Free Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer by Patrick Süskind Page A

field, people question and bore and scrutinize and pry and dabble with experiments. It’s no longer enough for a man to say that something is so or how it is so—everything now has to be proven besides, preferably with witnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments. These Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have—there are even clerics among them and gentlemen of noble birth!—they’ve finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!
    Wherever you looked, hectic excitement. People reading books, even women. Priests dawdling in coffee houses. And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison, publishers howled and submitted petitions, ladies and gentlemen of the highest rank used their influence, and within a couple of weeks he was set free or allowed out of the country, from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. In the salons people chattered about nothing but the orbits of comets and expeditions, about leverage and Newton, about building canals, the circulation of the blood, and the diameter of the earth.
    The King himself had had them demonstrate some sort of new-fangled nonsense, a kind of artificial thunderstorm they called electricity. With the whole court looking on, some fellow rubbed a bottle, and it gave off a spark, and His Majesty, so it was said, appeared deeply impressed. Unthinkable! that his grandfather, the truly great Louis, under whose beneficent reign Baldini had been lucky enough to have lived for many years, would have allowed such a ridiculous demonstration in his presence. But that was the temper of the times, and it would all come to a bad end.
    When, without the least embarrassment, people could brazenly call into question the authority of God’s Church; when they could speak of the monarchy—equally a creature of God’s grace—and the sacred person of the King himself as if they were both simply interchangeable items in a catalogue of various forms of government to be selected on a whim; when they had the ultimate audacity and have it they did—to describe God Himself, the Almighty, Very God of Very God, as dispensable and to maintain in all earnestness that order, morals and happiness on this earth could be conceived of without Him, purely as matters of man’s inherent morality and reason… God, good God!—then you needn’t wonder that everything was turned upside down, that morals had degenerated, and that humankind had brought down upon itself the judgement of Him whom it denied. It would come to a bad end. The great comet of 1681—they had mocked it, calling it a mere clump of stars, while in truth it was an omen sent by God in warning, for it had portended, as was clear by now, a century of decline and disintegration, ending in the spiritual, political and religious quagmire that man had created for himself, into which he would one day sink and where only glossy, stinking swamp flowers flourished, like Pélissier himself!
    Baldini stood at the window, an old man, and gazed malevolently at the sun angled above the river. Barges emerged beneath him and slid slowly to the west, towards the Pont-Neuf and the quay below the galleries of the Louvre. No one poled barges against the current here, for that they used the channel on the other side of the island. Here everything flowed away from you—the empty and the heavily laden ships, the rowboats, and the flat-bottomed punts of the fishermen, the dirty brown and the golden-curled water—everything flowed away, slowly, broadly and inevitably. And if Baldini looked directly below him, straight down the wall, it seemed to him as if the flowing water were sucking the foundations of the bridge with it, and he