Madame Gaillard

TL;DR: The Parisian children's-home keeper who houses Grenouille from infancy to age eight and never notices what's wrong with him because, after a childhood blow to the head from her own father, she has no sense of smell at all.

Spoilers through Chapter 5.

Snapshot

A thin, severe, perpetually-flat-faced Parisian woman in her fifties who runs a children's home for the parish stipend, has not felt a strong emotion in decades, and is the engine that lets Grenouille's odorless infancy pass without alarm.

Role in the story

Madame Gaillard is the book's quietest, cruellest joke about indifference. The novel needs Grenouille to survive a childhood that should not have survived him — every wet nurse to date has refused him within days — and the way Süskind solves the problem is by depositing Grenouille in the only household in Paris that cannot perceive what's wrong with him. Gaillard cannot smell. She also cannot register the unease everyone else feels around the boy, because her affective range is narrow to the point of clinical.

She houses him for roughly eight years and notices essentially nothing, except that he is reliably there at meal-tally and reliably alive enough to keep collecting his stipend. When he ages out, she sells him to Grimal the tanner for fifteen francs, which is the going rate.

The book also notes, with characteristic dry symmetry, that she dies decades later in the Hôtel-Dieu poorhouse — the institutional fate she had spent her life making sure other children didn't escape.

Personality in plain English

Affectless. Not unkind, not cruel, simply unable. She runs the children's home like a ledger; she does not see the children as anything other than columns in it. The narrator suggests she has been blank since the original blow to her head, and the prose around her never warms up.

What she wants

To collect the parish stipends, balance the books, and survive long enough to retire on what she has saved. The narrator is mordant about this latter ambition: she does not.

What she fears (or hides)

Almost nothing. She has been numb so long that fear, like everything else, has flattened into routine.

Key relationships

• The young Grenouille — paid charge, eight years. She does not see him in any human sense; he does not see her either. They share a roof and exchange almost no words.
• Grimal — her customer for Grenouille at age eight. Their transaction is brief, professional, mercenary on both sides.

Visual identity

Thin, dry, severe, sallow, deeply lined. Hair pinned tight under a plain white linen coif. A faint old scar at one temple, the souvenir of the original injury. Plain dark charcoal-wool gown buttoned high at the throat, white linen kerchief at the neck, indigo-grey apron, a small ring of iron keys at her waist. Holding a wooden tally-stick scored with notches; a bowl of grey porridge on a side-table. The image is meant to be cold institutional caretaker, and the cold is the point.

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.

• Madame Gaillard (canonical — the most common form)
• Gaillard
• The children's-home mistress