's content.

She senses him, and as she turns around to see him he strangles her.

He finds her scent from a long distance, and he follows it until he is very near her in the dark. On one of his olfactory jaunts around the city, Grenouille finds the most delicious scent he has ever encountered, that of a adolescent girl. Grenouille roams the city of Paris, searching for new scents, because he has the most gifted nose in the world. After having survived anthrax, and thus becoming more useful in a tannery, he is treated marginally better and is given some slight freedom. At the age of eight he is given in apprenticeship to a tanner, Grimal, where he is almost worked to death. He is brought up in a sort of home orphanage, tended together with several other orphans by an emotionally damaged woman named Madame Gaillard. His mother is executed for this attempt and for her previously successful infanticides, leaving Grenouille, a bastard, alone in the world. The baby, who strangely has no scent, cries out and is saved by onlookers. He is delivered behind his mother's fish stall and is immediately abandoned to die. Grenouille is born to a fishwife mother in Paris in the early eighteenth century.

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