Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

The catastrophe that eventually drives Grenouille away from his mountain solitude is the last thing he ever could have foreseen. In the middle of the night, Grenouille has a nightmare in which he is surrounded by a thick fog. He realizes the fog is a cloud of his own odor, but to his horror, he realizes that he smells nothing: “Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!” (138). Grenouille awakes in a panic, thrashing about “as if he had to drive off the odorless fog trying to suffocate him” (139). He runs outside the cave and stares up into the sky at the sun.

He eventually calms down and proceeds to think of how to resolve his terror. He eventually determines that he must have a smell, and he is simply not aware of it: “It is not that I do not smell, for everything smells,” he says, “It is, rather, that I cannot smell that I smell, because I have smelled myself day in day out since my birth” (140). He strips naked and waits outside for several hours, letting the elements cleanse him of any lingering odors. Upon completing this self-ascribed ritual, he gathers his clothes up. He notices they contain absolutely no smell. Beginning to panic, he returns to the cave, but to his horror, he realizes that there is no evidence of him there either. In shock, he finishes dressing and immediately sets out southwards, away from the mountain.

The first town he comes across is the town of Pierrefort, and the first people he encounters retreat in fear at his appearance. Having not groomed himself in seven years, he is hideous to behold. Eventually, he is brought by force to the mayor, who informs the local marquis de La Taillad-Espinasse, the lord of the town. The marquis, as a man of science, is fascinated by the appearance of Grenouille and conducts examinations on him in his laboratory. A week later, he is presented at the local university as a scientific sensation to a large crowd of onlookers. The marquis has a theory that there exists a “fluidum letale,” a lethal fluid that is harmful to the human body. Grenouille is to serve as his experimental subject, demonstrating that the marquis’ new method of ventilation therapy can be a cure for this oppressive fluid’s ability to wreak havoc on the human body.

Locked up in a ventilation therapy box, Grenouille is served the best food and drink, and after five days, he is brought out, groomed properly, dressed magnificently, and presented as a perfectly respectable and healthy member of society. Glancing at himself in the mirror, “[w]hat dumbfounded Grenouille most was the fact that he looked so unbelievably normal” (150). At the sight of his own reflection, Grenouille realizes that he has been given a great gift in this new façade of respectability but that his new costume lacks one thing: He needs to smell like a human being.

In order to complete this final step, Grenouille fakes a fainting spell, and upon feigning a return to consciousness, he cries out that he must be permitted to design a perfume of his own to allow him to retain his wits and remain conscious, alert, and healthy. He is taken to the laboratory of a local perfumer and left to his own devices. Rather than create the perfume he insisted he needed, however, Grenouille proceeds to craft a perfume that perfectly represents the basic elements of human odor: “Every human being smelled different, no one knew that better than Grenouille[…] And yet—there was a basic perfumatory theme to the odor of humanity” (154). Using his genius, therefore, Grenouille creates a perfume that becomes his own personal odor along with a generic perfume of a floral scent and anoints himself and his clothes with them.