Several times in the novel, children are referred to as subhuman, almost human, or not quite human. This notion, allegedly espoused by the Church at the time (Father Terrier mentions it to Jeanne Bussie), seems to have its roots in the idea that very young children do not have free will--particularly in choosing to obey or disobey God. It was not only that children did not have the rights of adults and adults thus had responsibilities toward them. Although children were protected by law from being murdered (such as Grenouille's escape from infanticide), and they were provided for up to a point by the state and the church (in establishments like Madame Gaillard's), they were not considered full human beings like adults were. This lower view of children can be seen in the treatment of apprentices, who were children as young as eight (or younger) used in a fashion similar to domestic animals.It is not only the murdered victims who suffer at Grenouille's hands; the main actors in Grenouille's life tend to come to bitter or sticky ends, and the novelist usually tells the reader of those ends just as that actor is leaving Grenouille's life. Madame Gaillard, who raised Grenouille adequately to the age of eight but gave him no love or affection of any kind (because she was incapable of it), dies in complete indignity in a public hospital, which was her greatest fear. Grimal, the tanner, who had treated Grenouille abominably by making him do very hard labor and locking him in a closet to sleep, died on the night he "sold" Grenouille's apprenticeship to Baldini. The science-obsessed Marquis, after Grenouille leaves him, decides to go to and sit at the top of a 9,000-foot peak for three weeks to prove his fluidum vitale theories, and also to return himself to the age of twenty--leaving his companions in a blizzard, never to be found and most likely to die from exposure. Baldini the perfumer, too, dies when his house falls into the river after the bridge collapses, the very...