Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Title

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Author

Patrick Süskind

Topic

• Horror

• Mystery

• Absurd

• Magic

• Realism

Year

1985

Country

Germany

Main characters

• Grenouille's mother

• Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

• Jeanne Bussie

• Father Terrier

• Madame Gaillard

• Grimal

• Giuseppe Baldini

• Chénier

• Pélissier

• Taillade-Espinasse

• Madame Arnulfi

• Dominique Druot

• Antoine Richis

• Laure Richis

Summary

Grenouille (French for "frog") was born in Paris, France, July 17 of 1738. His mother gives birth to him while working at a fish stall. She has given birth four times previously while working, which were all either stillbirths or near-dead, so she cuts his umbilical cord and leaves him to die. However, Grenouille cries out from inside the pile of fish heads and guts, and his mother is caught, tried for multiple infanticide, found guilty and beheaded. As a child, Grenouille is passed along different wet nurses, who give him away due to him being too greedy, and then is given to a parish church, which gives him to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie. She returns to the parish priest a few months later, saying that the child is possessed by the devil, as he drinks her dry and has no scent. The priest does not believe her, saying that there was no way that the child could be possessed by the devil. He sends the wet nurse away and cuddles Grenouille for a while. Curious, the priest, Terrier, leans in to take a smell. He expects to smell at least a little bit of scent, but he does not. Grenouille wakes up then and starts sniffing at the air, and Terrier feels as if the baby is sniffing at his soul, looking at his deepest secrets. Recoiling, he finds himself thinking of the baby as a devil. He runs out of the parish and across town, and gives the child to an orphanage on the outskirts of the city.

Grenouille has an extraordinary power to discern odors. He navigates the orphanage using only his nose, and barely uses his sight. The other children do not hate him, but they did try to suffocate him several times without knowing precisely why. Grenouille grew up cold and unfeeling; he was unafraid of anything and took punishment easily. When the owner of the orphanage discovers that Grenouille can locate hidden money with his sense of scent, she became afraid and later got rid of him by apprenticing him to a tanner. Later in life, the orphanage owner loses all her money and dies in a disgraceful way that she was afraid of. Grenouille explores the city during his free time, and memorizes all the smells of Paris. He has no bias or preferences against scent and seeks out every smell and every variation of every smell that he can find. He seeks scents for the sake of knowing, and he had no purpose in gathering all the scents but to satisfy his greed for smells. Paris is unhealthy and dirty, with people and their filth cramped in the city's narrow medieval streets. One day, on a day when he had memorized nearly all the smells of the city, he is surprised by a smell quite unlike the dirty, coarse ones he is familiar with. Entranced, he traces it with his nose, and finds that the source of this scent is a young, virginal girl just passing puberty (14–15 years old), who is slicing plums. Grenouille's heart starts beating; it is the start of a passion, but Grenouille, who has never felt anything like love or affection before, does not know what it is. Unnoticed, he gets closer to her, to get a better smell of her scent. The girl feels that something is not right and turns, sees Grenouille, and freezes in terror. Grenouille clamps his hand over her mouth. Scared, the girl does not fight back. Grenouille smothers her, with his eyes closed and concerned only with her scent. When she dies, he strips her, lays her down on the ground and smells her scent until it disappears from her body due to death. He does his best to remember every bit of her scent. This is the first time he felt a smell as being "good". In a happy daze, Grenouille returns to the tanner's shop where he sleeps. He decides that he must become a creator of scents, the greatest perfumer in the world, in order to create scents like the scent of the girl. He starts organizing the millions of scents he had gathered in his mental library into thousands of categories, such as fine, coarse, good, bad, fetid, and ambrosial.

In his quest to isolate and preserve scents, he becomes apprenticed to a once great perfumer, Baldini, and proves himself a talented pupil. His superior power to discern and dissect scents helps create wondrous perfumes and makes Baldini the most popular perfumer in Paris. However, Grenouille's ambitions are unmatched by technology: he cannot isolate the scent of inorganic materials, such as glass and iron, with the alembic that they use. At this shock, Grenouille falls ill with smallpox, presumably psychosomatically as a reaction to his body giving up on life as his quest can never be fulfilled. Yet Baldini has grown to cherish Grenouille for his skills and on his deathbed Baldini reveals to him that there are techniques other than distillation that can be used to preserve such odours. At this news, Grenouille miraculously recovers and resolves to journey to the city of Grasse, the home of the greatest perfumers, to continue his quest. After Grenouille leaves, great misfortune falls upon Baldini and his shop is destroyed, where he dies.

On his way to Grasse, Grenouille travels the countryside and discovers that he is disgusted with the scent of humanity. As he travels, he first avoids a city, then towns, then starts avoiding people that he can smell that are miles away. He reaches the Massif Central, and finds a haven where he is liberated from the smell of humans. In the morning he laps at a thin stream of water for a couple hours and eats whatever he can get, including moss. After that, he crawls into a long, deep shaft in the ground, as far as he can get, where he is shielded from all scent except for dirt, rock, and water. There he wedges himself against the stone and falls into a sort of meditation, first imagining himself as the creator of his world—Grenouille

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