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 farther 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 farther, 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 others arms, withdrew again, flapped their arms absurdly in the air, wrung their hands, twitched and grimaced like victims of St. Vituss dance.
The noble personages, being somewhat farther 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 Monsei-gneur the Bishop, who, as if he had been 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 executioners 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 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 Grenouilles 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 Savior in person, to the satanists as the shining Lord of Darkness, to those who were citizens of the Enlightenment as the Highest Principle, to young maidens as a fairy-tale 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 mens 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 lawyers spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with Freemasons wife all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odor 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 odor of his own on the most stinking spot in this 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 oigy in his honor 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 eajoy 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 smelted 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.