Perfume Suskind Sparknotes

In his novel, Perfume, Suskind, a German author mocking French culture, places Grenouille in the care of Madame Gaillard, a widow who runs an orphanage outside of Paris, for the majority of his childhood. Suskind satirizes French culture through Grenouille’s lack of positive experience at the orphanage, emphasizing the ignorance and greed that plagued their society.
To start, Susskind introduces Madame Gaillard, one of the greediest people Grenouille encounters throughout his entire life. “Even when it was a matter of life and death” (p 9), Madame Gaillard only spent half of her fees on the children keeping the other half for herself, is ironic because if those children died due to her greed invalidating her compassion, she would lose the
Since Madame Gaillard took in children that were not her own, she was not seen as a mother figure even though she cared for children. Without the label of mother, Madame Gaillard managed to mistreat the children under “her ward” (p 12) without care or scrutiny from the outside world. Madame Gaillard’s title as a care giver to many children, not mother, should not have allowed Madame Gaillard to get away with the lack of care and her indifference towards the state of the children’s’ wellbeing and continued to run an orphanage full of neglected children. Suskind emphasizes the neglect the children receive to further introduce the ignorance of French society. Whom should have had something to say about the woman raising the next generation, treating her wards as animals who would endure whatever happened to them during hard times, just because she refused to spend a penny more. The societies indifference to Gaillard’s methods of raising their children helps Susskind emphasize their ignorance and greed. If the people were not ignorant and understood that the harsh environment Gaillard creates a lasting negative effect on the children, the next generation of French society, the adults may put the children in a more stable, warm home that they required. However, due to their greed the parents and adults became indifferent to the treatment of the
Growing up in the hostile environment of Madame Gaillard’s orphanage negatively affected every child who lived there, but especially Grenouille. However, the rest of the children had each other to rely on when they needed somebody. In contrast, Grenouille relied on no one for the most part because, his only genuine human interaction was with Madame Gaillard herself, although she could not really be considered human as she did not have a bone of compassion in her body, the only thing she cared about was achieving her dreams of retirement. Madame Gaillard would take in any stray child “as long as someone paid for them…” (p. 9), her only compassion toward the children under her care focused around the source of income they provided, not their well-being. Driven by her life’s desires, she and cared very little for the affect she had on those around her, Grenouille adopts this idealology from her, he cares very little for the effects that his quest for the ultimate perfume has on others around him, and an overall distaste for people in general. All of this seemed the normal way to treat others to Grenouille, because growing up he received that same cold distance between himself and humanity from Madame Gaillard and the orphans. This helps Suskind emphasize the greed in society