Perfume. The story of a murderer

One

IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name-in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fbuche’s, Bonaparte’s, etc.-has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, to wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

And of course the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city of France. And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench: between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie, the Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact. For eight hundred years the dead had been brought here from the Hotel-Dieu and from the surrounding parish churches, for eight hundred years, day in, day out, corpses by the dozens had been carted here and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses. Only later-on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard’s neighbors to more than mere protest and to actual insurrection -was it finally closed and abandoned. Millions of bones and skulls were shoveled into the catacombs of Montmartre and in its place a food market was erected.

Here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom, Jean-Baptiste Grenouilie was born on July 17, 1738. It was one of the hottest days of the year. The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapor, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odor of burnt animal horn, out into the nearby alleys. When the labor pains began, Grenouille’s mother was standing at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted. The fish, ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odor of corpses. Grenouille’s mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impressions. She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths, for the bloody meat that had emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already, nor had lived much longer, and by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river. It would be much the same this day, and Grenouille’s mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and-except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption-suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children… Grenouille’s mother wished that it were already over. And when the final contractions began, she squatted down under the gutting table and there gave birth, as she had done four times before, and cut the newborn thing’s umbilical cord with her butcher knife. But then, on account of the heat and the stench, which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable, numbing something-like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils-she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there, knife in hand.

Tumult and turmoil. The crowd stands in a circle around her, staring, someone hails the police. The woman with the knife in her hand is still lying in the street. Slowly she comes to.

What has happened to her?

“Nothing.”

What is she doing with that knife?

“Nothing.”

Where does the blood on her skirt come from?

“From the fish.”

She stands up, tosses the knife aside, and walks off to wash.

And then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table begins to squall. They have a look, and beneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads they discover the newborn child. They pull it out. As prescribed by law, they give it to a wet nurse and arrest the mother. And since she confesses, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had with those other four by the way, she is tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weeks later decapitated at the place de Greve.

By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprived the other sucklings of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood, for it was impossible to make a living nursing just one babe. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, instantly wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. But since these convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time; since therefore the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily high; since for that reason the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate of transport; since, moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously to set a child at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge the other formalities… thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties that seemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because time was short as well, officer La Fosse revoked his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptize him and decide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste. And because on that day the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they did not have the child shipped to Rouen, but instead pampered him at the cloister’s expense. To this end, he was given to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive, until further notice, three francs per week for her trouble.

Two

A FEW WEEKS later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, market basket in hand, at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald monk of about fifty with a light odor of vinegar about him-Father Terrier-she said “There!” and set her market basket down on the threshold.

“What’s that?” asked Terrier, bending down over the basket and sniffing at it, in the hope that it was something edible.

“The bastard of that woman from the rue aux Fers who killed her babies!”

The monk poked about in the basket with his finger till he had exposed the face of the sleeping infant.

“He looks good. Rosy pink and well nourished.”

“Because he’s stuffed himself on me. Because he’s pumped me dry down to the bones. But I’ve put a stop to that. Now you can feed him yourselves with goat’s milk, with pap, with beet juice. He’ll gobble up anything, that bastard will.”

Father Terrier was an easygoing man. Among his duties was the administration of the cloister’s charities, the distribution of its moneys to the poor and needy. And for that he expected a thank-you and that he not be bothered further. He despised technical details, because details meant difficulties and difficulties meant ruffling his composure, and he simply would not put up with that. He was upset that he had even opened the gate. He wished that this female would take her market basket and go home and let him alone with her suckling problems. Slowly he straightened up, and as he did he breathed the scent of milk and cheesy wool exuded by the wet nurse. It was a pleasant aroma.

“I don’t understand what it is you want. I really don’t understand what you’re driving at. I can only presume that it would certainly do no harm to this infant if he were to spend a good while yet lying at your breast.”

“None to him,” the wet nurse snarled back, “but plenty to me. I’ve lost ten pounds and been eating like I was three women. And for what? For three francs a week!”

“Ah, I understand,” said Terrier, almost relieved. “I catch your drift. Once again, it’s a matter of money.”

“No!” said the wet nurse.

“Of course it is! It’s always a matter of money. When there’s a knock at this gate, it’s a matter of money. Just once I’d like to open it and find someone standing there for whom it was a matter of something else. Someone, for instance, with some little show of thoughtfulness. Fruit, perhaps, or a few nuts. After all, in autumn there are lots of things someone could come by with. Flowers maybe. Or if only someone would simply come and say a friendly word. ‘God bless you, Father Terrier, I wish you a good day!’ But I’ll probably never live to see it happen. If it isn’t a beggar, it’s a merchant, and if it isn’t a merchant, it’s a tradesman, and if it isn’t alms he wants, then he presents me with a bill. I can’t even go out into the street anymore. When I go out on the street, I can’t take three steps before I’m hedged in by folks wanting money!”

“Not me,” said the wet nurse.

“But I’ll tell you this: you aren’t the only wet nurse in the parish. There are hundreds of excellent foster mothers who would scramble for the chance of putting this charming babe to their breast for three francs a week, or to supply him with pap or juices or whatever nourishment…”

“Then give him to one of them!”

“… On the other hand, it’s not good to pass a child around like that. Who knows if he would flourish as well on someone else’s milk as on yours. He’s used to the smell of your breast, as you surely know, and to the beat of your heart.”

And once again he inhaled deeply of the warm vapors streaming from the wet nurse.

But then, noticing that his words had made no impression on her, he said, “Now take the child home with you! I’ll speak to the prior about all this. I shall suggest to him that in the future you be given four francs a week.”

“No,” said the wet nurse.

“All right-five!”

“No.”

“How much more do you want, then?” Terrier shouted at her. “Five francs is a pile of money for the menial task of feeding a baby.”

“I don’t want any money, period,” said the wet nurse. “I want this bastard out of my house.”

“But why, my good woman?” said Terrier, poking his finger in the basket again. “He really is an adorable child. He’s rosy pink, he doesn’t cry, and he’s been baptized.”

“He’s possessed by the devil.”

Terrier quickly withdrew his finger from the basket.

“Impossible! It is absolutely impossible for an infant to be possessed by the devil. An infant is not yet a human being; it is a prehuman being and does not yet possess a fully developed soul. Which is why it is of no interest to the devil. Can he talk already, perhaps? Does he twitch and jerk? Does he move things about in the room? Does some evil stench come from him?”

“He doesn’t smell at all,” said the wet nurse.

“And there you have it! That is a clear sign. If he were possessed by the devil, then he would have to stink.”

And to soothe the wet nurse and to put his own courage to the test, Terrier lifted the basket and held it up to his nose.

“I smell absolutely nothing out of the ordinary,” he said after he had sniffed for a while, “really nothing out of the ordinary. Though it does appear as if there’s an odor coming from his diapers.” And he held out the basket to her so that she could confirm his opinion.

“That’s not what I mean,”-said the wet nurse peevishly, shoving the basket away. “I don’t mean what’s in the diaper. His soil smells, that’s true enough. But it’s the bastard himself, he doesn’t smell.”

“Because he’s healthy,” Terrier cried, “because he’s healthy, that’s why he doesn’t smell! Only sick babies smell, everyone knows that. It’s well known that a child with the pox smells like horse manure, and one with scarlet fever like old apples, and a consumptive child smells like onions. He is healthy, that’s all that’s wrong with him. Do you think he should stink? Do your own children stink?”

“No,” said the wet nurse. “My children smell like human children ought to smell.”

Terrier carefully placed the basket back on the ground, for he could sense rising within him the first waves of his anger at this obstinate female. It was possible that he would need to move both arms more freely as the debate progressed, and he didn’t want the infant to be harmed in the process. But for the present, he knotted his hands behind his back, shoved his tapering belly toward the wet nurse, and asked sharply, “You maintain, then, that you know how a human child-which may I remind you, once it is baptized, is also a child of God-is supposed to smell?”

“Yes,” said the wet nurse.

“And you further maintain that, if it does not smell the way you-you, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie from the rue Saint-Denis!-think it ought to smell, it is therefore a child of the devil?”

He swung his left hand out from behind his back and menacingly held the question mark of his index finger in her face. The wet nurse thought it over. She was not happy that the conversation had all at once turned into a theological cross-examination, in which she could only be the loser.

“That’s not what I meant to say,” she answered evasively. “You priests will have to decide whether all this has anything to do with the devil or not, Father Terrier. That’s not for such as me to say. I only know one thing: this baby makes my flesh creep because it doesn’t smell the way children ought to smell.”

“Aha,” said Terrier with satisfaction, letting his arm swing away again. “You retract all that about the devil, do you? Good. But now be so kind as to tell me: what does a baby smell like when he smells the way you think he ought to smell? Well?”

“He smells good,” said the wet nurse.

“What do you mean, ‘good’?” Terrier bellowed at her. “Lots of things smell good. A bouquet of lavender smells good. Stew meat smells good. The gardens of Arabia smell good. But what does a baby smell like, is what I want to know.”

The wet nurse hesitated. She knew very well how babies smell, she knew precisely-after all she had fed, tended, cradled, and kissed dozens of them… She could find them at night with her nose. Why, right at that moment she bore that baby smell clearly in her nose. But never until now had she described it in words.

“Well?” barked Terrier, clicking his fingernails impatiently.

“Well it’s-” the wet nurse began, “it’s not all that easy to say, because… because they don’t smell the same all over, although they smell good ail over, Father, you know what I mean? Their feet, for instance, they smell like a smooth, warm stone-or no, more like curds… or like butter, like fresh butter, that’s it exactly. They smell like fresh butter. And their bodies smell like… like a griddle cake that’s been soaked in milk. And their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick, there, see where I mean, Father, there where you’ve got nothing left…” And she tapped the bald spot on the head of the monk, who, struck speechless for a moment by this flood of detailed inanity, had obediently bent his head down. “There, right there, is where they smell best of all. It smells like caramel, it smells so sweet, so wonderful, Father, you have no idea! Once you’ve smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody else’s. And that’s how little children have to smell-and no other way. And if they don’t smell like that, if they don’t have any smell at all up there, even less than cold air does, like that little bastard there, then… You can explain it however you like, Father, but I”-and she crossed her arms resolutely beneath her bosom and cast a look of disgust toward the basket at her feet as if it contained toads-”I, Jeanne Bussie, will not take that thing back!”

Father Terrier slowly raised his lowered head and ran his fingers across his bald head a few tirnes as if hoping to put the hair in order, passed his finger beneath his nose as if by accident, and sniffed thoughtfully.

“Like caramel…?” he asked, attempting to find his stern tone again. “Caramel! What do you know about caramel? Have you ever eaten any?”

“Not exactly,” said the wet nurae. “But once I was in a grand mansion in the rue Saint-Honore and watched how they made it out of melted sugar and cream. It smelled so good that I’ve never forgotten it.”

“Yes, yes. All right,” said Terrier and took his finger from his nose. “But please hold your tongue now! I find it quite exhausting to continue a conversation with you on such a level. I have determined that, for whatever reason, you refuse to nourish any longer the babe put under your care, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and are returning him herewith to his temporary guardian, the cloister of Saint-Merri. I find that distressing, but I apparently cannot alter the fact. You are discharged.”

With that he grabbed the basket, took one last whiff of that fleeting woolly, warm milkiness, and slammed the door. Then he went to his office.

Three

FATHER TERRIER was an educated man. He had not merely studied theology, but had read the philosophers as well, and had dabbled with botany and alchemy on the side. He had a rather high opinion of his own critical faculties. To be sure, he would never go so far as some-who questioned the miracles, the oracles, the very truth of Holy Scripture-even though the biblical texts could not, strictly speaking, be explained by reason alone, indeed often directly contradicted it. He preferred not to meddle with such problems, they were too discomfiting for him and would only land him in the most agonizing insecurity and disquiet, whereas to make use of one’s reason one truly needed both security and quiet. What he most vigorously did combat, however, were the superstitious notions of the simple folk: witches and fortune-telling cards, the wearing of amulets, the evil eye, exorcisms, hocus-pocus at full moon, and all the other acts they performed-it was really quite depressing to see how such heathenish customs had still not been uprooted a good thousand years after the firm establishment of the Christian religion! And most instances of so-called satanic possession or pacts with the devil proved on closer inspection to be superstitious mummery. Of course, to deny the existence of Satan himself, to doubt his power-Terrier could not go so far as that; ecclesiastical bodies other than one small, ordinary monk were assigned the task of deciding about such matters touching the very foundations of theology. But on the other hand, it was clear as day that when a simple soul like that wet nurse maintained that she had spotted a devilish spirit, the devil himself could not possibly have a hand in it. The very fact that she thought she had spotted him was certain proof that there was nothing devilish to be found, for the devil would certainly never be stupid enough to let himself be unmasked by the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie. And with her nose no less! With the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses! As if hell smelled of sulfur and paradise of incense and myrrh! The worst sort of superstition, straight out of the darkest days of paganism, when people still lived like beasts, possessing no keenness of the eye, incapable of distinguishing colors, but presuming to be able to smell blood, to scent the difference between friend and foe, to be smelled out by cannibal giants and werewolves and the Furies, all the while offering their ghastly gods stinking, smoking burnt sacrifices. How repulsive! “The fool sees with his nose” rather than his eyes, they say, and apparently the light of God-given reason would have to shine yet another thousand years before the last remnants of such primitive beliefs were banished.

“Ah yes, and you poor little child! Innocent creature! Lying in your basket and slumbering away, with no notion of the ugly suspicions raised against you. That impudent woman dared to claim you don’t smell the way human children are supposed to smell. Well, what do we have to say to that? Pooh-peedooh!”

And he rocked the basket gently on his knees, stroking the infant’s head with his finger and repeating “poohpeedooh” from time to time, an expression he thought had a gentle, soothing effect on small children. “You’re supposed to smell like caramel, what nonsense, poohpeedooh!”

After a while he pulled his finger back, held it under his nose and sniffed, but could smell nothing except the choucroute he had eaten at lunch.

He hesitated a moment, looked around him to make sure no one was watching, lifted the basket, lowered his fat nose into it. Expecting to inhale an odor, he sniffed all around the infant’s head, so close to it that the thin reddish baby hair tickled his nostrils. He did not know exactly how babies’ heads were supposed to smell. Certainly not like caramel, that much was clear, since caramel was melted sugar, and how could a baby that until now had drunk only milk smell like melted sugar? It might smell like milk, like wet nurse’s milk. But it didn’t smell like milk. It might smell like hair, like skin and hair and maybe a little bit of baby sweat. And Terrier sniffed with the intention of smelling skin, hair, and a little baby sweat. But he smelled nothing. For the life of him he couldn’t. Apparently an infant has no odor, he thought, that must be it. An infant, assuming it is kept clean, simply doesn’t smell, any more than it speaks, or walks, or writes. Such things come only with age. Strictly speaking, human beings first emit an odor when they reach puberty. That’s how it is, that’s all Wasn’t it Horace himself who wrote, “The youth is gamy as a buck, the maiden’s fragrance blossoms as does the white narcissus…”?-and the Romans knew all about that! The odor of humans is always a fleshly odor-that is, a sinful odor. How could an infant, which does not yet know sin even in its dreams, have an odor? How could it smell? Poohpee-dooh-not a chance of it!

He had placed the basket back on his knees and now rocked it gently. The babe still slept soundly. Its right fist, small and red, stuck out from under the cover and now and then twitched sweetly against his cheek. Terrier smiled and suddenly felt very cozy. For a moment he allowed himself the fantastic thought that he was the father of the child. He had not become a monk, but rather a normal citizen, an upstanding craftsman perhaps, had taken a wife, a warm wife fragrant with milk and wool, and had produced a son with her and he was rocking him here now on his own knees, his own child, poohpoohpoohpeedooh… The thought of it made him feel good. There was something so normal and right about the idea. A father rocking his son on his knees, poohpeedooh, a vision as old as the world itself and yet always new and normal, as long as the world would exist, ah yes! Terrier felt his heart glow with sentimental coziness.

Then the child awoke. Its nose awoke first. The tiny nose moved, pushed upward, and sniffed. It sucked air in and snorted it back out in short puffs, like an imperfect sneeze. Then the nose wrinkled up, and the child opened its eyes. The eyes were of an uncertain color, between oyster gray and creamy opal white, covered with a kind of slimy film and apparently not very well adapted for sight. Terrier had the impression that they did not even perceive him. But not so the nose. While the child’s dull eyes squinted into the void, the nose seemed to fix on a particular target, and Terrier had the very odd feeling that he himself, his person, Father Terrier, was that target. The tiny wings of flesh around the two tiny holes in the child’s face swelled like a bud opening to bloom. Or rather, like the cups of that small meat-eating plant that was kept in the royal botanical gardens. And like the plant, they seemed to create an eerie suction. It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils, as if it were staring intently at him, scrutinizing him, more piercingly than eyes could ever do, as if it were using its nose to devour something whole, something that came from him, from Terrier, and that he could not hold that something back or hide it,… 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. He felt naked and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him while revealing nothing of himself. The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his innards. His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose, which wasn’t even a proper nose, but only a pug of a nose, a tiny perforated organ, forever crinkling and puffing and quivering. Terrier shuddered. He felt sick to his stomach. He pulled back his own nose as if he smelled something foul that he wanted nothing to do with. Gone was the homey thought that his might be his own flesh and blood. Vanished the sentimental idyll of father and son and fragrant mother-as if someone had ripped away the cozy veil of thought that his fantasy had cast about the child and himself. A strange, cold creature lay there on his knees, a hostile animal, and were he not a man by nature prudent, God-fearing, and given to reason, in the rush of nausea he would have hurled it like a spider from him.

Terrier wrenched himself to his feet and set the basket on the table. He wanted to get rid of the thing, as quickly as possible, right away if possible, immediately if possible.

And then it began to wail. It squinted up its eyes, gaped its gullet wide, and gave a screech so repulsively shrill that the blood in Terrier’s veins congealed. He shook the basket with an outstretched hand and shouted “Poohpeedooh” to silence the child, but it only bellowed more loudly and turned completely blue in the face and looked as if it would burst from bellowing.

Away with it! thought Terrier, away this very instant with this… he was about to say “devil,” but caught himself and refrained… away with this monster, with this insufferable child! But away where? He knew a dozen wet nurses and orphanages in the neighborhood, but that was too near, too close for comfort, get the thing farther away, so far away that you couldn’t hear it, so far away that it could not be dropped on your doorstep again every hour or so; if possible it must be taken to another parish, on the other side of the river would be even better, and best of all extra mums, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, that was it! That was the place for this screaming brat, far off to the east, beyond the Bastille, where at night the city gates were locked.

And he hitched up his cassock and grabbed the bellowing basket and ran off, ran through the tangle of alleys to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, eastward up the Seine, out of the city, far, far out the rue de Charonne, almost to its very end, where at an address near the cloister of Madeleine de Trenelle, he knew there lived a certain Madame Gaillard, who took children to board no matter of what age or sort, as long as someone paid for them, and there he handed over the child, still screaming, paid a year in advance, and fled back into the city, and once at the cloister cast his clothes from him as if they were foully soiled, washed himself from head to foot, and crept into bed in his cell, crossing himself repeatedly, praying long, and finally with some relief falling asleep.

Four

MADAME GAILLARD’S life already lay behind her, though she was not yet thirty years old. To the world she looked as old as her years-and at the same time two, three, a hundred times older, like the mummy of a young girl. But on the inside she was long since dead. When she was a child, her father had struck her across the forehead with a poker, just above the base of the nose, and she had lost for good all sense of smell and every sense of human warmth and human coldness-indeed, every human passion. With that one blow, tenderness had become as foreign to her as enmity, joy as strange as despair. She felt nothing when later she slept with a man, and just as little when she bore her children. She did not grieve over those that died, nor rejoice over those that remained to her. When her husband beat her, she did not flinch, and she felt no sense of relief when he died of cholera in the Hotel-Dieu. The only two sensations that she was aware of were a very slight depression at the approach of her monthly migraine and a very slight elevation of mood at its departure. Otherwise, this numbed woman felt nothing. On the other hand… or perhaps precisely because of her total lack of emotion… Madame Gaillard had a merciless sense of order and justice. She showed no preference for any one of the children entrusted to her nor discriminated against any one of them. She served up three meals a day and not the tiniest snack more. She diapered the little ones three times a day, but only until their second birthday. Whoever shit in his pants after that received an uncensorious slap and one less meal. Exactly one half of the boarding fees were spent for her wards, exactly one half she retained for herself. She did not attempt to increase her profits when prices went down; and in hard times she did not charge a single sol extra, even when it was a matter of life and death. Otherwise her business would have been of no value to her. She needed the money. She had figured it down to the penny. In her old age she wanted to buy an annuity, with just enough beyond that so that she could afford to die at home rather than perish miserably in the Hotel-Dieu as her husband had. The death itself had left her cold. But she dreaded a communal, public death among hundreds of strangers. She wanted to afford a private death, and for that she needed her full cut of the boarding fees. True, there were winters when three or four of her two dozen little boarders died. Still, her record was considerably better than that of most other private foster mothers and surpassed by far the record of the great public and ecclesiastical orphanages, where the losses often came to nine out of ten. There were plenty of replacements. Paris produced over ten thousand new foundlings, bastards, and orphans a year. Several such losses were quite affordable.

For little Grenouille, Madame Gaillard’s establishment was a blessing. He probably could not have survived anywhere else. But here, with this small-souled woman, he throve. He had a tough constitution. Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again. He could eat watery soup for days on end, he managed on the thinnest milk, digested the rottenest vegetables and spoiled meat. In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest. True, he bore scars and chafings and scabs from it all, and a slightly crippled foot left him with a limp, but he lived. He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before. He required a minimum ration of food and clothing for his body. For his soul he required nothing. Security, attention, tenderness, love-or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require— were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille. Or rather, so it seems to us, he had totally dispensed with them just to go on living-from the very start. The cry that followed his birth, the cry with which he had brought himself to people’s attention and his mother to the gallows, was not an instinctive cry for sympathy and love. That cry, emitted upon careful consideration, one might almost say upon mature consideration, was the newborn’s decision against love and nevertheless for life. Under the circumstances, the latter was possible only without the former, and had the child demanded both, it would doubtless have abruptly come to a grisly end. Of course, it could have grabbed the other possibility open to it and held its peace and thus have chosen the path from birth to death without a detour by way of life, sparing itself and the world a great deal of mischief. But to have made such a modest exit would have demanded a modicum of native civility, and that Grenouille did not possess. He was an abomination from the start.

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice.

Obviously he did not decide this as an adult would decide, who requires his more or less substantial experience and reason to choose among various options. But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be.

Or like that tick in the tree, for which life has nothing better to offer than perpetual hibernation. The ugly little tick, which by rolling its blue-gray body up into a ball offers the least possible surface to the world; which by making its skin smooth and dense emits nothing, lets not the tiniest bit of perspiration escape. The tick, which makes itself extra small and inconspicuous so that no one will see it and step on it. The lonely tick, which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind, deaf, and dumb, and simply sniffs, sniffs all year long, for miles around, for the blood of some passing animal that it could never reach on its own power. The tick could let itself drop. It could fall to the floor of the forest and creep a millimeter or two here or there on its six tiny legs and lie down to die under the leaves-it would be no great loss, God knows. But the tick, stubborn, sullen, and loathsome, huddles there and lives and waits. Waits, for that most improbable of chances that will bring blood, in animal form, directly beneath its tree. And only then does it abandon caution and drop, and scratch and bore and bite into that alien flesh…

The young Grenouille was such a tick. He lived encapsulated in himself and waited for better times. He gave the world nothing but his dung-no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent. Every other woman would have kicked this monstrous child out. But not Madame Gaillard. She could not smell that he did not smell, and she expected no stirrings from his soul, because her own was sealed tight.

The other children, however, sensed at once what Grenouille was about. From the first day, the new arrival gave them the creeps. They avoided the box in which he lay and edged closer together in their beds as if it had grown colder in the room. The younger ones would sometimes cry out in the night; they felt a draft sweep through the room. Others dreamed something was taking their breath away. One day the older ones conspired to suffocate him. They piled rags and blankets and straw over his face and weighed it all down with bricks. When Madame Gaillard dug him out the next morning, he was crumpled and squashed and blue, but not dead. They tried it a couple of times more, but in vain. Simple strangulation-using their bare hands or stopping up his mouth and nose— would have been a dependable method, but they did not dare try it. They didn’t want to touch him. He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can’t bring yourself to crush in your own hand disgusts you.

As he grew older, they gave up their attempted murders. They probably realized that he could not be destroyed. Instead, they stayed out of his way, ran off, or at least avoided touching him. They did not hate him. They weren’t jealous of him either, nor did they begrudge him the food he ate. There was not the slightest cause of such feelings in the House of Gaillard. It simply disturbed them that he was there. They could not stand the nonsmell of him. They were afraid of him.

Five

LOOKED AT objectively, however, there was nothing at all about him to instill terror. As he grew older, he was not especially big, nor strong-ugly, true, but not so extremely ugly that people would necessarily have taken fright at him. He was not aggressive, nor underhanded, nor furtive, he did not provoke people. He preferred to keep out of their way. And he appeared to possess nothing even approaching a fearful intelligence. Not until age three did he finally begin to stand on two feet; he spoke his first word at four, it was the word “fishes,” which in a moment of sudden excitement burst from him like an echo when a fishmonger coming up the rue de Charonne cried out his wares in the distance. The next words he parted with were “pelargonium,” “goat stall,” “savoy cabbage,” and “Jacqueslorreur,” this last being the name of a gardener’s helper from the neighboring convent of the Filles de la Croix, who occasionally did rough, indeed very rough work for Madame Gaillard, and was most conspicuous for never once having washed in all his life. He was less concerned with verbs, adjectives, and expletives. Except for “yes” and “no”-which, by the way, he used for the first time quite late-he used only nouns, and essentially only nouns for concrete objects, plants, animals, human beings— and only then if the objects, plants, animals, or human beings would subdue him with a sudden attack of odor.

One day as he sat on a cord of beechwood logs snapping and cracking in the March sun, he first uttered the word “wood.” He had seen wood a hundred times before, had heard the word a hundred times before. He understood it, too, for he had often been sent to fetch wood in winter. But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to trouble himself to speak its name. It happened first on that March day as he sat on the cord of wood, The cord was stacked beneath overhanging eaves and formed a kind of bench along the south side of Madam Gaillard’s shed. The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of the cord came a mossy aroma; and in the warm sun, bits of resin odor crumbled from the pinewood planking of the shed.

Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed. He had closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing. He only smelled the aroma of the wood rising up around him to be captured under the bonnet of the eaves. He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half hour or more, he gagged up the word “wood.” He vomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood. And that brought him to himself, rescued him only moments before the overpowering presence of the wood, its aroma, was about to suffocate him. He shook himself, slid down off the logs, and tottered away as if on wooden legs. Days later he was still completely fuddled by the intense olfactory experience, and whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, “wood, wood.”

And so he learned to speak. With words designating nonsmelling objects, with abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature, he had the greatest difficulty. He could not retain them, confused them with one another, and even as an adult used them unwillingly and often incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude, etc.-what these were meant to express remained a mystery to 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. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouilie’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on… Or why should smoke possess only the name “smoke,” when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire… or why should earth, landscape, air-each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odor and thus animated with another identity-still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt if language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.

At age six he had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily. There was not an object in Madame Gaillard’s house, no place along the northern reaches of the rue de Charonne, no person, no stone, tree, bush, or picket fence, no spot be it ever so small, that he did not know by smell, could not recognize again by holding its uniqueness firmly in his memory. He had gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so, randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world. It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odors that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences— and at an age when other children stammer words, so painfully drummed into them, to formulate their first very inadequate sentences describing the world. Perhaps the closest analogy to his talent is the musical wunderkind, who has heard his way inside melodies and harmonies to the alphabet of individual tones and now composes completely new melodies and harmonies all on his own. With the one difference, however, that the alphabet of odors is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself.

To the world he appeared to grow ever more secretive. What he loved most was to rove alone through the northern parts of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, through vegetable gardens and vineyards, across meadows. Sometimes he did not come home in the evening, remained missing for days. The rod of punishment awaiting him he bore without a whimper of pain. Confining him to the house, denying him meals, sentencing him to hard labor-nothing could change his behavior. Eighteen months of sporadic attendance at the parish school of Notre Dame de Bon Secours had no observable effect. He learned to spell a bit and to write his own name, nothing more. His teacher considered him feebleminded.

Madame Gaillard, however, noticed that he had certain abilities and qualities that were highly unusual, if not to say supernatural: the childish fear of darkness and night seemed to be totally foreign to him. You could send him anytime on an errand to the cellar, where other children hardly dared go even with a lantern, or out to the shed to fetch wood on the blackest night. And he never took a light with him and still found his way around and immediately brought back what was demanded, without making one wrong move-not a stumble, not one thing knocked over. More remarkable still, Madame Gaillard thought she had discovered his apparent ability to see right through paper, cloth, wood, even through brick walls and locked doors. Without ever entering the dormitory, he knew how many of her wards-and which ones-where in there. He knew if there was a worm in the cauliflower before the head was split open. And once, when she had hidden her money so well that she couldn’t find it herself (she kept changing her hiding places), he pointed without a second’s search to a spot behind a fireplace beam-and there it was! He could even see into the future, because he would infallibly predict the approach of a visitor long before the person arrived or of a thunderstorm when there was not the least cloud in the sky. Of course, he could not see any of these things with his eyes, but rather caught their scents with a nose that from day to day smelled such things more keenly and precisely: the worm in the cauliflower, the money behind a beam, and people on the other side of a wall or several blocks away. But Madame Gaillard would not have guessed that fact in her wildest dream, even if that blow with the poker had left her olfactory organ intact. She was convinced that, feebleminded or not, the lad had second sight. And since she also knew that people with second sight bring misfortune and death with them, he made her increasingly nervous. What made her more nervous still was the unbearable thought of living under the same roof with someone who had the gift of spotting hidden money behind walls and beams; and once she had discovered that Grenouille possessed this dreadful ability, she set about getting rid of him. And it just so happened that at about the same time-Grenouille had turned eight-the cloister of Saint-Merri, without mention of the reason, ceased to pay its yearly fee. Madame did not dun them. For appearances’ sake, she waited an additional week, and when the money owed her still had not appeared, she took the lad by the hand and walked with him into the city.

She was acquainted with a tanner named Grimal-, who lived near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie and had a notorious need for young laborers-not for regular apprentices and journeymen, but for cheap coolies. There were certain jobs in the trade— scraping the meat off rotting hides, mixing the poisonous tanning fluids and dyes, producing the caustic lyes-so perilous, that, if possible, a responsible tanning master did not waste his skilled workers on them, but instead used unemployed riffraff, tramps, or, indeed, stray children, about whom there would be no inquiry in dubious situations. Madame Gaillard knew of course that by al! normal standards Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal’s tannery. But she was not a woman who bothered herself about such things. She had, after all, done her duty. Her custodianship was ended. What happened to her ward from here on was not her affair. If he made it through, well and good. If he died, that was well and good too-the main thing was that it all be done legally. And so she had Monsieur Grimal provide her with a written receipt for the boy she was handing over to him, gave him in return a receipt for her brokerage fee of fifteen francs, and set out again for home in the rue de Charonne. She felt not the slightest twinge of conscience. On the contrary, she thought her actions not merely legal but also just, for if a child for whom no one was paying were to stay on with her, it would necessarily be at the expense of the other children or, worse, at her own expense, endangering the future of the other children, or worse, her own future-that is, her own private and sheltered death, which was the only thing that she still desired from life.

Since we are to leave Madame Gaillard behind us at this point in our story and shall not meet her again, we shall take a few sentences to describe the end of her days. Although dead in her heart since childhood, Madame unfortunately lived to be very, very old. In 1782, just short of her seventieth birthday, she gave up her business, purchased her annuity as planned, sat in her little house, and waited for death. But death did not come. What came in its place was something not a soul in the world could have anticipated: a revolution, a rapid transformation of all social, moral, and transcendental affairs. At first this revolution had no effect on Madame Oaillard’s personal fate. But then-she was almost eighty by now-all at once the man who held her annuity had to emigrate, was stripped of his holdings, and forced to auction off his possessions to a trouser manufacturer. For a while it looked as if even this change would have no fatal effect on Madame Gaillard, for the trouser manufacturer continued to pay her annuity punctually. But then came the day when she no longer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printed paper, and that marked the beginning of her economic demise.

Within two years, the annuity was no longer worth enough to pay for her firewood. Madame was forced to sell her house-at a ridiculously low price, since suddenly there were thousands of other people who also had to sell their houses. And once again she received in return only these stupid slips of paper, and once again within two years they were as good as worthless, and by 1797 (she was nearing ninety now) she had lost her entire fortune, scraped together from almost a century of hard work, and was living in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles. And only then-ten, twenty years too late-did death arrive, in the form of a protracted bout with a cancer that grabbed Madame by the throat, robbing her first of her appetite and then of her voice, so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hotel-Dieu. There they put her in a ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill, the same ward in which her husband had died, laid her in a bed shared with total strangers, pressing body upon body with five other women, and for three long weeks let her die in public view. She was then sewn into a sack, tossed onto a tumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses, to the faint tinkle of a bell driven to the newly founded cemetery of Clamart, a mile beyond the city gates, and there laid in her final resting place, a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime.

That was in the year 1799. Thank God Madame had suspected nothing of the fate awaiting her as she walked home that day in 1746, leaving Grenouille and our story behind. She might possibly have lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning that she could make of life.

Six

FROM HIS first glance at Monsieur Grimal-no, from the first breath that sniffed in the odor enveloping Grimal-Grenouille knew that this man was capable of thrashing him to death for the least infraction. His life was worth precisely as much as the work he could accomplish and consisted only of whatever utility Grimal ascribed to it. And so, Grenouille came to heel, never once making an attempt to resist. With each new day, he would bottle up inside himself the energies of his defiance and contumacy and expend them solely to survive the impending ice age in his ticklike way. Tough, uncomplaining, inconspicuous, he tended the light of life’s hopes as a very small, but carefully nourished flame. He was a paragon of docility, frugality, and diligence in his work, obeyed implicitly, and appeared satisfied with every meal offered. In the evening, he meekly let himself be locked up in a closet off to one side of the tannery floor, where tools were kept and the raw, salted hides were hung. There he slept on the hard, bare earthen floor. During the day he worked as long as there was light-eight hours in winter, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours in summer. He scraped the meat from bestially stinking hides, watered them down, dehaired them, limed, bated, and fulled them, rubbed them down with pickling dung, chopped wood, stripped bark from birch and yew, climbed down into the tanning pits filled with caustic fumes, layered the hides and pelts just as the journeymen ordered him, spread them with smashed gallnuts, covered this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth. Years later, he would have to dig them up again and retrieve these mummified hide carcasses-now tanned leather— from their grave.

When he was not burying or digging up hides, he was hauling water. For months on end, he hauled water up from the river, always in two buckets, hundreds of bucketfuls a day, for tanning requires vast quantities of water, for soaking, for boiling, for dyeing. For months on end, the water hauling left him without a dry stitch on his body; by evening his clothes were dripping wet and his skin was cold and swollen like a soaked shammy.

After one year of an existence more animal than human, he contracted anthrax, a disease feared by tanners and usually fatal. Grimal had already written him off and was looking around for a replacement— not without regret, by the way, for he had never before had a more docile and productive worker than this Grenouille. But contrary to all expectation, Grenouille survived the illness. All he bore from it were scars from the large black carbuncles behind his ears and on his hands and cheeks, leaving him disfigured and even uglier than he had been before. It also left him immune to anthrax-an invaluable advantage-so that now he could strip the foulest hides with cut and bleeding hands and still run no danger of reinfection. This set him apart not only from the apprentices and journeymen, but also from his own potential successors. And because he could no longer be so easily replaced as before, the value of his work and thus the value of his life increased. Suddenly he no longer had to sleep on bare earth, but was allowed to build himself a plank bed in the closet, was given straw to scatter over it and a blanket of his own. He was no longer locked in at bedtime. His food was more adequate. Grimal no longer kept him as just any animal, but as a useful house pet.

When he was twelve, Grimal gave him half of Sunday off, and at thirteen he was even allowed to go out on weekend evenings for an hour after work and do whatever he liked. He had triumphed, for he was alive, and he possessed a small quantum of freedom sufficient for survival. The days of his hibernation were over. Grenouille the tick stirred again. He caught the scent of morning. He was seized with an urge to hunt. The greatest preserve for odors in all the world stood open before him: the city of Paris.

Seven

IT WAS LIKE living in Utopia. The adjacent neighborhoods of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Eustache were a wonderland. In the narrow side streets off the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin, people lived so densely packed, each house so tightly pressed to the next, five, six stories high, that you could not see the sky, and the air at ground level formed damp canals where odors congealed. It was a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw. Thousands upon thousands of odors formed an invisible gruel that filled the street ravines, only seldom evaporating above the rooftops and never from the ground below. The people who lived there no longer experienced this gruel as a special smell; it had arisen from them and they had been steeped in it over and over again; it was, after all, the very air they breathed and from which they lived, it was like clothes you have worn so long you no longer smell them or feel them against your skin. Grenouille, however, smelled it all as if for the first time. And he did not merely smell the mixture of odors in the aggregate, but he dissected it analytically into its smallest and most remote parts and pieces. His discerning nose unraveled the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors that could not be unthreaded further. Unwinding and spinning out these threads gave him unspeakable joy.

He would often just stand there, leaning against a wall or crouching in a dark corner, his eyes closed, his mouth half open and nostrils flaring wide, quiet as a feeding pike in a great, dark, slowly moving current. And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way, he would lunge at it and not let go. Then he would smell at only this one odor, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odor might be an old acquaintance, or a variation on one; it could be a brand-new one as well, with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled, let alone seen, till that moment: the odor of pressed silk, for example, the odor of a wild-thyme tea, the odor of brocade embroidered with silver thread, the odor of a cork from a bottle of vintage wine, the odor of a tortoiseshell comb. Grenouille was out to find such odors still unknown to him; he hunted them down with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him.

When he had smelled his fill of the thick gruel of the streets, he would go to airier terrain, where the odors were thinner, mixing with the wind as they unfurled, much as perfume does-to the market of Les Halles, for instance, where the odors of the day lived on into the evening, invisibly but ever so distinctly, as if the vendors still swarmed among the crowd, as if the baskets still stood there stuffed full of vegetables and eggs, or the casks full of wine and vinegar, the sacks with their spices and potatoes and flour, the crates of nails and screws, the meat tables, the tables full of doth and dishes and shoe soles and all the hundreds of other things sold there during the day… the bustle of it all down to the smallest detail was still present in the air that had been left behind. Gre-nouille saw the whole market smelling, if it can be put that way. And he smelled it more precisely than many people could see it, for his perception was after the fact and thus of a higher order: an essence, a spirit of what had been, something undisturbed by the everyday accidents of the moment, like noise, glare, or the nauseating press of living human beings.

Or he would go to the spot where they had beheaded his mother, to the place de Greve, which stuck out to lick the river like a huge tongue. Here lay the ships, pulled up onto shore or moored to posts, and they smelled of coal and grain and hay and damp ropes.

And from the west, via this one passage cut through the city by the river, came a broad current of wind bringing with it the odors of the country, of the meadows around Neuilly, of the forests between Saint-Germain and Versailles, of far-off cities like Rouen or Caen and sometimes of the sea itself. The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt, and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odors into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit in his memory, relishing it whole. The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea-which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells-dissolving with pleasure in that breath. But it was never to be, for Grenouille, who stood there on the riverbank at the place de Greve steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose, would never in his life see the sea, the real sea, the immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell. He had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hotel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night. And so he expanded his hunting grounds, first westward to the Faubourg Saint-Honore, then out along the rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and finally across to the other bank of the river into the quarters of the Sorbonne and the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the rich people lived. Through the wrought-iron gates at their portals came the smells of coach leather and of the powder in the pages’ wigs, and over the high walls passed the garden odors of broom and roses and freshly trimmed hedges. It was here as well that Grenouille first smelled perfume in the literal sense of the word: a simple lavender or rose water, with which the fountains of the gardens were filled on gala occasions; but also the more complex, more costly scents, of tincture of musk mixed with oils of neroli and tuberose, jonquil, jasmine, or cinnamon, that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze. He made note of these scents, registering them just as he would profane odors, with curiosity, but without particular admiration. Of course he realized that the purpose of perfumes was to create an intoxicating and alluring effect, and he recognized the value of the individual essences that comprised them. But on the whole they seemed to him rather coarse and ponderous, more slapdashed together than composed, and he knew that he could produce entirely different fragrances if he only had the basic ingredients at his disposal.

He knew many of these ingredients already from the flower and spice stalls at the market; others were new to him, and he filtered them out from the aromatic mixture and kept them unnamed in his memory: ambergris, civet, patchouli, sandalwood, bergamot, vetiver, opopanax, benzoin, hop blossom, castor…

He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of the hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud, the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat’s kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations. He fashioned grotes-queries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks-inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.

Eight

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1753, the anniversary of the king’s coronation, the city of Paris set off fireworks at the Pont-Royal. The display was not as spectacular as the fireworks celebrating the king’s marriage, or as the legendary fireworks in honor of the dauphin’s birth, but it was impressive nevertheless. They had mounted golden sunwheeis on the masts of the ships. From the bridge itself so-called fire bulls spewed showers of burning stars into the river. And while from every side came the deafening roar of petards exploding and of firecrackers skipping across the cobblestones, rockets rose into the sky and painted white lilies against the black firmament. Thronging the bridge and the quays along both banks of the river, a crowd of many thousands accompanied the spectacle with ah’s and oh’s and even some “long live” ‘s-although the king had ascended his throne more than thirty-eight years before and the high point of his popularity was Song since behind him. Fireworks can do that.

Grenouille stood silent in the shadow of the Pavilion de Flore, across from the Pont-Neuf on the right bank. He did not stir a finger to applaud, did not even look up at the ascending rockets. He had come in hopes of getting a whiff of something new, but it soon became apparent that fireworks had nothing to offer in the way of odors. For all their extravagant variety as they glittered and gushed and crashed and whistled, they left behind a very monotonous mixture of smells: sulfur, oil, and saltpeter.

He was just about to leave this dreary exhibition and head homewards along the gallery of the Louvre when the wind brought him something, a tiny, hardly noticeable something, a crumb, an atom of scent; no, even less than that: it was more the premonition of a scent than the scent itself-and at the same time it was definitely a premonition of something he had never smelled before. He backed up against the wall, closed his eyes, and flared his nostrils. The scent was so exceptionally delicate and fine that he could not hold on to it; it continually eluded his perception, was masked by the powder smoke of the petards, blocked by the exudations of the crowd, fragmented and crushed by the thousands of other city odors. But then, suddenly, it was there again, a mere shred, the whiff of a magnificent premonition for only a second… and it vanished at once. Grenouille suffered agonies. For the first time, it was not just that his greedy nature was offended, but his very heart ached. 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.

He was almost sick with excitement. He had not yet even figured out what direction the scent was coming from. Sometimes there were intervals of several minutes before a shred was again wafted his way, and each time he was overcome by the horrible anxiety that he had lost it forever. He was finally rescued by a desperate conviction that the scent was coming from the other bank of the river, from somewhere to the southeast.

He moved away from the wall of the Pavilion de Flore, dived into the crowd, and made his way across the bridge. Every few strides he would stop and stand on tiptoe in order to take a sniff from above people’s heads, at first smelling nothing for pure excitement; then finally there was something, he smelled the scent, stronger than before, knew that he was on the right track, dived in again, burrowed through the throng of gapers and pyrotechnicians unremittingly setting torch to their rocket fuses, lost the scent in the acrid smoke of the powder, panicked, shoved and jostled his way through and burrowed onward, and after countless minutes reached the far bank, the Hotel de Mailly, the Quai Malaquest, the entrance to the rue de Seine,…

Here he stopped, gathering his forces, and smelled. He had it. He had hold of it tight. The odor came rolling down the rue de Seine like a ribbon, unmistakably clear, and yet as before very delicate and very fine. Grenouille felt his heart pounding, and he knew that it was not the exertion of running that had set it pounding, but rather his excited helplessness in the presence of this scent. He tried to recall something comparable, but had to discard all comparisons. This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, nor that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water… and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris… This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk… and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honeysweet milk-and try as he would he couldn’t fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way-it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day. Grenouille followed it, his fearful heart pounding, for he suspected that it was not he who followed the scent, but the scent that had captured him and was drawing him irresistibly to it.

He walked up the rue de Seine. No one was on the street. The houses stood empty and still. The people were down by the river watching the fireworks. No hectic odor of humans disturbed him, no biting stench of gunpowder. The street smelled of its usual smells: water, feces, rats, and vegetable matter. But above it hovered the ribbon, delicate and clear, leading Grenouille on. After a few steps, what little light the night afforded was swallowed by the tall buildings, and Grenouille walked on in darkness. He did not need to see. The scent led him firmly.

Fifty yards farther, he turned off to the right up the rue des Marais, a narrow alley hardly a span wide and darker still-if that was possible. Strangely enough, the scent was not much stronger. It was only purer, and in its augmented purity, it took on an even greater power of attraction. Grenouille walked with no will of his own. At one point, the scent pulled him strongly to the right, straight through what seemed to be a wall. A low entryway opened up, leading into a back courtyard. Grenouille moved along the passage like a somnambulist, moved across the courtyard, turned a corner, entered a second, smaller courtyard, and here finally there was light-a space of only a few square feet. A wooden roof hung out from the wall. Beneath it, a table, a candle stuck atop it. A girl was sitting at the table cleaning yellow plums. With her left hand, she took the fruit from a basket, stemmed and pitted it with a knife, and dropped it into a bucket. She might have been thirteen, fourteen years old. Gre-nouille stood still. He recognized at once the source of the scent that he had followed from half a mile away on the other bank of the river: not this squalid courtyard, not the plums. The source was the girl.

For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so beautiful as this girl-although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight. He meant, of course, he had never smelled anything so beautiful. But since he knew the smell of humans, knew it a thousandfold, men, women, children, he could not conceive of how such an exquisite scent could be emitted by a human being. Normally human odor was nothing special, or it was ghastly. Children smelled insipid, men urinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Totally uninteresting, repulsive-that was how humans smelled… And so it happened that for the first time in his life, Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for assistance if he was to believe what he smelled. This confusion of senses did not last long at all. Actually he required only a moment to convince himself optically-then to abandon himself all the more ruthlessly to olfactory perception. And now he smelled that this was a human being, smelled the sweat of her armpits, the oil in her hair, the fishy odor of her genitals, and smelied it all with the greatest pleasure. Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms… and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless. A hundred thousand odors seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.

Grenouille knew for certain that unless he possessed this scent, his life would have no meaning. He had to understand its smallest detail, to follow it to its last delicate tendril; the mere memory, however complex, was not enough. He wanted to press, to emboss this apotheosis of scent on his black, muddled soul, meticulously to explore it and from this point on, to think, to live, to smell only according to the innermost structures of its magic formula.

He slowly approached the girl, closer and closer, stepped under the overhanging roof, and halted one step behind her. She did not hear him.

She had red hair and wore a gray, sleeveless dress. Her arms were very white and her hands yellow with the juice of the halved plums. Grenouille stood bent over her and sucked in the undiluted fragrance of her as it rose from her nape, her hair, from the neckline of her dress. He let it flow into him like a gentle breeze. He had never felt so wonderful. But the girl felt the air turn cool.

She did not see Grenouille. But she was uneasy, sensed a strange chill, the kind one feels when suddenly overcome with some long discarded fear. She felt as if a cold draft had risen up behind her, as if someone had opened a door leading into a vast, cold cellar. And she laid the paring knife aside, pulled her arms to her chest, and turned around.

She was so frozen with terror at the sight of him that he had plenty of time to put his hands to her throat. She did not attempt to cry out, did not budge, did not make the least motion to defend herself. He, in turn, did not look at her, did not see her delicate, freckled face, her red lips, her large sparkling green eyes, keeping his eyes closed tight as he strangled her, for he had only one concern-not to lose the least trace of her scent.

When she was dead he laid her on the ground among the plum pits, tore off her dress, and the stream of scent became a flood that inundated him with its fragrance. He thrust his face to her skin and swept his flared nostrils across her, from belly to breast, to neck, over her face and hair, and back to her belly, down to her genitals, to her thighs and white legs. He smelled her over from head to toe, he gathered up the last fragments of her scent under her chin, in her navel, and in the wrinkles inside her elbow.

And after he had smelled the last faded scent of her, he crouched beside her for a while, collecting himself, for he was brimful with her. He did not want to spill a drop of her scent. First he must seal up his innermost compartments. Then he stood up and blew out the candle.

Meanwhile people were starting home, singing and hurrahing their way up the rue de Seine. Grenouille smelled his way down the dark alley and out onto the rue des Petits Augustins, which lay parallel to the rue de Seine and led to the river. A little while later, the dead girl was discovered. A hue and cry arose. Torches were lit. The watch arrived. Grenouille had long since gained the other bank.

That night, his closet seemed to him a palace, and his plank bed a four-poster. Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. But now he was quivering with happiness and could not sleep for pure bliss. It was as if he had been born a second time; no, not a second time, the first time, for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness. 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. And that he alone in ail the world possessed the means to carry it off: namely, his exquisite nose, his phenomenal memory, and, most important, the master scent taken from that girl in the rue des Marais. Contained within it was the magic formula for everything that could make a scent, a perfume, great: delicacy, power, stability, variety, and terrifying, irresistible beauty. He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted abominations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the chaotic vortex of their souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him. It was clear to him now why he had clung to life so tenaciously, so -savagely. He must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But, rather, the greatest perfumer of all time.

And during that same night, at first awake and then in his dreams, he inspected the vast rubble of his memory. He examined the millions and millions of building blocks of odor and arranged them systematically: good with good, bad with bad, fine with fine, coarse with coarse, fetid with fetid, ambrosial with ambrosial. In the course of the next week, this system grew ever more refined, the catalog of odors ever more comprehensive and differentiated, the hierarchy ever clearer. And soon he could begin to erect the first carefully planned structures of odor: houses, walls, stairways, towers, cellars, rooms, secret chambers… an inner fortress built of the most magnificent odors, that each day grew larger, that each day grew more beautiful and more perfectly framed. A murder had been the start of this splendor-if he was at all aware of the fact, it was a matter of tota! indifference to him. 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.

Nine

THERE WERE a baker’s dozen of perfumers in Paris in those days. Six of them resided on the right bank, six on the left, and one exactly in the middle, that is, on the Pont-au-Change, which connected the right bank with the He de la Cite. This bridge was so crammed with four-story buildings that you could not glimpse the river when crossing it and instead imagined yourself on solid ground on a perfectly normal street-and a very elegant one at that. Indeed, the Pont-au-Change was considered one of the finest business addresses in the city. The most renowned shops were to be found here; here were the goldsmiths, the cabinetmakers, the best wigmakers and pursemakers, the manufacturers of the finest lingerie and stockings, the picture framers, the merchants for riding boots, the embroiderers of epaulets, the mold-ers of gold buttons, and the bankers. And here as well stood the business and residence of the perfumer and glover Giuseppe Baldini. Above his display window was stretched a sumptuous green-lacquered baldachin, next to which hung Baldini’s coat of arms, all in gold: a golden flacon, from which grew a bouquet of golden flowers. And before the door lay a red carpet, also bearing the Baldini coat of arms embroidered in gold. When you opened the door, Persian chimes rang out, and two silver herons began spewing violet-scented toilet water from their beaks into a gold-plated vessel, which in turn was shaped like the flacon in the Baldini coat of arms.

Behind the counter of light boxwood, however, stood Baldini himself, old and stiff as a pillar, in a silver-powdered wig and a blue coat adorned with gold frogs. A cloud of the frangipani with which he sprayed himself every morning enveloped him almost visibly, removing him to a hazy distance. So immobile was he, he looked like part of his own inventory. Only if the chimes rang and the herons spewed-both of which occurred rather seldom-did he suddenly come to life, his body folding up into a small, scrambling figure that scurried out from behind the counter with numerous bows and scrapes, so quickly that the cloud of frangipani could hardly keep up with him, and bade his customer take a seat while he exhibited the most exquisite perfumes and cosmetics.

Baldini had thousands of them. His stock ranged from essences absolues-floral oils, tinctures, extracts, secretions, balms, resins, and other drugs in dry, liquid, or waxy form-through diverse pomades, pastes, powders, soaps, creams, sachets, bandolines, brilliantines, mustache waxes, wart removers, and beauty spots, all the way to bath oils, lotions, smelling salts, toilet vinegars, and countless genuine perfumes. But Baldini was not content with these products of classic beauty care. It was his ambition to assemble in his shop everything that had a scent or in some fashion contributed to the production of scent. And so in addition to incense pastilles, incense candles, and cords, there were also sundry spices, from anise seeds to zapota seeds, syrups, cordials, and fruit brandies, wines from Cyprus, Malaga, and Corinth, honeys, coffees, teas, candied and dried fruits, figs, bonbons, chocolates, chestnuts, and even pickled capers, cucumbers, and onions, and marinated tuna. Plus perfumed sealing waxes, stationery, lover’s ink scented with attar of roses, writing kits of Spanish leather, penholders of whjte sandalwood, caskets and chests of cedarwood, potpourris and bowls for flower petals, brass incense holders, crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber, scented gloves, handkerchiefs, sewing cushions filled with mace, and musk-sprinkled wallpaper that could fill a room with scent for more than a century.

Naturally there was not room for all these wares in the splendid but small shop that opened onto the street (or onto the bridge), and so for lack of a cellar, storage rooms occupied not just the attic, but the whole second and third floors, as well as almost every room facing the river on the ground floor. The result was that an indescribable chaos of odors reigned in the House of Baldini. However exquisite the quality of individual items-for Baldini bought wares of only highest quality-the blend of odors was almost unbearable, as if each musician in a thousand-member orchestra were playing a different melody at fortissimo. Baldini and his assistants were themselves inured to this chaos, like aging orchestra conductors (all of whom are hard of hearing, of course); and even his wife, who lived on the fourth floor, bitterly defending it against further encroachments by the storage area, hardly noticed the many odors herself anymore. Not so the customer entering Baldini’s shop for the first time. The prevailing mishmash of odors hit him like a punch in the face. Depending on his constitution, it might exalt or daze him, but in any case caused such a confusion of senses that he often no longer knew what he had come for. Errand boys forgot their orders.

Belligerent gentlemen grew queasy. And many ladies took a spell, half-hysteric, half-claustrophobic, fainted away, and could be revived only with the most pungent smelling salts of clove oil, ammonia, and camphor.

Under such conditions, it was really not at all astonishing that the Persian chimes at the door of Giuseppe Baldini’s shop rang and the silver herons spewed less and less frequently.

Ten

“CHENIER!” BALDINI cried from behind the counter where for hours he had stood rigid as a pillar, staring at the door. “Put on your wig!” And out from among the kegs of olive oil and dangling Bayonne hams appeared Chenier-Baldini’s assistant, somewhat younger than the latter, but already an old man himself-and moved toward the elegant front of the shop. He pulled his wig from his coat pocket and shoved it on his head. “Are you going out, Monsieur Baldini?”

“No,” said Baldini. “I shall retire to my study for a few hours, and I do not wish to be disturbed under any circumstances.”

“Ah, I see! You are creating a new perfume.”

BALDSNI: Correct. With which to impregnate a Spanish hide for Count Verhamont. He wants something like… like… I think he said it’s called Amor and Psyche, and comes he says from that… that bungler in the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, that… that…

CHENIER: Pelissier.

BALDINI: Yes. Indeed. That’s the bungler’s name. Amor and Psyche, by Pelissier.-Do you know it?”

CHENIER: Yes, yes. I do indeed. You can smell it everywhere these days. Smell it on every street corner. But if you ask me-nothing special! It most certainly can’t be compared in any way with what you will create, Monsieur Baldini.

BALDSNI: Naturally not.

CHENIER: It’s a terribly common scent, this Amor and Psyche.

BALDINI: Vulgar?

CHENIER: Totally vulgar, like everything from Pelissier. I believe it contains lime oil.

BALDINI: Really? What else?

CHENIER: Essence of orange blossom perhaps. And maybe tincture of rosemary. But I can’t say for sure.

BALDINI: It’s of no consequence at all to me in any case.

CHENIER: Naturally not.

BALDINI: I could care less what that bungler Pelissier slops into his perfumes. I certainly would not take my inspiration from him, I assure you.

CHENIER: You’re absolutely right, monsieur.

BALDINI: As you know, I take my inspiration from no one. As you know,! create my own perfumes.

CHENIER: I do know, monsieur.

BALDINI: I alone give birth to them.

CHENIER: I know.

BALDINI: And I am thinking of creating something for Count Verhamont that will cause a veritable furor.

CHENIER: I am sure it will, Monsieur Baldini.

BALDINI: Take charge of the shop. I need peace and quiet. Don’t let anyone near me, Chenier.

And with that, he shuffled away-not at all like a statue, but as befitted his age, bent over, but so far that he looked almost as if he had been beaten-and slowly climbed the stairs to his study on the second floor.

Chenier took his place behind the counter, positioning himself exactly as his master had stood before, and stared fixedly at the door. He knew what would happen in the next few hours: absolutely nothing in the shop, and up in Baldini’s study, the usual catastrophe. Baldini would take off his blue coat drenched in frangipani, sit down at his desk, and wait for inspiration. The inspiration would not come. He would then hurry over to the cupboard with its hundreds of vials and start mixing them haphazardly. The mixture would be a failure. He would curse, fling open the window, and pour the stuff into the river. He would try something else, that too would be a failure, he would then rave and rant and throw a howling fit there in the stifling, odor-filled room. At about seven o’clock he would come back down, miserable, trembling and whining, and say: “Chenier, I’ve lost my nose, I cannot give birth to this perfume, I cannot deliver the Spanish hide to the count, all is lost, I am dead inside, I want to die, Chenier, please, help me die!” And Chenier would suggest that someone be sent to Pelissier’s for a bottle of Amor and Psyche, and Baldini would acquiesce, but only on condition that not a soul should learn of his shame. Chenier would swear himself to silence, and tonight they would perfume Count Verhamont’s leather with the other man’s product. That was how it would be, no doubt of it, and Chenier only wished that the whole circus were already over. Baldini was no longer a great perfumer. At one time, to be sure, in his youth, thirty, forty years ago, he had composed Rose of the South and Baldini’s Gallant Bouquet, the two truly great perfumes to which he owed his fortune. But now he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes, and whenever he did manage to concoct a new perfume of his own, it was some totally old-fashioned, unmarketable stuff that within a year they had to dilute ten to one and peddle as an additive for fountains. What a shame, Chenier thought as he checked the sit of his wig in the mirror-a shame about old Baldini; a shame about his beautiful shop, because he’s sure to ruin it; and a shame about me, because by the time he has ruined it, I’ll be too old to take it over…

Eleven

GIUSEPPE BALDINI had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit. The odor of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his ability to smell; he had carried it about with him for decades now and no longer noticed it at all. And although he had closed the doors to his study and asked for peace and quiet, he had not sat down at his desk to ponder and wait for inspiration, for he knew far better than Chenier that inspiration would not strike-after all, it never had before. He was old and exhausted, that much was true, and was no longer a great perfumer, but he knew that he had never in his life been one. He had inherited Rose of the South from his father, and the formula for Baidini’s Gallant Bouquet had been bought from a traveling Genoese spice salesman. The rest of his perfumes were old familiar blends. He had never invented anything. He was not an inventor. He was a careful producer of traditional scents; he was like a cook who runs a great kitchen with a routine and good recipes, but has never created a dish of his own. He staged this whole hocus-pocus with a study and experiments and inspiration and hush-hush secrecy only because that was part of the professional image of a perfumer and glover. A perfumer was fifty percent alchemist who created miracles-that’s what people wanted. Fine! That his art was a craft like any other, only he knew, and was proud of the fact. He didn’t want to be an inventor. He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken. And he had no intention of inventing some new perfume for Count Verhamont. Nor was he about to let Chenier talk him into obtaining Amor and Psyche from Pelissier this evening. He already had some. There it stood on his desk by the window, in a little glass flacon with a cut-glass stopper. He had bought it a couple of days before. Naturally not in person. He couldn’t go to Pelissier and buy perfume in person! But through a go-between, who had used yet another go-between… Caution was necessary. Because Baldini did not simply want to use the perfume to scent the Spanish hide-the small quantity he had bought was not sufficient for that in any case. He had something much nastier in mind: he wanted to copy it.

That was, moreover, not forbidden. It was merely highly improper. To create a clandestine imitation of a competitor’s perfume and sell it under one’s own name was terribly improper. But more improper still was to get caught at it, and that was why Chenier must know nothing about it, for Chenier was a gossip.

How awful, that an honest man should feel compelled to travel such crooked paths! How awful, that the most precious thing a man possesses, his own honor, should be sullied by such shabby dealings! But what was he to do? Count Verhamont was, after all, a customer he dared not lose. He had hardly a single customer left now. He would soon have to start chasing after customers as he had in his twenties at the start of his career, when he had wandered the streets with a boxful of wares dangling at his belly. God knew, he, Giuseppe Baldini-owner of the largest perfume establishment in Paris, with the best possible address-only managed to stay out of the red by making house calls, valise in hand. And that did not suit him at all, for he was well over sixty and hated waiting in cold antechambers and parading eau des millefleurs and four thieves’ vinegar before old marquises or foisting a migraine salve off on them. Besides which, there was such disgusting competition in those antechambers. There was that upstart Brouet from the rue Dauphine, who claimed to have the greatest line of pomades in Europe; or Calteau from the rue Mauconseil, who had managed to become purveyor to the household of the duchesse d’Artois; or this totally unpredictable Antoine Pelissier from the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, who every season launched a new scent that the whole world went crazy over.

Perfumes like Pelissier’s could make a shambles of the whole market. If the rage one year was Hungary water and Baldini had accordingly stocked up on lavender, bergamot, and rosemary to cover the demand-here came Pelissier with his Air de Muse, an ultra-heavy musk scent. Suddenly everyone had to reek like an animal, and Baldini had to rework his rosemary into hair oil and sew the lavender into sachets. If, however, he then bought adequate supplies of musk, civet, and castor for the next year, Pelissier would take a notion to create a perfume called Forest Blossom, which would be an immediate success. And when, after long nights of experiment or costly bribes, Baldini had finally found out the ingredients in Forest Blossom-Pelissier would trump him again with Turkish Nights or Lisbon Spice or Bouquet de la Cour or some such damn thing. The man was indeed a danger to the whole trade with his reckless creativity. It made you wish for a return to the old rigid guild laws. Made you wish for draconian measures against this nonconformist, against this inflationist of scent. His license ought to be revoked and a juicy injunction issued against further exercise of his profession… and, just on principle, the fellow ought to be taught a lesson! Because this Pelissier wasn’t even a trained perfumer and glover. His father had been nothing but a vinegar maker, and Pelissier was a vinegar maker too, nothing else. But as a vinegar maker he was entitled to handle spirits, and only because of that had the skunk been able to crash the gates and wreak havoc in the park of the true perfumers. What did people need with a new perfume every season? Was that necessary? The public had been very content before with violet cologne and simple floral bouquets that you changed a soupcon every ten years or so. For thousands of years people had made do with incense and myrrh, a few balms, oils, and dried aromatic herbs. And even once they had learned to use retorts and alembics for distilling herbs, flowers, and woods and stealing the aromatic base of their vapors in the form of volatile oils, to crush seeds and pits and fruit rinds in oak presses, and to extract the scent from petals with carefully filtered oils-even then, the number of perfumes had been modest. In those days a figure like Pelissier would have been an impossibility, for back then just for the production of a simple pomade you needed abilities of which this vinegar mixer could not even dream. You had to be able not merely to distill, but also to act as maker of salves, apothecary, alchemist, and craftsman, merchant, humanist, and gardener all in one. You had to be able to distinguish sheep suet from calves’ suet, a victoria violet from a parma violet. You had to be fluent in Latin. You had to know when heliotrope is harvested and when pelargonium blooms, and that the jasmine blossom loses its scent at sunrise. Obviously Pelissier had not the vaguest notion of such matters. He had probably never left Paris, never in all his life seen jasmine in bloom. Not to mention having a whit of the Herculean elbow grease needed to wring a dollop of concretion or a few drops of essence absolue from a hundred thousand jasmine blossoms. Probably he knew such things-knew jasmine-only as a bottle of dark brown liquid concentrate that stood in his locked cabinet alongside the many other bottles from which he mixed his fashionable perfumes. No, in the good old days of true craftsmen, a man like this coxcomb Pelissier would never have got his foot in the door. He lacked everything: character, education, serenity, and a sense for the hierarchy within a guild. He owed his few successes at perfumery solely to the discovery made some two hundred years before by that genius Mauritius Frangipani-an Italian, let it be noted!-that odors are soluble in rectified spirit. By mixing his aromatic powder with alcohol and so transferring its odor to a volatile liquid, Frangipani had liberated scent from matter, had etherialized scent, had discovered scent as pure scent; in short, he had created perfume. What a feat! What an epoch-making achievement! Comparable really only to the greatest accomplishments of humankind, like the invention of writing by the Assyrians, Euclidean geometry, the ideas of Plato, or the metamorphosis of grapes into wine by the Greeks. A truly Promethean act! And yet, just as ail great accomplishments of the spirit cast both shadow and light, offering humankind vexation and misery along with their benefits, so, too, Frangipani’s marvelous invention had its unfortunate results. For now that people knew how to bind the essence of flowers and herbs, woods, resins, and animal secretions within tinctures and fill them into bottles, the art of perfumery was slipping bit by bit from the hands of the masters of the craft and becoming accessible to mountebanks, at least a mountebank with a passably discerning nose, like this skunk Pelissier. Without ever bothering to learn how the marvelous contents of these bottles had come to be, they could simply follow their olfactory whims and concoct whatever popped into their heads or struck the public’s momentary fancy.

So much was certain: at age thirty-five, this bastard Pelissier already possessed a larger fortune than he, Baldini, had finally accumulated after three generations of constant hard work. And Pelissier’s grew daily, while his, Baldini’s, daily shrank. That sort of thing would not have been even remotely possible before! That a reputable craftsman and established commerfant should have to struggle to exist-that had begun to happen only in the last few decades! And only since this hectic mania for novelty had broken out in every quarter, this desperate desire for action, this craze of experimentation, this rodomontade in commerce, in trade, and in the sciences!

Or this insanity about speed. What was the need for all these new roads being dug up everywhere, and these new bridges? What purpose did they serve? What was the advantage of being in Lyon within a week? Who set any store by that? Whom did it profit? Or crossing the Atlantic, racing to America in a month-as if people hadn’t got along without that continent for thousands of years. What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes. People even traveled to Lapland, up there in the north, with its eternal ice and savages who gorged themselves on raw fish. And now they hoped to discover yet another continent that was said to lie in the South Pacific, wherever that might be. And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the same, the Spaniards, the damned English, the impertinent Dutch, whom you then had to go out and fight, which you couldn’t in the least afford. One of those battleships easily cost a good 300,000 livres, and a single cannon shot would sink it in five minutes, for good and all, paid for with our taxes. The minister of finance had recently demanded one-tenth of all income, and that was simply ruinous, even if you didn’t pay Monsieur his tithe. The very attitude was perverse.

Man’s misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs. Pascal said that. And Pascal was a great man, a Frangipani of the intellect, a real craftsman, so to speak, and no one wants one of those anymore. People read incendiary books now by Huguenots or Englishmen. Or they write tracts or so-called scientific masterpieces that put anything and everything in question. Nothing is supposed to be right anymore, suddenly everything ought to be different. The latest is that little animals never before seen are swimming about in a glass of water; they say syphilis is a completely normal disease and no longer the punishment of God. God didn’t make the world in seven days, it’s said, but over millions of years, if it was He at all. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrong; and the earth is no longer round like it was, but flat on the top and bottom like a melon-as if that made a damn bit of difference! In every field, people question and bore and scrutinize and pry and dabble with experiments. It’s no longer enough for a man to say that something is so or how it is so-everything now has to be proven besides, preferably with witnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments. These Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have-there are even clerics among them and gentlemen of noble birth!-they’ve finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!

Wherever you looked, hectic excitement. People reading books, even women. Priests dawdling in coffeehouses. And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison, publishers howled and submitted petitions, ladies and gentlemen of the highest rank used their influence, and within a couple of weeks he was set free or allowed out of the country, from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. In the salons people chattered about nothing but the orbits of comets and expeditions, about leverage and Newton, about building canals, the circulation of the blood, and the diameter of the earth.

The king himself had had them demonstrate some sort of newfangled nonsense, a kind of artificial thunderstorm they called electricity. With the whole court looking on, some fellow rubbed a bottle, and it gave off a spark, and His Majesty, so it was said, appeared deeply impressed. Unthinkable! that his great-grandfather, the truly great Louis, under whose beneficent reign Baldini had been lucky enough to have lived for many years, would have allowed such a ridiculous demonstration in his presence. But that was the temper of the times, and it would all come to a bad end.

When, without the least embarrassment, people could brazenly call into question the authority of God’s Church; when they could speak of the monarchy-equally a creature of God’s grace-and the sacred person of the king himself as if they were both simply interchangeable items in a catalog of various forms of government to be selected on a whim; when they had the ultimate audacity-and have it they did-to describe God Himself, the Almighty, Very God of Very God, as dispensable and to maintain in all earnestness that order, morals, and happiness on this earth could be conceived of without Him, purely as matters of man’s inherent morality and reason… God, good God!-then you needn’t wonder that everything was turned upside down, that morals had degenerated, and that humankind had brought down upon itself the judgment of Him whom it denied. It would come to a bad end. The great comet of 1681-they had mocked it, calling it a mere clump of stars, while in truth it was an omen sent by God in warning, for it had portended, as was clear by now, a century of decline and disintegration, ending in the spiritual, political, and religious quagmire that man had created for himself, into which he would one day sink and where only glossy, stinking swamp flowers flourished, like Pelissier himself!

Baidini stood at the window, an old man, and gazed malevolently at the sun angled above the river. Barges emerged beneath him and slid slowly to the west, toward the Pont-Neuf and the quay below the galleries of the Louvre. No one poled barges against the current here, for that they used the channel on the other side of the island. Here everything flowed away from you-the empty and the heavily laden ships, the rowboats, and the flat-bottomed punts of the fishermen, the dirty brown and the golden-curled water— everything flowed away, slowly, broadly, and inevitably. And if Baldini looked directly below him, straight down the wall, it seemed to him as if the flowing water were sucking the foundations of the bridge with it, and he grew dizzy.

He had made a mistake buying a house on the bridge, and a second when he selected one on the western side. Because constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current. Sometimes when he had business on the left bank, in the quarter of the Sorbonne or around Saint-Sulpice, he would not walk across the island and the Pont-Saint-Michel, but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf, for it was a bridge without buildings. And then he would stand at the eastern parapet and gaze up the river, just for once to see everything flowing toward him; and for a few moments he basked in the notion that his life had been turned around, that his business was prospering, his family thriving, that women threw themselves at him, that his own life, instead of dwindling away, was growing and growing.

But then, if he lifted his gaze the least bit, he could see his own house, tall and spindly and fragile, several hundred yards away on the Pont-au-Change, and he saw the window of his study on the second floor and saw himself standing there at the window, saw himself looking out at the river and watching the water flow away, just as now. And then the beautiful dream would vanish, and Baldini would turn away from where he had stood on the Pont-Neuf, more despondent than before-as despondent as he was now, turning away from the window and taking his seat at his desk.

Twelve

BEFORE HIM stood the flacon with Peiissier’s perfume. Glistening golden brown in the sunlight, the liquid was clear, not clouded in the least. It looked totally innocent, like a light tea-and yet contained, in addition to four-fifths alcohol, one-fifth of a mysterious mixture that could set a whole city trembling with excitement. The mixture, moreover, might consist of three or thirty different ingredients, prepared from among countless possibilities in very precise proportions to one another. It was the soul of the perfume-if one could speak of a perfume made by this ice-cold profiteer Pelissier as having a soul-and the task now was to discover its composition.

Baldini blew his nose carefully and pulled down the blind at the window, since direct sunlight was harmful to every artificial scent or refined concentration of odors. He pulled a fresh white lace handkerchief out of a desk drawer and unfolded it. Then, holding his head far back and pinching his nostrils together, he opened the flacon with a gentle turn of the stopper. He did not want, for God’s sake, to get a premature olfactory sensation directly from the bottle. Perfume must be smelled in its efflorescent, gaseous state, never as a concentrate. He sprinkled a few drops onto the handkerchief, waved it in the air to drive off the alcohol, and then held it to his nose. In three short, jerky tugs, he snatched up the scent as if it were a powder, immediately blew it out again, fanned himself, took another sniff in waltz time, and finally drew one long, deep breath, which he then exhaled slowly with several pauses, as if letting it slide down a long, gently sloping staircase. He tossed the handkerchief onto his desk and fell back into his armchair.

The perfume was disgustingly good. That miserable Pelissier was unfortunately a virtuoso. A master, to heaven’s shame, even if he had never learned one thing a thousand times overt Baldini wished he had created it himself, this Amor and Psyche. There was nothing common about it. An absolute classic-full and harmonious. And for all that, fascinatingly new. It was fresh, but not frenetic. It was floral, without being unctuous. It possessed depth, a splendid, abiding, voluptuous, rich brown depth-and yet was not in the least excessive or bombastic.

Baldini stood up almost in reverence and held the handkerchief under his nose once again. “Wonderful, wonderful…” he murmured, sniffing greedily. “It has a cheerful character, it’s charming, it’s like a melody, puts you in a good mood at once… What nonsense, a good mood!” And he flung the handkerchief back onto his desk in anger, turned away, and walked to the farthest corner of the room, as if ashamed of his enthusiasm.

Ridiculous! Letting himself be swept up in such eulogies-”like a melody, cheerful, wonderful, good mood.” How idiotic. Childishly idiotic. A moment’s impression. An old weakness. A matter of temperament. Most likely his Italian blood. Judge not as long as you’re smelling! That is rule number one, Baldini, you muttonhead! Smell when you’re smelling and judge after you have smelled! Amor and Psyche is not half bad as a perfume. A thoroughly successful product. A cleverly managed bit of concocting. If not to say conjuring. And you could expect nothing but conjuring from a man like Pelissier. Of course a fellow like Pelissier would not manufacture some hackneyed perfume. The scoundrel conjured with complete mastery of his art, confusing your sense of smell with its perfect harmony. In the classical arts of scent, the man was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In short, he was a monster with talent. And what was worse, a perverter of the true faith.

But you, Baldini, are not going to be fooled. You were surprised for a moment by your first impression of this concoction. But do you know how it will smell an hour from now when its volatile ingredients have fled and the central structure emerges? Or how it will smell this evening when all that is still perceptible are the heavy, dark components that now lie in odorous twilight beneath a veil of flowers? Wait and see, Baldini!

The second rule is: perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity, and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life, can it be called successful. How often have we not discovered that a mixture that smelled delightfully fresh when first tested, after a brief interval was more like rotten fruit, and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. Utmost caution with the civet! One drop too much brings catastrophe. An old source of error. Who knows— perhaps Pelissier got carried away with the civet. Perhaps by this evening all that’s left of his ambitious Amor and Psyche will be just a whiff of cat piss. We shall see.

We shall smell it. Just as a sharp ax can split a log into tiny splinters, our nose will fragment every detail of this perfume. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical scent was created by the most ordinary, familiar methods. We, Baldini, perfumer, shall catch Pelissier, the vinegar man, at his tricks. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. We’ll scrupulously imitate his mixture, his fashionable perfume. It will be born anew in our hands, so perfectly copied that the humbug himself won’t be able to tell it from his own. No! That’s not enough! We shall improve on it! We’ll show up his mistakes and rinse them away, and then rub his nose in it. You’re a bungler, Pelissier! An old stinker is what you are! An upstart in the craft of perfumery, and nothing more.

And now to work, Baldini! Sharpen your nose and smell without sentimentality! Dissect the scent by the rules of the art! You must have the formula by this evening!

And he made a dive for his desk, grabbing paper, ink, and a fresh handkerchief, laid it all out properly, and began his analysis. The procedure was this: to dip the handkerchief in perfume, pass it rapidly under his nose, and extract from the fleeting cloud of scent one or another of its ingredients without being significantly distracted by the complex blending of its other parts; then, holding the handkerchief at the end of his outstretched arm, to jot down the name of the ingredient he had discovered, and repeat the process at once, letting the handkerchief flit by his nose, snatching at the next fragment of scent, and so on…

Thirteen

HE WORKED WITHOUT pause for two hours-with increasingly hectic movements, increasingly slipshod scribblings of his pen on the paper, and increasingly large doses of perfume sprinkled onto his handkerchief and held to his nose.

He could hardly smell anything now, the volatile substances he was inhaling had long since drugged him; he could no longer recognize what he thought had been established beyond doubt at the start of his analysis. He knew that it was pointless to continue smelling. He would never ascertain the ingredients of this newfangled perfume, certainly not today, nor tomorrow either, when his nose would have recovered, God willing. He had never learned fractionary smelling. Dissecting scents, fragmenting a unity, whether well or not-so-well blended, into its simple components was a wretched, loathsome business. It did not interest him. He did not want to continue.

But his hand automatically kept on making the dainty motion, practiced a thousand times over, of dunking the handkerchief, shaking it out, and whisking it rapidly past his face, and with each whisk he automatically snapped up a portion of scent-drenched air, only to let it out again with the proper exhalations and pauses. Until finally his own nose liberated him from the torture, swelling in allergic reaction till it was stopped up as tight as if plugged with wax. He could not smell a thing now, could hardly breathe. It was as if a bad cold had soldered his nose shut; little tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. Thank God in heaven! Now he could quit in good conscience. He had done his duty, to the best of his abilities, according to all the rules of the art, and was, as so often before, defeated. Ultra posse nemo obligatur. Closing time. Tomorrow morning he would send off to Pelissi-er’s for a large bottle of Amor and Psyche and use it to scent the Spanish hide for Count Verhamont, as per order. And after that he would take his valise, full of old-fashioned soaps, scent bags, pomades, and sachets and make his rounds among the salons of doddering countesses. And one day the last doddering countess would be dead, and with her his last customer. By then he would himself be doddering and would have to sell his business, to Pelissier or another one of these upstart merchants-perhaps he would get a few thousand livres for it. And he would pack one or two bags and go off to Italy with his old wife, if she was not dead herself by then. And if he survived the trip, he would buy a little house in the country near Messina where things were cheap. And there in bitterest poverty he, Giuseppe Baldini, once the greatest perfumer of Paris, would die-whenever God willed it. And that was well and good.

He stoppered the flacon, laid down his pen, and wiped the drenched handkerchief across his forehead one last time. He could sense the cooling effect of the evaporating alcohol, but nothing else. Then the sun went down.

Baldini stood up. He opened the jalousie and his body was bathed to the knees in the sunset, caught fire like a burnt-out torch glimmering low. He saw the deep red rim of the sun behind the Louvre and the softer fire across the slate roofs of the city. On the river shining like gold below him, the ships had disappeared. And a wind must have come up, for gusts were serrating the surface, and it glittered now here, now there, moving ever closer, as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis d’or over the water. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini, a shimmering flood of pure gold.

Baldini’s eyes were moist and sad. He stood there motionless for a long time gazing at the splendid scene. Then, suddenly, he flung both window casements wide and pitched the fiacon with Pelissier’s perfume away in a high arc. He saw it splash and rend the glittering carpet of water for an instant.

Fresh air streamed into the room. Baldini gulped for breath and noticed that the swelling in his nose was subsiding. Then he closed the window. At almost the same moment, night fell, very suddenly. The view of a glistening golden city and river turned into a rigid, ashen gray silhouette. Inside the room, all at once it was dark. Baldini resumed the same position as before and stared out of the window. “I shall not send anyone to Pelissier’s in the morning,” he said, grasping the back of his armchair with both hands. “I shall not do it. And I shall not make my tour of the salons either. Instead, I shall go to the notary tomorrow morning and sell my house and my business. That is what I shall do. E basta!”

The expression on his face was that of a cheeky young boy, and he suddenly felt very happy. He was once again the old, the young Baldini, as bold and determined as ever to contend with fate-even if contending meant a retreat in this case. And what if it did! There was nothing else to do. These were stupid times, and they left him no choice. God gives good times and bad times, but He does not wish us to bemoan and bewail the bad times, but to prove ourselves men. And He had given His sign. That golden, blood-red mirage of the city had been a warning: act now, Baldini, before it is too late! Your house still stands firm, your storage rooms are still full, you will still be able to get a good price for your slumping business. The decisions are still in your hands. To grow old living modestly in Messina had not been his goal in life, true-but it was more honorable and pleasing to God than to perish in splendor in Paris. Let the Brouets, Calteaus, and Pelissiers have their triumph. Giuseppe Baldini was clearing out. But he did it unbent and of his own free will!

He was quite proud of himself now. And his mind was finally at peace. For the first time in years, there was an easing in his back of the subordinate’s cramp that had tensed his neck and given an increasingly obsequious hunch to his shoulders. And he stood up straight without strain, relaxed and free and pleased with himself. His breath passed lightly through his nose. He could clearly smell the scent of Amor and Psyche that reigned in the room, but he did not let it affect him anymore. Baidini had changed his life and felt wonderful. He would go up to his wife now and inform her of his decision, and then he would make a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame and light a candle thanking God for His gracious prompting and for having endowed him, Giuseppe Baldini, with such unbelievable strength of character.

With almost youthful elan, he plopped his wig onto his bald head, slipped into his blue coat, grabbed the candlestick from the desk, and left his study. He had just lit the tallow candle in the stairwell to light his way up to his living quarters when he heard a doorbell ring on the ground floor. It was not the Persian chimes at the shop door, but the shrill ring of the servants’ entrance, a repulsive sound that had always annoyed him. He had often made up his mind to have the thing removed and replaced with a more pleasant bell, but then the cost would always seem excessive. The thought suddenly occurred to him-and he giggled as it did-that it made no difference now, he would be selling the obtrusive doorbell along with the house. Let his successor deal with the vexation!

The bell rang shrilly again. He cocked his ear for sounds below. Apparently Chenier had already left the shop. And the servant girl seemed not about to answer it either. So Baldini went downstairs to open the door himself.

He pulled back the bolt, swung the heavy door open-and saw nothing. The darkness completely swallowed the light of his candle. Then, very gradually, he began to make out a figure, a child or a half-grown boy carrying something over his arm.

“What do you want?”

“I’m from Maitre Grimal, I’m delivering the goatskins,” said the figure and stepped closer and held out to him a stack of hides hanging from his cocked arm. By the light of his candle, Baldini could now see the boy’s face and his nervous, searching eyes. He carried himself hunched over. He looked as if he were hiding behind his own outstretched arm, waiting to be struck a blow. It was Grenouille.

Fourteen

THE GOATSKINS for the Spanish leather! Baldini remembered now. He had ordered the hides from Grimal a few days before, the finest, softest goatskin to be used as a blotter for Count Verhamont’s desk, fifteen francs apiece. But he really did not need them anymore and could spare the expense. On the other hand, if he were simply to send the boy back…? Who knew-it could make a bad impression, people might begin to talk, rumors might start: Baldini is getting undependable, Baldini isn’t getting any orders, Baldini can’t pay his bills… and that would not be good; no, no, because something like that was likely to lower the selling price of his business. It would be better to accept these useless goatskins. No one needed to know ahead of time that Giuseppe Baldini had changed his life.

“Come in!”

He let the boy inside, and they walked across to the shop, Baldini leading with the candle, Grenouille behind him with the hides. It was the first time Grenouille had ever been in a perfumery, a place in which odors are not accessories but stand unabashedly at the center of interest. Naturally he knew every single perfumery and apothecary in the city, had stood for nights on end at their shop windows, his nose pressed to the cracks of their doors. He knew every single odor handled here and had often merged them in his innermost thoughts to create the most splendid perfumes. So there was nothing new awaiting him. And yet, just as a musically gifted child burns to see an orchestra up close or to climb into the church choir where the organ keyboard lies hidden, Grenouille burned to see a perfumery from the inside; and when he had heard that leather was to be delivered to Baldini, he had done all he could to make sure that he would be the one to deliver it.

And here he stood in Baldini’s shop, on the one spot in Paris with the greatest number of professional scents assembled in one small space. He could not see much in the fleeting light of the candle, only brief glimpses of the shadows thrown by the counter with its scales, the two herons above the vessel, an armchair for the customers, the dark cupboards along the walls, the brief flash of bronze utensils and white labels on bottles and crucibles; nor could he smell anything beyond what he could already smell from the street. But he at once felt the seriousness that reigned in these rooms, you might almost call it a holy seriousness, if the word “holy” had held any meaning whatever for Grenouille; for he could feel the cold seriousness, the craftsmanlike sobriety, the staid business sense that adhered to every piece of furniture, every utensil, to tubs, bottles, and pots. And as he walked behind Baldini, in Baldini’s shadow-for Baldini did not take the trouble to light his way-he was overcome by the idea that he belonged here and nowhere else, that he would stay here, that from here he would shake the world from its foundations.

The idea was, of course, one of perfectly grotesque immodesty. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could justify a stray tanner’s helper of dubious origin, without connections or protection, without the least social standing, to hope that he would get so much as a toehold in the most renowned perfume shop in Paris-all the less so, since we know that the decision had been made to dissolve the business. But what had formed in Grenouille’s immodest thoughts was not, after all, a matter of hope, but of certainty. He knew that the only reason he would leave this shop would be to fetch his clothes from Grimal’s, and then never again. The tick had scented blood. It had been dormant for years, encapsulated, and had waited. Now it let itself drop, for better or for worse, entirely without hope. And that was why he was so certain.

They had crossed through the shop. Baldini opened the back room that faced the river and served partly as a storeroom, partly as a workshop and laboratory where soaps were cooked, pomades stirred, and toilet waters blended in big-bellied bottles. “There!” he said, pointing to a large table in front of the window, “lay them there!”

Grenouille stepped out from Baldini’s shadow, laid the leather on the table, but quickly jumped back again, placing himself between Baldini and the door. Baldini stood there for a while. He held the candle to one side to prevent the wax from dripping on the table and stroked the smooth surface of the skins with the back of his fingers. Then he pulled back the top one and ran his hand across the velvety reverse side, rough and yet soft at the same time. They were very good goatskins. Just made for Spanish leather. As they dried they would hardly shrink, and when correctly pared they would become supple again; he could feel that at once just by pressing one between his thumb and index finger. They could be impregnated with scent for five to ten years. They were very, very good hides-perhaps he could make gloves from them, three pairs for himself and three for his wife, for the trip to Messina.

He pulled back his hand. He was touched by the way this worktable looked: everything lay ready, the glass basin for the perfume bath, the glass plate for drying, the mortars for mixing the tincture, pestle and spatula, brush and parer and shears. It was as if these things were only sleeping because it was dark and would come to life in the morning. Should he perhaps take the table with him to Messina? And a few of the tools, only the most important ones…? You could sit and work very nicely at this table. The boards were oak, and legs as well, and it was cross-braced, so that nothing about it could wiggle or wobble, acids couldn’t mar it, or oils or slips of a knife-but it would cost a fortune to take it with him to Messina! Even by ship! And therefore it would be sold, the table would be sold tomorrow, and everything that lay on it, under it, and beside it would be sold as well! Because he, Baldini, might have a sentimental heart, but he also had strength of character, and so he would follow through on his decision, as difficult as that was to do; he would give it all up with tears in his eyes, but he would do it nonetheless, because he knew he was right-he had been given a sign.

He turned to go. There at the door stood this little deformed person he had almost forgotten about. “They’re fine,” Baldini said. “Tell your master that the skins are fine. I’ll come by in the next few days and pay for them.”

“Yes, sir,” said Grenouille, but stood where he was, blocking the way for Baldini, who was ready to leave the workshop. Baldini was somewhat startled, but so unsuspecting that he took the boy’s behavior not for insolence but for shyness.

“What is it?” he asked. “Is there something else I can do for you? Well? Speak up!”

Grenouille stood there cowering and gazing at Baldini with a look of apparent timidity, but which in reality came from a cunning intensity.

“I want to work for you, Maitre Baldini. Work for you, here in your business.”

It was not spoken as a request, but as a demand; nor was it really spoken, but squeezed out, hissed out in reptile fashion. And once again, Baldini misread Grenouille’s outrageous self-confidence as boyish awkwardness. He gave him a friendly smile. “You’re a tanner’s apprentice, my lad,” he said. “I have no use for a tanner’s apprentice. I have a journeyman already, and I don’t need an apprentice.”

“You want to make these goatskins smell good, Maitre Baldini? You want to make this leather I’ve brought you smell good, don’t you?” Grenouille hissed, as if he had paid not the least attention to Baldini’s answer.

“Yes indeed,” said Baldini.

“With Amor and Psyche by Pelissier?” Grenouille asked, cowering even more than before.

At that, a wave of mild terror swept through Baldini’s body. Not because he asked himself how this lad knew all about it so exactly, but simply because the boy had said the name of the wretched perfume that had defeated his efforts at decoding today.

“How did you ever get the absurd idea that I would use someone else’s perfume to…”

“You reek of it!” Grenouille hissed. “You have it on your forehead, and in your right coat pocket is a handkerchief soaked with it. It’s not very good, this Amor and Psyche, it’s bad, there’s too much bergamot and too much rosemary and not enough attar of roses.”

“Aha!” Baldini said, totally surprised that the conversation had veered from the general to the specific. “What else?”

“Orange blossom, lime, clove, musk, jasmine, alcohol, and something that I don’t know the name of, there, you see, right there! In that bottle!” And he pointed a finger into the darkness. Baldini held the candlestick up in that direction, his gaze following the boy’s index finger toward a cupboard and falling upon a bottle filled with a grayish yellow balm.

“Storax?” he asked.

Grenouille nodded. “Yes. That’s in it too. Storax.” And then he squirmed as if doubling up with a cramp and muttered the word at least a dozen times to himself: “Storaxstoraxstoraxstorax…”

Baldini held his candle up to this lump of humankind wheezing “storax” and thought: Either he is possessed, or a thieving impostor, or truly gifted. For it was perfectly possible that the list of ingredients, if mixed in the right proportions, could result in the perfume Amor and Psyche-it was, in fact, probable. Attar of roses, clove, and storax-it was those three ingredients that he had searched for so desperately this afternoon. Joining them with the other parts of the composition-which he believed he had recognized as well-would unite the segments into a pretty, rounded pastry. It was now only a question of the exact proportions in which you had to join them. To find that out, he, Baldini, would have to run experiments for several days, a horrible task, almost worse than the basic identification of the parts, for it meant you had to measure and weigh and record and all the while pay damn close attention, because the least bit of inattention-a tremble of the pipette, a mistake in counting drops-could ruin the whole thing. And every botched attempt was dreadfully expensive. Every ruined mixture was worth a small fortune…

He wanted to test this mannikin, wanted to ask him about the exact formula for Amor and Psyche. If he knew it, to the drop and dram, then he was obviously an impostor who had somehow pinched the recipe from Pelissier in order to gain access and get a position with him, Baldini. But if he came close, then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini’s professional interest. Not that Baldini would jeopardize his firm decision to give up his business! This perfume by Pelissier was itself not the important thing to him. Even if the fellow could deliver it to him by the gallon, Baldini would not dream of scenting Count Verhamont’s Spanish hides with it, but… But he had not been a perfumer his life long, had not concerned himself his life long with the blending of scents, to have lost all professional passions from oae moment to the next. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume, and beyond that, in studying the gifts of this mysterious boy, who had parsed a scent right off his forehead. He wanted to know what was behind that. He was quite simply curious.

“You have, it appears, a fine nose, young man,” he said, once Grenouille had ceased his wheezings; and he stepped back into the workshop, carefully setting the candlestick on the worktable, “without doubt, a fine nose, but…”

“I have the best nose in Paris, Maitre Baldini,” Grenouille interrupted with a rasp. “I know all the odors in the world, all of them, only I don’t know the names of some of them, but I can learn the names. The odors that have names, there aren’t many of those, there are only a few thousand. I’ll learn them all, I’ll never forget the name of that balm, storax, the balm is called storax, it’s called storax…”

“Silence!” shouted Baldini. “Do not interrupt me when I’m speaking! You are impertinent and insolent. No one knows a thousand odors by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odors, they are simply stenches.”

During the rather lengthy interruption that had burst from him, Grenouille had almost unfolded his body, had in fact been so excited for the moment that he had flailed both arms in circles to suggest the “all, all of them” that he knew. But at Baldini’s reply he collapsed back into himself, like a black toad lurking there motionless on the threshold.

“I have, of course, been aware,” Baldini continued, “for some time now that Amor and Psyche consisted of storax, attar of roses, and cloves, plus bergamot and extract of rosemary et cetera. All that is needed to find that out is, as I said, a passably fine nose, and it may well be that God has given you a passably fine nose, as He has many, many other people as well— particularly at your age. A perfumer, however”-and here Baldini raised his index finger and puffed out his chest-”a perfumer, however, needs more than a passably fine nose. He needs an incorruptible, hardworking organ that has been trained to smell for many decades, enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odors by composition and proportion, as well as to create new, unknown mixtures of scent. Such a nose”-and here he tapped his with his finger-”is not something one has, young man! It is something one acquires, by perseverance and diligence. Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you?”

Grenouille did not answer.

“Could you perhaps give me a rough guess?” Baldini said, bending forward a bit to get a better look at the toad at his door. “Just a rough one, an estimation? Well, speak up, best nose in Paris!”

But Grenouille was silent.

“You see?” said Baldini, equally both satisfied and disappointed; and he straightened up. “You can’t do it. Of course you can’t. You’re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at mealtime. That’s fine, there’s something to be said for that. But that doesn’t make you a cook, not by a long shot. Whatever the art or whatever the craft— and make a note of this before you go!-talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.”

He was reaching for the candlestick on the table, when from the doorway came Grenouille’s pinched snarl: “I don’t know what a formula is, maitre. I don’t know that, but otherwise I know everything!”

“A formula is the alpha and omega of every perfume,” replied Baldini sternly, for he wanted to end this conversation-now. “It contains scrupulously exact instructions for the proportions needed to mix individual ingredients so that the result is the unmistakable scent one desires. That is a formula. It is the recipe-if that is a word you understand better.”

“Formula, formula,” rasped Grenouille and grew somewhat larger in the doorway. “I don’t need a formula. I have the recipe in my nose. Can I mix it for you, maitre, can I mix it, can I?”

“How’s that?” pried Baldini in a rather loud voice and held the candle up to the gnome’s face. “How would you mix it?”

For the first time, Grenouille did not flinch. “Why, they’re all here, all the ones you need, the scents, they’re all here, in this room,” he said, pointing again into the darkness. “There’s attar of roses! There’s orange blossom! That’s clove! That’s rosemary, there…!”

“Certainly they’re here!” roared Baldini. “They are all here. But I’m telling you, you blockhead, that is of no use if one does not have the formula!”

“… There’s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!” Grenouille went on crowing, and at each name he pointed to a different spot in the room, although it was so dark that at best you could surmise the shadows of the cupboards filled with bottles.

“You can see in the dark, can you?” Baldini went on. “You not only have the best nose, but also the keenest eyes in Paris, do you? Now if you have passably good ears, then open them up, because I’m telling you: you are a little swindler. You probably picked up your information at Pelissier’s, did some spying, is that it? And now you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, right?”

Grenouille was now standing up, completely unfolded to full size, so to speak, in the doorway, his legs slightly apart, his arms slightly spread, so that he looked like a black spider that had latched onto the threshold and frame. “Give me ten minutes,” he said in close to a normal, fluent pattern of speech, “and I will produce for you the perfume Amor and Psyche. Right now, right here in this room. Maitre, give me just five minutes!”

“Do you suppose I’d let you slop around here in my laboratory? With essences that are worth a fortune? You?”

“Yes,” said Grenouille.

“Bah!” Baldini shouted, exhaling all at once every bit of air he had in him. Then he took a deep breath and a long look at Grenouille the spider, and thought it over. Basically it makes no difference, he thought, because it will all be over tomorrow anyway. I know for a fact that he can’t do what he claims he can, can’t possibly do it. Why, that would make him greater than the great Frangipani. But why shouldn’t I let him demonstrate before my eyes what I know to be true? It is possible that someday in Messina-people do grow very strange in old age and their minds fix on the craziest ideas-I’ll get the notion that I had failed to recognize an olfactory genius, a creature upon whom the grace of God had been poured out in superabundance, a wunderkind… It’s totally out of the question. Everything my reason tells me says it is out of the question-but miracles do happen, that is certain. So what if, when I lie dying in Messina someday, the thought comes to me there on my deathbed: On that evening, back in Paris, I shut my eyes to a miracle…? That would not be very pleasant, Baldini. Let the fool waste a few drops of attar of roses and musk tincture; you would have wasted them yourself if Pelissier’s perfume had still interested you. And what are a few drops-though expensive ones, very, very expensive!-compared to certain knowledge and a peaceful old age?

“Now pay attention!” he said with an affectedly stern voice. “Pay attention! I… what is your name, anyway?”

“Grenouille,” said Grenouille. “Jean-Baptiste Gre-nouille,”

“Aha,” said Baldini. “All right then, now pay attention, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. You shall have the opportunity, now, this very moment, to prove your assertion. Your grandiose failure will also be an opportunity for you to learn the virtue of humility, which-although one may pardon the total lack of its development at your tender age-will be an absolute prerequisite for later advancement as a member of your guild and for your standing as a man, a man of honor, a dutiful subject, and a good Christian. I am prepared to teach you this lesson at my own expense. For certain reasons, I am feeling generous this evening, and, who knows, perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day. But do not suppose that you can dupe me! Giuseppe Baldini’s nose is old, but it is still sharp, sharp enough immediately to recognize the slightest difference between your mixture and this product here.” And at that he pulled the handkerchief drenched in Amor and Psyche from his pocket and waved it under Grenouille’s nose. “Come closer, best nose in Paris! Come here to the table and show me what you can do. But be careful not to drop anything or knock anything over. Don’t touch anything yet. Let me provide some light first. We want to have lots of illumination for this little experiment, don’t we?”

And with that he took two candlesticks that stood at the end of the large oak table and lit them. He placed all three next to one another along the back, pushed the goatskins to one side, cleared the middle of the table. Then, with a few composed yet rapid motions, he fetched from a small stand the utensils needed for the task-the big-bellied mixing bottle, the glass funnel, the pipette, the small and large measuring glasses -and placed them in proper order on the oaken surface.

Grenouille had meanwhile freed himself from the doorframe. Even while Baldini was making his pompous speech, the stiffness and cunning intensity had fallen away from him. He had heard only the approval, only the “yes,” with the inner jubilation of a child that has sulked its way to some— permission granted and thumbs its nose at the limitations, conditions, and moral admonitions tied to it. Standing there at his ease and letting the rest of Baldini’s oration flow by, he was for the first time more human than animal, because he knew that he had already conquered the man who had yielded to him.

While Baldini was still fussing with his candlesticks at the table, Grenouille had already slipped off into the darkness of the laboratory with its cupboards full of precious essences, oils, and tinctures, and following his sure-scenting nose, grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. There were nine altogether: essence of orange blossom, lime oil, attars of rose and clove, extracts of jasmine, bergamot, and rosemary, musk tincture, and storax balm, all quickly plucked down and set at the ready on the edge of the table. The last item he lugged over was a demijohn full of high-proof rectified spirit. Then he placed himself behind Baldini-who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry, moving this glass back a bit, that one over more to one side, so that everything would be in its old accustomed order and displayed to its best advantage in the candlelight— and waited, quivering with impatience, for the old man to get out of the way and make room for him.

“There!” Baldini said at last, stepping aside. “I’ve lined up everything you’ll require for-let us graciously call it-your ‘experiment.’ Don’t break anything, don’t spill anything. Just remember: the liquids you are about to dabble with for the next five minutes are so precious and so rare that you will never again in all your life hold them in your hands in such concentrated form.”

“How much of it shall I make for you, maitre?” Grenouille asked.

“Make what…?” said Baldini, who had not yet finished his speech.

“How much of the perfume?” rasped Grenouille. “How much of it do you want? Shall I fill this big bottle here to the rim?” And he pointed to a mixing bottle that held a gallon at the very least.

“No, you shall not!” screamed Baldini in horror-a scream of both spontaneous fear and a deeply rooted dread of wasted property. Embarrassed at what his scream had revealed, he followed it up by roaring, “And don’t interrupt me when I am speaking, either!” Then in a calm voice tinged with irony, he continued, “Why would we need a gallon of a perfume that neither of us thinks much of? Haifa beakerful will do, really. But since such small quantities are difficult to measure, I’ll allow you to start with a third of a mixing bottle.”

“Good,” said Grenouille. “I’m going to fill a third of this bottle with Amor and Psyche. But, Maitre Baidini, I will do it in my own way. I don’t know if it will be how a craftsman would do it. I don’t know how that’s done. But I will do it my own way.”

“As you please,” said Baidini, who knew that in this business there was no “your way” or “my way,” but one and only one way, which consisted of knowing the formula and, using the appropriate calculations for the quantity one desired, creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences, which then had to be volatilized into a true perfume by mixing it in a precise ratio with alcohol-usually varying between one-to-ten and one-to-twenty. There was no other way, that he knew. And therefore what he was now called upon to witness-first with derisive hauteur, then with dismay, and finally with helpless astonishment-seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day.

Fifteen

THE LITTLE MAN named Grenouille first uncorked the demijohn of alcohol. Heaving the heavy vessel up gave him difficulty. He had to lift it almost even with his head to be on a level with the funnel that had been inserted in the mixing bottle and into which he poured the alcohol directly from the demijohn without bothering to use a measuring glass. Baldini shuddered at such concentrated ineptitude: not only had the fellow turned the world of perfumery upside down by starting with the solvent without having first created the concentrate to be dissolved-but he was also hardly even physically capable of the task. He was shaking with exertion, and Baldini was waiting at any moment for the heavy demijohn to come crashing down and smash everything on the table to pieces. The candles, he thought, for God’s sake, the candles! There’s going to be an explosion, he’ll burn my house down…! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman’s hands when Grenouille set it down himself, getting it back on the floor all in one piece, and stoppered it. A clear, light liquid swayed in the bottle-not a drop spilled. For a few moments Grenouille panted for breath, but with a look of contentment on his face as if the hardest part of the job were behind him. And indeed, what happened now proceeded with such speed that BaWini could hardly follow it with his eyes, let alone keep track of the order in which it occurred or make even partial sense of the procedure.

Grenouille grabbed apparently at random from the row of essences in their flacons, pulled out the glass stoppers, held the contents under his nose for an instant, splashed a bit of one bottle, dribbled a drop or two of another, poured a dash of a third into the funnel, and so on. Pipette, test tube, measuring glass, spoons and rods-all the utensils that allow the perfumer to control the complicated process of mixing-Grenouille did not so much as touch a single one of them. 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. Yes, like a child, thought Baldini; all at once he looks like a child, despite his ungainly hands, despite his scarred, pockmarked face and his bulbous old-man’s nose. I took him to be older than he is; but now he seems much younger to me; he looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. There was just such a fanatical child trapped inside this young man, standing at the table with eyes aglow, having forgotten everything around him, apparently no longer aware that there was anything else in the laboratory but himself and these bottles that he tipped into the funnel with nimble awkwardness to mix up an insane brew that he would confidently swear-and would truly believe!-to be the exquisite perfume Amor and Psyche. Baldini shuddered as he watched the fellow bustling about in the candlelight, so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. In the old days-so he thought, and for a moment he felt as sad and miserable and furious as he had that afternoon while gazing out onto the city glowing ruddy in the twilight-in the old days people like that simply did not exist; he was an entirely new specimen of the race, one that could arise only in exhausted, dissipated times like these…, But he was about to be taught his lesson, the impertinent boy. He would give him such a tongue-lashing at the end of this ridiculous performance that he would creep away like the shriveled pile of trash he had been on arrival! Vermin! One dared not get involved with anyone at all these days, the world was simply teeming with absurd vermin!

Baldini was so busy with his personal exasperation and disgust at the age that he did not really comprehend what was intended when Grenouille suddenly stoppered up all the flacons, pulled the funnel out of the mixing bottle, grabbed the neck of the bottle with his right hand, capped it with the palm of his left, and shook it vigorously. Only when the bottle had been spun through the air several times, its precious contents sloshing back and forth like lemonade between belly and neck, did Baldini let loose a shout of rage and horror. “Stop it!” he screeched. “That’s enough! Stop it this moment! Basta! Put that bottle back on the table and don’t touch anything else, do you understand, nothing else! I must have been crazy to listen to your asinine gibberish. The way you handle these things, your crudity, your primitive lack of judgment, demonstrate to me that you are a bungler, a barbaric bungler, and a beastly, cheeky, snot-nosed brat besides. You wouldn’t make a good lemonade mixer, not even a good licorice-water vendor, let alone a perfumer! Just be glad, be grateful and content that your master lets you slop around in tanning fluids! Do not dare it ever again, do you hear me? Do not dare ever again to set a foot across the threshold of a perfumer’s shop!”

Thus spoke Baldini. And even as he spoke, the air around him was saturated with the odor of Amor and Psyche. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.

Grenouille had set down the bottle, removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirttail. One, two steps back-and the clumsy way he hunched his body together under Baldini’s tirade sent enough waves rolling out into the room to spread the newly created scent in all directions. Nothing more was needed. True, Baldini ranted on, railed and cursed, but with every breath his outward show of rage found less and less inner nourishment. He sensed he had been proved wrong, which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos. And when he fell silent, had been silent for a good while, he had no need of Grenouille’s remark: “It’s all done.” He knew that already.

But nevertheless, although in the meantime air heavy with Amor and Psyche was undulating all about him, he stepped up to the old oak table to make his test. He pulled a fresh snowy white lace handkerchief from his coat pocket, the left one, unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. He waved the handkerchief with outstretched arm to aerate it and then pulled it past his nose with the delicate, well-practiced motion, soaking up its scent. Letting it out again in little puffs, he sat down on a stool. Where before his face had been bright red with erupting anger, all at once he had grown pale. “Incredible,” he murmured softly to himself, “by God— incredible.” And he pressed the handkerchief to his nose again and again and sniffed and shook his head and muttered, “Incredible.” It was Amor and Psyche, beyond the shadow of a doubt Amor and Psyche, that despicable, ingenious blend of scents, so exactly copied that not even Pelissier himself would have been able to distinguish it from his own product. “Incredible…”

Small and ashen, the great Baldini sat on his stool, looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand, pressing it to his nose like an old maid with the sniffles. By now he was totally speechless. He didn’t even say “incredible” anymore, but nodding gently and staring at the contents of the mixing bottle, could only let out a monotone “Hmm, hrnm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm.” After a while, Gre-nouille approached, stepping up to the table soundlessly as a shadow.

“It’s not a good perfume,” he said. “It’s been put together very bad, this perfume has.”

“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini, and Grenouille continued, “If you’ll let me, maitre, I’ll make it better. Give me a minute and I’ll make a proper perfume out of it!”

“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini and nodded. Not in consent, but because he was in such a helplessly apathetic condition that he would have said “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and nodded to anything. And he went on nodding and murmuring “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and made no effort to interfere as Grenouille began to mix away a second time, pouring the alcohol from the demijohn into the mixing bottle a second time (right on top of the perfume already in it), tipping the contents of flacons a second time in apparently random order and quantity into the funnel. Only at the end of the procedure-Grenouille did not shake the bottle this time, but swirled it about gently like a brandy glass, perhaps in deference to Baldini’s delicacy, perhaps because the contents seemed more precious to him this time-only then, as the liquid whirled about in the bottle, did Baldini awaken from his numbed state and stand up, the handkerchief still pressed to his nose, of course, as if he were arming himself against yet another attack upon his most private self.

“It’s all done, maitre,” Grenouille said. “Now it’s a really good scent.”

“Yes, yes, fine, fine,” Baldini replied and waved him off with his free hand.

“Don’t you want to test it?” Grenouille gurgled on. “Don’t you want to, maitre? Aren’t you going to test it?”

“Later. I’m not in the mood to test it at the moment… have other things on my mind. Go now! Come on!”

And he picked up one of the candlesticks and passed through the door into the shop. Grenouille followed him. They entered the narrow hallway that led to the servants’ entrance. The old man shuffled up to the doorway, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. He stepped aside to let the lad out.

“Can’t I come to work for you, maitre, can’t I?” Grenouille asked, standing on the threshold, hunched over again, the lurking look returning to his eye.

“I don’t know,” said Baldini. “I shall think about it. Go.”

And then Grenouille had vanished, gone in a split second, swallowed up by the darkness. Baldini stood there and stared into the night. In his right hand he held the candlestick, in his left the handkerchief, like someone with a nosebleed, but in fact he was simply frightened. He quickly bolted the door. Then he took the protective handkerchief from his face, shoved it into his pocket, and walked back through the shop to his laboratory.

The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini’s eyes. He did not have to test it, he simply stood at the table in front of the mixing bottle and breathed. The perfume was glorious. It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. And it was more. 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; he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss, now! now at this very moment! He forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, some toiletry. It was something completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine…

The hairs that had ruffled up on Baldini’s arm fell back again, and a befuddling peace took possession of his soul. He picked up the leather, the goat leather lying at the table’s edge, and a knife, and trimmed away. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. He fixed a pane of glass over the basin, divided the rest of the perfume between two small bottles, applied labels to them, and wrote the words Nuit Napolitaine on them. Then he extinguished the candles and left.

Once upstairs, he said nothing to his wife while they ate. Above all, he said nothing about the solemn decision he had arrived at that afternoon. And his wife said nothing either, for she noticed that he was in good spirits, and that was enough for her. Nor did he walk over to Notre-Dame to thank God for his strength of character. Indeed, that night he forgot, for the first time ever, to say his evening prayers.

Sixteen

THE NEXT MORNING he went straight to Grimal. First he paid for his goat leather, paid in full, without a grumble or the least bit of haggling. And then he invited Grimal to the Tour d’Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille, his apprentice. It goes without saying that he did not reveal to him the why’s and wherefore’s of this purchase. He told some story about how he had a large order for scented leather and to fill it he needed unskilled help. He required a lad of few needs, who would do simple tasks, cutting leather and so forth. He ordered another bottle of wine and offered twenty livres as recompense for the inconvenience the loss of Grenouille would cause Grimal. Twenty livres was an enormous sum. Grimal immediately took him up on it. They walked to the tannery, where, strangely enough, Grenouille was waiting with his bundle already packed. Baldini paid the twenty livres and took him along at once, well aware that he had just made the best deal of his life.

Grimal, who for his part was convinced that he had just made the best deal of his life, returned to the Tour d’Argent, there drank two more bottles of wine, moved over to the Lion d’Or on the other bank around noon, and got so rip-roaring drunk there that when he decided to go back to the Tour d’Argent late that night, he got the rue Geoffroi L’Anier confused with the rue des Nonaindieres, and instead of coming out directly onto the Pont-Marie as he had intended, he was brought by ill fortune to the Quai des Ormes, where he splashed lengthwise and face first into the water like a soft mattress. He was dead in an instant. The river, however, needed considerable time to drag him out from the shallows, past the barges moored there, into the stronger main current, and not until the early morning hours did Grimal the tanner-or, better, his soaked carcass-float briskly downriver toward the west.

As he passed the Pont-au-Change, soundlessly, without bumping against the bridge piers, sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed. A bunk had been set up for him in a back corner of Baldini’s laboratory, and he was now about to take possession of it-while his former employer floated down the cold Seine, all four limbs extended. Grenouille rolled himself up into a little ball like a tick. As he fell off to sleep, he sank deeper and deeper into himself, leading the triumphant entry into his innermost fortress, where he dreamed of an odoriferous victory banquet, a gigantic orgy with clouds of incense and fogs of myrrh, held in his own honor.

Seventeen

WITH THE acquisition of Grenouille, the House of Giuseppe Baidini began its ascent to national, indeed European renown. The Persian chimes never stopped ringing, the herons never stopped spewing in the shop on the Pont-au-Change.

The very first evening, Grenouille had to prepare a large demijohn full of Nuit Napolitaine, of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. The fame of the scent spread like wildfire. Chenier’s eyes grew glassy from the moneys paid and his back ached from all the deep bows he had to make, for only persons of high, indeed highest, rank-or at least the servants of persons of high and highest rank— appeared. One day the door was flung back so hard it rattled; in stepped the footman of Count d’Argenson and shouted, as only footmen can shout, that he wanted five bottles of this new scent. Chenier was still shaking with awe fifteen minutes later, for Count d’Argenson was commissary and war minister to His Majesty and the most powerful man in Paris.

While Chenier was subjected to the onslaught of customers in the shop, Baidini had shut himself up in his laboratory with his new apprentice. He justified this state of affairs to Chenier with a fantastic theory that he called “division of labor and increased productivity.” For years, he explained, he had patiently watched while Pelissier and his ilk-despisers of the ancient craft, all-had enticed his customers away and made a shambles of his business. His forbearance was now at an end. He was accepting their challenge and striking back at these cheeky parvenus, and, what was more, with their own weapons. Every season, every month, if necessary every week, he would play trumps, a new perfume. And what perfumes they would be! He would draw fully upon his creative talents. And for that it was necessary that he— assisted only by an unskilled helper-would be solely and exclusively responsible for the production of scents, while Chenier would devote himself exclusively to their sale. By using such modern methods, they would open a new chapter in the history of perfumery, sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes, he had consciously and explicitly said “they,” because he intended to allow his old and trusted journeyman to share a given percentage of these incomparable riches.

Only a few days before, Chenier would have regarded such talk as a sign of his master’s incipient senility. “Ready for the Charite,” he would have thought. “It won’t be long now before he lays down the pestle for good.” But now he was not thinking at all. He didn’t get around to it, he simply had too much to do. He had so much to do that come evening he was so exhausted he could hardly empty out the cashbox and siphon off his cut. Not in his wildest dreams would he have doubted that things were not on the up and up, though Baldini emerged from his laboratory almost daily with some new scent.

And what scents they were! Not just perfumes of high, indeed highest, quality, but also cremes and powders, soaps, hair tonics, toilet waters, oils… Everything meant to have a fragrance now smelled new and different and more wonderful than ever before. And as if bewitched, the public pounced upon everything, absolutely everything-even the newfangled scented hair ribbons that Baldini created one day on a curious whim. And price was no object. Everything that Baldini produced was a success. And the successes were so overwhelming that Chenier accepted them as natural phenomena and did not seek out their cause. That perhaps the new apprentice, that awkward gnome, who was housed like a dog in the laboratory and whom one saw sometimes when the master stepped out, standing in the background wiping off glasses and cleaning mortars-that this cipher of a man might be implicated in the fabulous blossoming of their business, Chenier would not have believed had he been told it.

Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it. Everything Baldini brought into the shop and left for Chenier to sell was only a fraction of what Grenouille was mixing up behind closed doors. Baldini couldn’t smell fast enough to keep up with him. At times he was truly tormented by having to choose among the glories that Grenouille produced. This sorcerer’s apprentice could have provided recipes for all the perfumers of France without once repeating himself, without once producing something of inferior or even average quality. As a matter of fact, he could not have provided them with recipes, i.e., formulas, for at first Grenouille still composed his scents in the totally chaotic and unprofessional manner familiar to Baldini, mixing his ingredients impromptu and in apparent wild confusion. Unable to control the crazy business, but hoping at least to get some notion of it, Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales, measuring glasses, and the pipette when preparing his mixtures, even though he considered them unnecessary; further, he was to get used to regarding the alcohol not as another fragrance, but as a solvent to be added at the end; and, for God’s sake, he would simply have to go about things more slowly, at an easier and slower pace, as befitted a craftsman.

Grenouille did it. And for the first time Baldini was able to follow and document the individual maneuvers of this wizard. Paper and pen in hand, constantly urging a slower pace, he sat next to Grenouille and jotted down how many drams of this, how many level measures of that, how many drops of some other ingredient wandered into the mixing bottles. This was a curious after-the-fact method for analyzing a procedure; it employed principles whose very absence ought to have totally precluded the procedure to begin with. But by employing this method, Baldini finally managed to obtain such synthetic formulas. How it was that Grenouille could mix his perfumes without the formulas was still a puzzle, or better, a miracle, to Baldini, but at least he had captured this miracle in a formula, satisfying in part his thirst for rules and order and preventing the total collapse of his perfumer’s universe.

In due time he ferreted out the recipes for all the perfumes Grenouille had thus far invented, and finally he forbade him to create new scents unless he, Baldini, was present with pen and paper to observe the process with Argus eyes and to document it step by step. In his fastidious, prickly hand, he copied his notes, soon consisting of dozens of formulas, into two different little books-one he locked in his fireproof safe and the other he always carried with him, even sleeping with it at night. That reassured him. For now, should he wish, he could himself perform Gre-nouille’s miracles, which had on first encounter so profoundly shaken him. He believed that by collecting these written formulas, he could exorcise the terrible creative chaos erupting from his apprentice. Also the fact that he no longer merely stood there staring stupidly, but was able to participate in the creative process by observing and recording it, had a soothing effect on Baldini and strengthened his self-confidence. After a while he even came to believe that he made a not insignificant contribution to the success of these sublime scents. And when he had once entered them in his little books and entrusted them to his safe and his bosom, he no longer doubted that they were now his and his alone.

But Grenouille, too, profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him. He was not dependent on them himself. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later, for he never forgot an odor. But 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. After a few weeks Grenouille had mastered not only the names of all the odors in Baldini’s laboratory, but he was also able to record the formulas for his perfumes on his own and, vice versa, to convert other people’s formulas and instructions into perfumes and other scented products. And not merely that! Once he had learned to express his fragrant ideas in drops and drams, he no longer even needed the intermediate step of experimentation. When Baldini assigned him a new scent, whether for a handkerchief cologne, a sachet, or a face paint, Grenouille no longer reached for flacons and powders, but instead simply sat himself down at the table and wrote the formula straight out. He had learned to extend the journey from his mental notion of a scent to the finished perfume by way of writing down the formula. For him it was a detour. In the world’s eyes-that is, in Baldini’s-it was progress. Grenouille’s miracles remained the same. But the recipes he now supplied along with therii removed the terror, and that was for the best. The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in the conventional language of perfumery-and the less his master feared and suspected him. While still regarding him as a person with exceptional olfactory gifts, Baldini no longer considered him a second Frangipani or, worse, some weird wizard-and that was fine with Grenouille. The regulations of the craft functioned as a welcome disguise. He virtually lulled Baldini to sleep with his exemplary procedures, weighing ingredients, swirling the mixing bottles, sprinkling the test handkerchief. He could shake it out almost as delicately, pass it beneath his nose almost as elegantly as his master. And from time to time, at well-spaced intervals, he would make mistakes that could not fail to capture Baldini’s notice: forgetting to filter, setting the scales wrong, fixing the percentage of ambergris tincture in the formula ridiculously high. And took his scoldings for the mistakes, correcting them then most conscientiously. Thus he managed to lull Baldini into the illusion that ultimately this was all perfectly normal. He was not out to cheat the old man after all. He truly wanted to learn from him. Not how to mix perfumes, not how to compose a scent correctly, not that of course! In that sphere, there was no one in the world who could have taught him anything, nor would the ingredients available in Baldini’s shop have even begun to suffice for his notions about how to realize a truly great perfume. 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. But for that, he knew, two indispensable prerequisites must be met. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability, the status of a journeyman at the least, under the protection of which he could indulge his true passions and follow his true goals unimpeded. The second was the knowledge of the craft itself, the way in which scents were produced, isolated, concentrated, preserved, and thus first made available for higher ends. For Grenouille did indeed possess the best nose in the world, both analytical and visionary, but he did not yet have the ability to make those scents realities.

Eighteen

AND SO HE gladly let himself be instructed in the arts of making soap from lard, sewing gloves of chamois, mixing powders from wheat flour and almond bran and pulverized violet roots. Rolled scented candles made of charcoal, saltpeter, and sandalwood chips. Pressed Oriental pastilles of myrrh, benzoin, and powdered amber. Kneaded frankincense, shellac, vetiver, and cinnamon into balls of incense. Sifted and spatulated poudre impermle out of crushed rose petals, lavender flowers, cascarilla bark. Stirred face paints, whites and vein blues, and molded greasy sticks of carmine for the lips. Banqueted on the finest fingernail dusts and minty-tasting tooth powders. Mixed liquids for curling periwigs and wart drops for corns, bleaches to remove freckles from the complexion and nightshade extract for the eyes, Spanish fly for the gentlemen and hygienic vinegars for the ladies… Grenouille learned to produce all such eauxand powders, toilet and beauty preparations, plus teas and herbal blends, liqueurs, marinades, and such-in short, he learned, with no particular interest but without complaint and with success, everything that Baldini knew to teach him from his great store of traditional lore.

He was an especially eager pupil, however, whenever Baldini instructed him in the production of tinctures, extracts, and essences. He was indefatigable when it came to crushing bitter almond seeds in the screw press or mashing musk pods or mincing dollops of gray, greasy ambergris with a chopping knife or grating violet roots and digesting the shavings in the finest alcohol. He learned how to use a separatory funnel that could draw off the purest oil of crushed lemon rinds from the milky dregs. He learned to dry herbs and flowers on grates placed in warm, shady spots and to preserve what was once rustling foliage in wax-sealed crocks and caskets. He learned the art of rinsing pomades and producing, filtering, concentrating, clarifying, and rectifying infusions.

To be sure, Baldini’s laboratory was not a proper place for fabricating floral or herbal oils on a grand scale. It would have been hard to find sufficient quantities of fresh plants in Paris for that. But from time to time, when they could get cheap, fresh rosemary, sage, mint, or anise seeds at the market, or a shipment of valerian roots, caraway seeds, nutmegs, or dried clove blossoms had come in, then the alchemist in Baldini would stir, and he would bring out the large alembic, a copper distilling vessel, atop it a head for condensing liquids-a so-called moor’s head alembic, he proudly announced-which he had used forty years before for distilling lavender out on the open southern exposures of Liguria’s slopes and on the heights of the Luberon. And while Grenouille chopped up what was to be distilled, Baldini hectically bustled about heating a brick-lined hearth— because speed was the alpha and omega of this procedure-and placed on it a copper kettle, the bottom well covered with water. He threw in the minced plants, quickly closed off the double-walled moor’s head, and connected two hoses to allow water to pass in and out. This clever mechanism for cooling the water, he explained, was something he had added on later, since out in the field, of course, one had simply used bellowed air for cooling. And then he blew on the fire.

Slowly the kettle came to a boil. And after a while, the distillate started to flow out of the moor’s head’s third tap into a Florentine flask that Baldini had set below it-at first hesitantly, drop by drop, then in a threadlike stream. It looked rather unimpressive to begin with, like some thin, murky soup. Bit by bit, however-especially after the first flask had been replaced with a second and set aside to settle-the brew separated into two different liquids: below, the floral or herbal fluid; above, a thick floating layer of oil. If one carefully poured off the fluid-which had only the lightest aroma-through the lower spout of the Florentine flask, the pure oil was left behind-the essence, the heavily scented principle of the plant.

Grenouille was fascinated by the process. If ever anything in his life had kindled his enthusiasm— granted, not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame-then it was this procedure for using fire, water, steam, and a cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter. That scented soul, that ethereal oil, was in fact the best thing about matter, the only reason for his interest in it. The rest of the stupid stuff-the blossoms, leaves, rind, fruit, color, beauty, vitality, and all those other useless qualities-were of no concern to him. They were mere husk and ballast, to be disposed of.

From time to time, when the distillate had grown watery and clear, they took the alembic from the fire, opened it, and shook out the cooked muck. It looked as flabby and pale as soggy straw, like the bleached bones of little birds, like vegetables that had been boiled too long, insipid and stringy, pulpy, hardly still recognizable for what it was, disgustingly cadaverous, and almost totally robbed of its own odor. They threw it out the window into the river. Then they fed the alembic with new, fresh plants, poured in more water, and set it back on the hearth. And once again the kettle began to simmer, and again the lifeblood of the plants dripped into the Florentine flask. This often went on all night long. Baldini watched the hearth, Grenouille kept an eye on the flasks; there was nothing else to do while waiting for the next batch.

They sat on footstools by the fire, under the spell of the rotund flacon-both spellbound, if for very different reasons. Baldini enjoyed the blaze of the fire and the flickering red of the flames and the copper, he loved the crackling of the burning wood, the gurgle of the alembic, for it was like the old days. You could lose yourself in it! He fetched a bottle of wine from the shop, for the heat made him thirsty, and drinking wine was like the old days too. And then he began to tell stories, from the old days, endless stories. About the War of the Spanish Succession, when his own participation against the Austrians had had a decisive influence on the outcome; about the Camisards, together with whom he had haunted the Cevennes; about the daughter of a Huguenot in the Esterel, who, intoxicated by the scent of lavender, had complied with his wishes; about a forest fire that he had damn near started and which would then have probably set the entire Provence ablaze, as sure as there was a heaven and hell, for a biting mistral had been blowing; and over and over he told about distilling out in the open fields, at night, by moonlight, accompanied by wine and the screech of cicadas, and about a lavender oil that he had created, one so refined and powerful that you could have weighed it out in silver; about his apprentice years in Genoa, about his journeyman years in the city of Grasse, where there were as many perfumers as shoemakers, some of them so rich they lived like princes, in magnificent houses with shaded gardens and terraces and wainscoted dining rooms where they feasted with porcelain and golden cutlery, and so on…

Such were the stories Baldini told while he drank his wine and his cheeks grew ruddy from the wine and the blazing fire and from his own enthusiastic story-telling. Grenouille, however, who sat back more in the shadows, did not listen to him at all. He did not care about old tales, he was interested in one thing only: this new process. He stared uninterruptedly at the tube at the top of the alembic out of which the distillate ran in a thin stream. And as he stared at it, he imagined that he himself was such an alembic, simmering away inside just like this one, out of which there likewise gushed a distillate, but a better, a newer, an unfamiliar distillate of those exquisite plants that he tended within him, that blossomed there, their bouquet unknown to anyone but himself, and that with their unique scent he could turn the world into a fragrant Garden of Eden, where life would be relatively bearable for him, olfactorily speaking. To be a giant alembic, flooding the whole world with a distillate of his own making, that was the daydream to which Grenouille gave himself up.

But while Baldini, inflamed by the wine, continued to tell ever more extravagant tales of the old days and got more and more tangled up in his uninhibited enthusiasms, Grenouille soon abandoned his bizarre fantasy. For the moment he banished from his thoughts the notion of a giant alembic, and instead he pondered how he might make use of his newly gained knowledge for more immediate goals.

Nineteen

IT WASN’T LONG before he had become a specialist in the field of distillation. He discovered-and his nose was of more use in the discovery than Baldini’s rules and regulations-that the heat of the fire played a significant role in the quality of the distillate. Every plant, every flower, every sort of wood, and every oil-yielding seed demanded a special procedure. Sometimes you had to build up the hottest head of steam, sometimes you just left it at a moderate boil, and some flowers yielded their best only if you let them steep over the lowest possible flame.

It was much the same with their preparation. Mint and lavender could be distilled by the bunch. Other things needed to be carefully culled, plucked, chopped, grated, crushed, or even made into pulp before they were placed in the copper kettle. Many things simply could not be distilled at all-which irritated Grenouille no end.

Having observed what a sure hand Grenouille had with the apparatus, Baldini had given him free rein with the alembic, and Grenouille had taken full advantage of that freedom. While still mixing perfumes and producing other scented and herbal products during the day, he occupied himself at night exclusively with the art of distillation. His plan was to create entirely new basic odors, and with them to produce at least some of the scents that he bore within him. At first he had some small successes. He succeeded in producing oils from nettles and from cress seeds, toilet water from the fresh bark of elderberry and from yew sprigs. These distillates were only barely similar to the odor of their ingredients, but they were at least interesting enough to be processed further. But there were also substances with which the procedure was a complete failure. Grenouille tried for instance to distill the odor of glass, the clayey, cool odor of smooth glass, something a normal human being cannot perceive at all. He got himself both window glass and bottle glass and tried working with it in large pieces, in fragments, in slivers, as dust-all without the least success. He distilled brass, porcelain, and leather, grain and gravel. He distilled plain dirt. Blood and wood and fresh fish. His own hair. By the end he was distilling plain water, water from the Seine, the distinctive odor of which seemed to him worth preserving. He believed that with the help of an alembic he could rob these materials of their characteristic odors, just as could be done with thyme, lavender, and caraway seeds. He did not know that distillation is nothing more than a process for separating complex substances into volatile and less volatile components and that it is only useful in the art of perfumery because the volatile essential oils of certain plants can be extracted from the rest, which have little or no scent. For substances lacking these essential oils, the distilling process is, of course, wholly pointless. For us moderns, educated in the natural sciences, that is immediately apparent. For Grenouille, however, this knowledge was won painfully after a long chain of disappointing experiments. For months on, end he sat at his alembic night after night and tried every way he could think to distill radically new scents, scents that had never existed on earth before in a concentrated form. But except for a few ridiculous plant oils, nothing came of it. From the immeasurably deep and fecund well of his imagination, he had pumped not a single drop of a real and fragrant essence, had been unable to realize a single atom of his olfactory preoccupations.

When it finally became clear to him that he had failed, he halted his experiments and fell mortally ill.

Twenty

HE CAME DOWN with a high fever, which for the first few days was accompanied by heavy sweats, but which later, as if the pores of his skin were no longer enough, produced countless pustules. Grenouille’s body was strewn with reddish blisters. Many of them popped open, releasing their watery contents, only to fill up again. Others grew into true boils, swelling up thick and red and then erupting like craters, spewing viscous pus and blood streaked with yellow. In time, with his hundreds of ulcerous wounds, Grenouille looked like some martyr stoned from the inside out. Naturally, Baldini was worried. It would have been very unpleasant for him to lose his precious apprentice just at the moment when he was planning to expand his business beyond the borders of the capital and out across the whole country. For increasingly, orders for those innovative scents that Paris was so crazy about were indeed coming not only from the provinces but also from foreign courts. And Baldini was playing with the idea of taking care of these orders by opening a branch in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, virtually a small factory, where the fastest-moving scents could be mixed in quantity and bottled in quantity in smart little flacons, packed by smart little girls, and sent off to Holland, England, and Greater Germany. Such an enterprise was not exactly legal for a master perfumer residing in Paris, but Baldini had recently gained the protection of people in high places; his exquisite scents had done that for him-not just with the commissary, but also with such important personages as the gentleman holding the franchise for the Paris customs office or with a member of the Conseii Royal des Finances and promoter of flourishing commercial undertakings like Monsieur Feydeau de Brou. The latter had even held out the prospect of a royal patent, truly the best thing that one could hope for, a kind of carte blanche for circumventing all civil and professional restrictions; it meant the end of all business worries and the guarantee of secure, permanent, unassailable prosperity.

And Baldini was carrying yet another plan under his heart, his favorite plan, a sort of counterplan to the factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where his wares, though not mass produced, would be made available to anyone. But for a selected number of well-placed, highly placed clients, he wanted to create -or rather, have created-personal perfumes that would fit only their wearer, like tailored clothes, would be used only by the wearer, and would bear his or her illustrious name. He could imagine a Parfum de la Marquise de Cernay, a Parfum de la Marechale de Villar, a Parfum du Due d’Aiguillon, and so on. He dreamed of a Parfum de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, even of a Parfum de Sa Majeste le Roi, in a flacon of costliest cut agate with a holder of chased gold and, hidden on the inside of the base, the engraved words: “Giuseppe Baldini, Parfumeur.” The king’s name and his own, both on the same object. To such glorious heights had Baldini’s ideas risen! And now Grenouille had fallen ill. Even though Grimal, might he rest in peace, had sworn there had never been anything wrong with him, that he could stand up to anything, had even put the black plague behind him. And here he had gone and fallen ill, mortally ill. What if he were to die? Dreadful! For with him would die the splendid plans for the factory, for the smart little girls, for the patent, and for the king’s perfume.

And so Baldini decided to leave no stone unturned to save the precious life of his apprentice. He ordered him moved from his bunk in the laboratory to a clean bed on the top floor. He had the bed made up with damask. He helped bear the patient up the narrow stairway with his own hands, despite his unutterable disgust at the pustules and festering boils. He ordered his wife to heat chicken broth and wine. He sent for the most renowned physician in the neighborhood, a certain Procope, who demanded payment in advance -twenty francs!-before he would even bother to pay a call.

The doctor come, lifted up the sheet with dainty fingers, took one look at Grenouille’s body, which truly looked as if it had been riddled with hundreds of bullets, and left the room without ever having opened the bag that his attendant always carried about with him. The case, so began his report to Baldini, was quite clear. What they had was a case of syphilitic smallpox complicated by festering measles in stadio ultimo. No treatment was called for, since a lancet for bleeding could not be properly inserted into the deteriorating body, which was more like a corpse than a living organism. And although the characteristic pestilential stench associated with the illness was not yet noticeable-an amazing detail and a minor curiosity from a strictly scientific point of view-there could not be the least doubt of the patient’s demise within the next forty-eight hours, as surely as his name was Doctor Procope. Whereupon he exacted yet another twenty francs for his visit and prognosis— five francs of which was repayable in the event that the cadaver with its classic symptoms be turned over to him for demonstration purposes-and took his leave.

Baldini was beside himself. He wailed and lamented in despair. He bit his fingers, raging at his fate. Once again, just before reaching his goal, his grand, very grand plans had been thwarted. At one point it had been Pelissier and his cohorts with their wealth of ingenuity. Now it was this boy with his inexhaustible store of new scents, this scruffy brat who was worth more than his weight in gold, who had decided now of all times to come down with syphilitic smallpox and festering measles in stadio ultimo. Now of all times! Why not two years from now? Why not one? By then he could have been plundered like a silver mine, like a golden ass. He could have gone ahead and died next year. But no! He was dying now, God damn it all, within forty-eight hours!

For a brief moment, Baldini considered the idea of a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame, where he would light a candle and plead with the Mother of God for Gre-nouille’s recovery. But he let the idea go, for matters were too pressing. He ran to get paper and ink, then shooed his wife out of the sickroom. He was going to keep watch himself. Then he sat down in a chair next to the bed, his notepaper on his knees, the pen wet with ink in his hand, and attempted to take Gre-nouille’s perfumatory confession. For God’s sake, he dare not slip away without a word, taking along the treasures he bore inside him. Would he not in these last hours leave a testament behind in faithful hands, so that posterity would not be deprived of the finest scents of all time? He, Baldini, would faithfully administer that testament, the canon of formulas for the most sublime scents ever smelled, would bring them all to full bloom. He would attach undying fame to Grenouille’s name, he would-yes, he swore it by everything holy-lay the best of these scents at the feet of the king, in an agate flacon with gold chasing and the engraved dedication, “From Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, Parfumeur, Paris.” So spoke-or better, whispered-Baldini into Grenouille’s ear, unremittingly beseeching, pleading, wheedling.

But all in vain. Grenouille yielded nothing except watery secretions and bloody pus. He lay there mute in his damask and parted with those disgusting fluids, but not with his treasures, his knowledge, not a single formula for a scent. Baldini would have loved to throttle him, to club him to death, to beat those precious secrets out of that moribund body, had there been any chance of success… and had it not so blatantly contradicted his understanding of a Christian’s love for his neighbor.

And so he went on purring and crooning in his sweetest tones, and coddled his patient, and-though only after a great and dreadful struggle with himself— dabbed with cooling presses the patient’s sweat-drenched brow and the seething volcanoes of his wounds, and spooned wine into his mouth hoping to bring words to his tongue-all night long and all in vain. In the gray of dawn he gave up. He fell exhausted into an armchair at the far end of the room and stared-no longer in rage, really, but merely yielding to silent resignation-at Grenouille’s small dying body there in the bed, whom he could neither save nor rob, nor from whom he could salvage anything else for himself, whose death he could only witness numbly, like a captain watching his ship sink, taking all his wealth with it into the depths.

And then all at once the lips of the dying boy opened, and in a voice whose clarity and firmness betrayed next to nothing of his immediate demise, he spoke. “Tell me, maftre, are there other ways to extract the scent from things besides pressing or distilling?”

Baldini, believing the voice had come either from his own imagination or from the next world, answered mechanically, “Yes, there are.”

“What are they?” came the question from the bed. And Baldini opened his tired eyes wide. Grenouille lay there motionless among his pillows. Had the corpse spoken?

“What are they?” came the renewed question, and this time Baldini noticed Grenouille’s lips move. It’s over now, he thought. This is the end, this is the madness of fever or the throes of death. And he stood up, went over to the bed, and bent down to the sick man. His eyes were open and he gazed up at Baldini with the same strange, lurking look that he had fixed on him at their first meeting.

“What are they?” he asked.

Baldini felt a pang in his heart-he could not deny a dying man his last wish-and he answered, “There are three other ways, my son: enfleurage it chaud, enfleurage a froid, and enfleurage a I’huile. They are superior to distillation in several ways, and they are used for extraction of the finest of all scents: jasmine, rose, and orange blossom.”

“Where?” asked Grenouille.

“In the south,” answered Baldini. “Above all, in the town of Grasse.”

“Good,” said Grenouille.

And with that he closed his eyes. Baldini raised himself up slowly. He was very depressed. He gathered up his notepaper, on which he had not written a single line, and blew out the candle. Day was dawning already. He was dead tired. One ought to have sent for a priest, he thought. Then he made a hasty sign of the cross with his right hand and left the room.

Grenouille was, however, anything but dead. He was only sleeping very soundly, deep in dreams, sucking fluids back into himself. The blisters were already beginning to dry out on his skin, the craters of pus had begun to drain, the wounds to close. Within a week he was well again.

Twenty-one

HE WOULD HAVE loved then and there to have left for the south, where he could learn the new techniques the old man had told him about. But that was of course out of the question. He was after all only an apprentice, which was to say, a nobody. Strictly speaking, as Baldini explained to him-this was after he had overcome his initial joy at Grenouille’s resurrection-strictly speaking, he was less than a nobody, since a proper apprentice needed to be of faultless, i.e., legitimate, birth, to have relatives of like standing, and to have a certificate of indenture, all of which he lacked. Should he, Baldini, nevertheless decide one day to help him obtain his journeyman’s papers, that would happen only on the basis of Grenouille’s uncommon talents, his faultless behavior from then on, and his, Baldini’s, own infinite kindness, which, though it often had worked to his own disadvantage, he would forever be incapable of denying.

To be sure, it was a good while before he fulfilled his promised kindness-just a little under three years.

During that period and with Grenouille’s help, Baldini realized his high-flying dreams. He built his factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, succeeded in his scheme for exclusive perfumes at court, received a royal patent. His fine fragrances were sold as far off as St. Petersburg, as Palermo, as Copenhagen. A musk-impregnated item was much sought after even in Constantinople, where God knows they already had enough scents of their own. Baldini’s perfumes could be smelled both in elegant offices in the City of London and at the court in Parma, both in the royal castle at Warsaw and in the little Schloss of the Graf von und zu Lippe-Detmold. Having reconciled himself to living out his old age in bitterest poverty near Messina, Baldini was now at age seventy indisputably Europe’s greatest perfumer and one of the richest citizens of Paris.

Early in 1756-he had in the meantime acquired the adjoining building on the Pont-au-Change, using it solely as a residence, since the old building was literally stuffed full to the attic with scents and spices-he informed Grenouille that he was now willing to release him, but only on three conditions: first, he would not be allowed to produce in the future any of the perfumes now under Baldini’s roof, nor sell their formulas to third parties; second, he must leave Paris and not enter it again for as long as Baldini lived; and third, he was to keep the first two conditions absolutely secret. He was to swear to this by all the saints, by the poor soul of his mother, and on his own honor.

Grenouille, who neither had any honor nor believed in any saints or in the poor soul of his mother, swore it. He would have sworn to anything. He would have accepted any condition Baldini might propose, because he wanted those silly journeyman’s papers that would make it possible for him to live an inconspicuous life, to travel undisturbed, and to find a job. Everything else was unimportant to him. What kinds of conditions were those anyway! Not enter Paris again? What did he need Paris for! He knew it down to its last stinking cranny, he took it with him wherever he went, he had owned Paris for years now. -Not produce any of Baldini’s top-selling perfumes, not pass on their formulas? As if he could not invent a thousand others, just as good and better, if and when he wanted to! But he didn’t want to at all. He did not in the least intend to go into competition with Baldini or any other bourgeois perfumer. He was not out to make his fortune with his art; he didn’t even want to live from it if he could find another way to make a living. He wanted to empty himself of his innermost being, of nothing less than his innermost being, which he considered more wonderful than anything else the world had to offer. And thus Baldini’s conditions were no conditions at all for Grenouille.

He set out in spring, early one May morning. Baldini had given him a little rucksack, a second shirt, two pairs of stockings, a large sausage, a horse blanket, and twenty-five francs. That was far more than he was obligated to do, Baldini said, considering that Grenouille had not paid a sol in fees for the profound education he had received. He was obligated to pay two francs in severance, nothing more. But he could no more deny his own kindly nature than he could the deep sympathy for Jean-Baptiste that had accumulated in his heart over the years. He wished him good luck in his wanderings and once more warned him emphatically not to forget his oath. With that, he accompanied him to the servants’ entrance where he had once taken him in, and let him go.

He did not give him his hand-his sympathy did not reach quite that far. He had never shaken hands with him. He had always avoided so much as touching him, out of some kind of sanctimonious loathing, as if there were some danger that he could be infected or contaminated. He merely said a brief adieu. And Grenouille nodded and ducked away and was gone. The street was empty.

Twenty-two

BALDINI WATCHED him go, shuffling across the bridge to the island, small, bent, bearing his rucksack like a hunchback, looking from the rear like an old man. On the far side, where the street made a dogleg at the Palais de Parlement, he lost sight of him and felt extraordinarily relieved.

He had never liked the fellow, he could finally admit it now. He had never felt comfortable the whole time he had housed him under his roof and plundered him. He felt much as would a man of spotless character who does some forbidden deed for the first time, who uses underhanded tricks when playing a game. True, the risk that people might catch up with him was small, and the prospects for success had been great; but even so, his nervousness and bad conscience were equally great. In fact, not a day had passed in all those years when he had not been haunted by the notion that in some way or other he would have to pay for having got involved with this man. If only it turns out all right!-that had been his continual anxious prayer-if only I succeed in reaping the profits of this risky adventure without having to pay the piper! If only I succeed! What I’m doing is not right, but God will wink His eye, I’m sure He will. He has punished me hard enough many times in my life, without any cause, so that it would only be just if He would deal graciously with me this time. What wrong have I actually done, if there has been a wrong? At the worst I am operating somewhat outside guild regulations by exploiting the wonderful gifts of an unskilled worker and passing off his talent as my own. At the worst I have wandered a bit off the traditional path of guild virtue. At the very worst, I am doing today what I myself have condemned in the past. Is that a crime? Other people cheat their whole life long. I have only fudged a bit for a couple of years. And only because of purest chance I was given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Perhaps it wasn’t chance at all, but God Himself, who sent this wizard into my house, to make up for the days of humiliation by Pelissier and his cohorts. Perhaps Divine Providence was not directing Himself at me at all, but against Pelissier! That’s perfectly possible! How else would God have been able to punish Pelissier other than by raising me up? My luck, in that case, would be the means by which divine justice has achieved its end, and thus I not only ought to accept it, but I must, without shame and without the least regret…

Such had often been Baldini’s thoughts during those years-mornings, when he would descend the narrow stairway to his shop, evenings, when he would climb back up carrying the contents of the cashbox to count the heavy gold and silver coins, and at night, when he lay next to the snoring bag of bones that was his wife, unable to sleep for fear of his good fortune.

But now such sinister thoughts had come to an end. His uncanny guest was gone and would never return again. Yet the riches remained and were secure far into the future. Baldini laid a hand to his chest and felt, beneath the cloth of his coat, that little book beside his beating heart. Six hundred formulas were recorded there, more than a whole generation of perfumers would ever be able to implement. If he were to lose everything today, he could, with just this wonderful little book, be a rich man once again within a year. Truly he could not ask for more!

From the gables of the houses across the way, the morning sun fell golden and warm on his face. Baldini was still looking to the south, down the street in the direction of the Palais de Parlement-it was simply too delightful not to see anything more of Grenouille!-and, washed over by a sense of gratitude, he decided to make that pilgrimage to Notre-Dame today, to cast a gold coin in the alms box, to light three candles, and on his knees to thank his Lord for having heaped such good fortune on him and having spared him from retribution.

But then that same afternoon, just as he was about to head for the church, something absurd happened: a rumor surfaced that the English had declared war on France. That was of itself hardly disquieting. But since Baldini had planned to send a shipment of perfume to London that very day, he postponed his visit to Notre-Dame and instead went into the city to make inquiries and from there to go out to his factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and cancel the shipment to London for the present. That night in bed, just before falling asleep, he had a brilliant idea: in light of the hostilities about to break out over the colonies in the New World, he would launch a perfume under the name of Prestige du Quebec, a heroic, resinous scent, whose success-this much was certain-would more than repay him for the loss of business with England. With that sweet thought in his silly old head, relieved and bedded now on its pillow, beneath which the pressure of the little book of formulas was pleasantly palpable, Maitre Baldini fell asleep and awoke no more in this life.

For that night a minor catastrophe occurred, which, with appropriate delays, resulted in a royal decree requiring that little by little all the buildings on all the bridges of Paris be torn down. For with no apparent reason, the west side of the Pont-au-Change, between the third and fourth piers, collapsed. Two buildings were hurtled into the river, so completely and suddenly that none of their occupants could be rescued. Fortunately, it was a matter of only two persons, to wit: Giuseppe Baldini and his wife, Teresa. The servants had gone out, either with or without permission. Chenier, who first returned home in the small hours slightly drunk-or rather, intended to return home, since there was no home left-suffered a nervous breakdown. He had sacrificed thirty long years of his life in hopes of being named heir in Baldini’s will, for the old man had neither children nor relatives. And now, at one blow, the entire inheritance was gone, everything, house, business, raw materials, laboratory, Baldini himself-indeed even the will, which perhaps might have offered him a chance of becoming owner of the factory.

Nothing was found, not the bodies, not the safe, not the little books with their six hundred formulas. Only one thing remained of Giuseppe Baldini, Europe’s greatest perfumer: a very motley odor-of musk, cinnamon, vinegar, lavender, and a thousand other things-that took several weeks to float high above the Seine from Paris to Le Havre.