Father Terrier

TL;DR: The bookish, self-styled-rationalist priest at the Paris cloister of Saint-Merri who briefly fosters the infant Grenouille and is the first person on the page to register, with horror, that the child has no scent of his own.

Spoilers through Chapter 3.

Snapshot

A heavy-set Parisian cleric in his fifties, tonsured, fond of his own enlightenment, comically condescending to the wet nurse who returns the child to him — and silently terrified the moment he leans down to inhale Grenouille and finds nothing there.

Role in the story

Terrier appears in chapters 2 and 3. Jeanne Bussie returns the infant Grenouille to him claiming the boy is "possessed by the devil" because he has no baby smell. Terrier dismisses her superstition and takes the child into his own arms to demonstrate his rationalist composure — and is undone in a single sniff. The next morning he arranges to ship the infant out of his cloister and out of his life. He does not appear again.

He is the book's first portrait of a type it returns to obsessively: the educated man who is certain he understands the world until smell betrays him, at which point he panics and offloads the problem.

Personality in plain English

Self-satisfied, intellectually vain, kind in his self-image, decisive only when frightened. He likes to argue with the wet nurse because arguing with her confirms his own categories of reason. He stops arguing the moment his categories don't fit.

What he wants

To remain a man of the Enlightenment in a world that mostly isn't. To have a quiet, well-fed, well-bookshelved priest's life. To not be the one holding this particular baby.

What he fears (or hides)

What he just inhaled. He never tells anyone in the cloister what he smelled — or rather, what he didn't.

Key relationships

• Jeanne Bussie — the wet nurse who returns the infant. Their scene together is comic-condescending on his side and stubbornly correct on hers.
• The infant Grenouille — handled, sniffed, dispatched. One scene's worth of contact, and it costs Terrier his composure for life.

Visual identity

Heavy. Round face, double chin, pursed mouth, tonsured greying head with a fringe of grey-brown hair. Indoor-pale skin. Dressed in the standard ankle-length black wool monastic cassock with a wide white linen rabat collar, rope cincture, small wooden crucifix at the chest. In his cell: a heavy wooden desk, ledger, quill, a single tallow candle. The image he projects is learned cleric. The image Süskind catches is the precise instant that mask slips.

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.

• Father Terrier (canonical — the most common form)
• Terrier
• The priest of Saint-Merri