Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly, that was it! It was establishing his scent! And all at once he felt as if he stank, of sweat and vinegar, of choucroute and unwashed clothes.”

Once taken in by the priest after being abandoned by the wet nurse, the infant Grenouille immediately spooks the cleric by seeming to be more beast than child. The fact that Grenouille seems to be devoid of other senses—specifically his sight—while simultaneously trying to interrogate his surroundings with his nose, seems so bestial and alien that the priest immediately decides to get rid of him. He worries the nurse’s accusation of the demonic might prove correct.

“Security, attention, tenderness, love—or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require—were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille.”

As Grenouille begins to age, the reader begins to understand that he is quite abnormal in his emotional intelligence as well. Completely lacking what could be called a heart, he comes across more like an animal or a mechanical creation than a human being, and no amount of schooling can inculcate normal feelings or reactions in him.

“The other children, however, sensed at once what Grenouille was about. From the first day, the new arrival gave them the creeps.”

Like the priest that briefly took him in as an infant, the children at the orphanage are wary and disturbed by Grenouille’s presence. Since he has yet to mature to a point where he can use his intelligence to convince others that he is harmless, the other children see Grenouille much more clearly than the adults will in the future. They realize that there is something truly monstrous about him.

“On the other hand, everyday language soon would prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple wood, oak wood, pinewood, elm wood, pearwood, old, young, rotting, moldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips, and splinters—and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight.

As Grenouille begins to grow up, he comes into his own by fully realizing his capabilities regarding scents. For many, sight is the most vivid and insightful sense, especially concerning one’s ability to accurately describe what they have seen, using descriptive terms for shades of color, size, and shape. Grenouille, however, has this precise and distinguishing ability regarding scent, keenly able to store an almost infinite number of scents in his memory. He combines them to make other scents in his imagination the way a composer composes a work of music in his mind.

“He had the prescience of something extraordinary—this scent was the key for ordering all odors, one could understand nothing about odors if one did not understand this one scent, and his whole life would be bungled, if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it. He had to have it, not simply in order to possess it, but for his heart to be at peace.”

Drifting through life up to this point, Grenouille finally comes across a scent that he literally cannot ignore, drawn to its source no less forcefully than if he had been chained to it. This scent, moreover, seems to him like a keystone or the solution to a previously unknown mathematical problem. The scent of the girl with the plums is something that he did not know that he needed, but now that he is aware of its existence, he realizes that he cannot go on living without it.

“But after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius. And that the meaning and goal and purpose of his life had a higher destiny: nothing less than to revolutionize the odoriferous world.”

Grenouille’s murder of the girl with the plums is described as a kind of baptism, a rebirth without which he would never find his true calling. His experience with the thrill of discovering the scent, the thrill of the chase, and the thrill of taking possession of the scent and being the last one to ever experience it thrusts him irrevocably toward his ultimate destiny. His “revolution” is the murder of 25 young women, culminating with Laure Richis.

“Already he could no longer recall how the girl from the rue des Marais had looked, not her face, not her body. He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.”

In keeping with the judgments made by others about him, Grenouille demonstrates a total lack of feeling or humanity by failing to retain any details about the girl’s appearance, holding onto the only thing that matters from his point of view: her scent. Anyone else, one would imagine, would be able to recall the face of someone they had just murdered, but Grenouille recalls only the memory of the way she smelled, judging that to be the only worthy thing about her.

“It was as if he were just playing, splashing and swishing like a child busy cooking up some ghastly brew of water, grass, and mud, which he then asserts to be soup.”

At this point, in Baldini’s workshop, Grenouille has finally reached the desire of his heart: the means and opportunity to create a scent. The description of his work as akin to a child playing in the dirt is visually striking, as it lets us see Grenouille through Baldini’s eyes, who can only see an ugly boy combining ingredients in a way that could only be described as haphazard and careless, though shot through with an innocent, ignorant, and naïve kind of joy.

“Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were awakened within him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of Naples…”

Once Grenouille completes the perfume, Baldini knows at once that he succeeded. Baldini is transported instantly to times in his life long past that the scent awakens from the depths of his memory. This passage is one of the first to dive deep into the power of smell to revivify memories that have long lain dormant.

“Grenouille, too, profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him… by using the obligatory measuring glasses and scales, he learned the language of perfumery, and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him.”

Coming to work with Baldini, Grenouille initially assumes there is nothing he can gain personally to improve his own method or practice, viewing Baldini as purely a means to an end he could not reach on his own. The demands that Baldini place on him, however, force him to learn the tools of the trade and the language that accompany it. These skills serve him well in the future as he eventually goes off on his own and needs to reliably convince others of his seeming normality and trustworthiness in the trade.

“The scents he could create at Baldini’s were playthings compared with those he carried within him and that he intended to create one day.”

Even as Baldini considers the perfumes and scented products that come from Grenouille to be practically divinely inspired, they are relatively low on the scale of what Grenouille knows he can create. For Baldini, Grenouille only does the bare minimum, but that his least ambitious work can excite Baldini and his customers speaks to his otherworldly skill for this particular craft.

“Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.”

Having liberated himself from servitude to Baldini, Grenouille feels driven to leave Paris and find a place where he can have absolutely no contact with human beings. Having lived among other humans his entire life in the most disgusting circumstances, he desires to find a way to be rid of the scent of other human beings. He could not care less about where in the world he is or what he needs to do—the smell of other human beings has become too much for him to bear, and he needs to find a place devoid of all human scent.

“In the past weeks and months he had no longer fed himself with food processed by human hands—bread, sausage, cheese—but instead, whenever he felt hungry, had wolfed down anything vaguely edible that had crossed his path.”

Having spent the past several years in the service of two different masters—Grimal and Baldini—he has been brought into the world of society. Though he was never treated with anything resembling true kindness or dignity, he was still able to live relatively like any other servant. Now, out on his own, he reverts to a state much more animal-like, much like his earliest years as a child when he went years barely even speaking a word.

“What he now felt was the fear of not knowing much of anything about himself. It was the opposite pole of that other fear. He could not flee it, but had to move toward it. He had to know for certain—even if that knowledge proved too terrible—whether he had an odor or not.”

At the end of his time in the cave on the mountain, Grenouille realizes for the first time that he himself has no scent. He can smell the tiniest, least fragrant thing from miles away, and this sudden realization throws him into an existential crisis. Everything he knows about the world he knows through the way it smells, so to realize that he has no scent is to realize that he knows absolutely nothing about himself; to know nothing of one’s self is a horrible and terrifying thing.

“But now, in the streets of Montpellier, Grenouille sensed and saw with his own eyes—and each time he saw it anew, a powerful sense of pride washed over him—that he exerted an effect on people.”

After reentering society following the seven years he spent in the wild, Grenouille concocts a way of creating a perfume for himself that would imitate the smell of a generic human being—not of a specific human being, as he would later become obsessed with, but the general notes that demarcate what it means to be a human. With this new scent, he suddenly realizes that he is no longer an object of fear or derision, but he can now be simply acknowledged and ignored. He is now subconsciously treated like any other person, something that he has never before experienced.

“For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath.”

Scent is the one sensation, Grenouille is convinced, that can never be denied thanks to its intrinsic association with something absolutely necessary for human life: breathing. Life is in the breath, and so the same act of breathing is at once the act of inhaling and inviting a smell into one’s self. Sight, touch, taste, and hearing can all be denied without depriving the living subject of their life, but breath is necessary, and so is scent.

“He had to tell the tale of the robbers over and over… so he gained some facility in speaking—admittedly only a very limited one, since he had never in all his life handled speech well—and, what was even more important to him, a practiced routine for lying.”

In a similar way he had gained facility in the perfume trade under the watchful gaze and tutelage of Baldini, he is now gaining a facility in speaking and—more importantly, for his purposes—lying and manipulating others through words. While Grenouille never really encounters a situation that requires great talent in verbal deceit, he still considers it a useful tactic to practice should he ever need it.

“People will be overwhelmed, disarmed, helpless before the magic of this girl, and they will not know why.”

For only the second time in his life, Grenouille encounters a human scent that fascinates him. Grenouille, contemplating his new reality under his increasing sense of superiority, is pleased with being the only one who will ever know the true source of the girl’s magnetic attraction. Others would attribute it to her physical beauty or the charm of her personality, but Grenouille knows the truth: it is her scent.

“Grenouille encouraged him in this opinion, displaying doltish drudgery and not a hint of ambition, acting as if he comprehended nothing of his own genius and were merely executing the orders of the more experienced Druot, without whom he would be a cipher.”

At this point in his career, Grenouille has gained enough experience to be a practiced manipulator. While not the most intelligent man, he is intelligent enough to realize that he is best served by allowing Druot to think he is the smart one and play the part of a simpleton, content to simply carry out orders. All the while, Grenouille is maneuvering the pieces wherever he sees fit, merely preparing the way to be left completely alone and to his own devices to reach a point where he can begin carrying out his master plan.

“It was not just that all the murders had been carried out in the same efficient manner, but the very choice of victims betrayed intentions almost economical in their planning.”

Antoine betrays an affinity with Grenouille, at least as far as his ability to pick up on what this anonymous murderer is after. While the pattern hasn’t been noticed by anyone else as of yet, Antoine is able to put the pieces together, realizing that there is a specific type of victim the murderer seeks out. While he doesn’t have any idea about Grenouille’s desire for the girls’ scents, he realizes that there is a specific physical type that was targeted—at least at first—and that they were all a specific age and of striking beauty.

“Because he was in the position to put himself inside the mind of the would-be murderer of his daughter, he had made himself vastly superior to the murderer.”

While not a murderer himself, Antoine is a sociopath of a different order. Not only does he harbor semi-incestuous thoughts regarding his own daughter, but he is consumed with lust for power and prestige, and he matches Grenouille in his ability to create manipulative plans and his complete lack of empathy for anyone other than himself. Grenouille views Laure through a purely mechanical lens, desiring her as one would desire any other lifeless object. Antoine views Laure with the same detached objectivity, content to use her as a pawn in his scheme to gain riches and honor. He would use her in a manner that is not too far removed from Grenouille’s more obviously horrific intentions for his daughter.

“Feelings of humility and gratitude welled up within him. ‘I thank you,’ he said softly, ‘I thank you, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, for being what you are!’ So touched was he by himself.”

At this point in the narrative, Grenouille sees himself as a god. Grenouille here is practically a new Narcissus, completely absorbed with himself and completely enraptured by his own genius. Incapable of genuine gratitude or good feelings toward anyone else in the world, he admits a small amount of gratitude to and love for himself (more than he has directed to anything or anyone else).

“Her form did not interest him. She no longer existed for him as a body, but only as a disembodied scent.”

As with the girl with the plums from his youth, Laure is useful to him only as a source of the scent she carried. She is not a person, not a woman, not someone to love or protect; she is not even a corpse to treat respectfully or to fear. Laure is her scent, and now he is in possession of it.