Grimal

TL;DR: The brutal Parisian tanner who buys the eight-year-old Grenouille from Madame Gaillard for fifteen francs and works him in the lime pits of his rue de la Mortellerie tannery for years — surviving, in turn, only as long as it takes him to sell the boy on to Baldini and stagger to the Seine.

Spoilers through Chapter 14.

Snapshot

A broad-shouldered, ruddy, drink-flushed Parisian tradesman in his late forties, dressed in a blackened leather apron and the permanent stain of his trade, who treats apprentices as a renewable resource and underestimates one of them for exactly long enough.

Role in the story

Grimal is the second person to attempt to use Grenouille, and the second to be destroyed by him. He buys the child for cheap labor in the lime pits and bark vats — work that kills most apprentices within months. Grenouille survives anthrax under his roof in chapter 5, becomes by accident the most valuable boy in the tannery, and is sold on to Baldini in chapter 12 for fifty francs.

The same night Grimal collects his sale-price he goes drinking on the proceeds and drowns in the Seine. The book treats this as offhand justice. It does not pause to mourn him.

Personality in plain English

Brutal, miserly, blunt. Communicates by gesture, threat, and the back of his hand. A drinker. The kind of working-class master who makes his fortune on the breakable bodies of the apprentices the parish keeps sending him.

What he wants

A run of cheap labor and the money to drink. He achieves both, briefly.

What he fears (or hides)

Public scandal — anything that might cost him his master-tanner license. He is not afraid of Grenouille. That is the structural mistake he shares with everyone else who handles the boy.

Key relationships

• The young Grenouille — bought eight-year-old apprentice. Their relationship is the wordless physical hierarchy of the lime pits.
• Madame Gaillard — his supplier of cheap apprentices. A small businessman's relationship with a small businesswoman.
• Giuseppe Baldini — his customer for Grenouille at fifty francs. Grimal undersells the most valuable nose in Europe and never knows it.

Visual identity

Big-bodied — broad shoulders, thick neck, heavy gut. Florid red face from drink and the steam of his lime pits. Grizzled grey-brown hair cropped short, dark stubble. Heavy capable hands scarred from work with knives and lime, stained brown to the wrists from bark dyes. Coarse linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, blackened heavy leather apron with knife-pockets, dark wool breeches, scuffed wooden clogs. An iron-handled knife at his belt. The image you should hold of him is the leather apron — the trade made visible on his body.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Grimal (canonical — the most common form)
• Master Grimal
• The tanner