Perfume (novel)

This article is about the novel. For the 2006 film adaptation, see Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (film).

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Author(s)	Patrick Süskind
Country	Germany
Language	Translated from German
Genre(s)	Horror, Mystery, Absurd, Magic Realism
Publisher	Penguin Books
Publication date	1985
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	263 p. (UK hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-241-11919-7 (UK hardback edition)
OCLC Number	14130766

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical cross-genre novel (originally published in German as Das Parfum) by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meaning that scents may carry. Above all this is a story of identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit.

The story focuses on Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a perfume apprentice in 18th century France who, born with no body scent himself, begins to stalk and murder virgins in search of the "perfect scent", which he finds in a young woman named Laure, whom his acute sense of smell finds in a secluded private garden in Grasse.

Some editions of Perfume have as their cover image Antoine Watteau's painting Jupiter and Antiope, which depicts a murdered woman.

Plot

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

Grenouille has an extraordinary power to discern odours. He navigates the orphanage using only his nose, and barely uses his sight. The other children do not hate him, but they try to suffocate him several times because he is different, and they can't tell why. Grenouille grew up cold and unfeeling; he was unafraid of anything and took punishment easily. When the owner of the orphanage discovers that Grenouille can locate hidden money, she became afraid and later got rid of him by apprenticing him to a tanner. He explores the city during his free time, and memorizes all the smells of Paris. He has no bias or preferences against scent and seeks out every smell and every variation of every smell that he can find. One day he smells a divine scent and follows it. He finds that the source of this scent is a young virginal girl just passing puberty (14-15 years old), who is slicing plums. Unnoticed, he gets closer to her, to get a better smell of her scent. The girl feels that something is not right and turns, sees Grenouille, and freezes in terror. Grenouille clamps his hand over her mouth. In fright, the girl doesn't fight back in any way. Grenouille strangles her, with his eyes closed and concerned only with her scent. When she dies, he strips her, lays her down on the ground and smells her scent until it disappears from her body due to death. He does his best to remember every bit of her scent. This is the first time he felt a smell as 'good'. In a happy daze, Grenouille returns home, and starts organizing the thousands of scents he had gathered into categories.

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

On his way to Grasse, Grenouille travels the countryside and discovers that he is disgusted with the scent of humanity. As he travels, he first avoids a city, then towns, then starts avoiding people that he can smell that are miles away. He reaches the Massif Central, and finds a haven where he is liberated from the smell of humans. In the morning he laps at a thin stream of water for a couple hours and eat whatever he can get, including moss. After that, he crawls into a long, deep shaft in the ground, as far as he can get, where he is shielded from all scent except for dirt, rock and water. There he wedges himself against the stone and falls into a sort of meditation, first imagining himself as the creator of his world - Grenouille the Great - ; 'seeding' the world with seeds of scent. later, tired from the act of creation, he retreats into a purple palace with a vast and grand library of scents inside his mind, served by scentless spectres who bring him "vials" of his favourite scents. And every day before he falls asleep he is brought the scent memory vial of the plum slicing girl, and gets drunk with its splendour before sleeping.

One day he wakes up from a nightmare, dreaming of being suffocated by a white fog. He knows that the white fog is his own odor, but he can't smell it. To shake off the confusion he examines his own scent for the first time. Going layer by layer from his surroundings and through his (now tattered) clothes and down to the grime and dirt he is covered in, he soon realizes that he has no scent at all. He is calm at this revelation, and squats in the dirt, simply nodding to himself. After a while, he dons his tattered clothing and leaves the mountain.

Grenouille journeys to Montpellier where an amateur scientist, the Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, uses Grenouille to test his thesis of the "so-called fluidum letale". The Marquis combines a treatment of decontamination and revitalization for Grenouille, and subsequently Grenouille looks like a clean gentleman for the first time in his life. Grenouille in turn tricks his way into the laboratory of a famous perfumier. There he creates a body odour for himself from ingredients including "cat shit," "cheese," and "vinegar", which imitates the odour of humans. Previously, nobody would notice Grenouille due to his lack of scent, but his new "disguise" tricks people into thinking that it's the scent of a human, and he is accepted by society. It is only a test of his abilities, as he has grander plans yet.

Finally moving to Grasse, Grenouille once again becomes intoxicated by the scent of a young girl transitioning through puberty to womanhood: Laure. He believes her scent to be greater than that of the plum slicing girl, but he also believes that she is not quite mature and plans to wait two more years until he can capture her scent at its peak, when she is sexually mature and her scent is at it's purest. Grenouille learns how to trap scent in oil, not just in water as he did with an alembic, and experiments with animals. He discovers that he has to kill the animals to get a scent that is not polluted with fear and feces. While contemplating the scent of Laure, he is struck by the thought that whatever perfume that he could make would eventually run out. He shakes in fear, then realizes that he has to mix Laure's scent with those of others to make the ultimate perfume; one which will make him be worshipped as a god. He starts a chain of murders; silently killing 24 beautiful virgin girls that have just reached sexual maturity. The victims were always naked, shaved, and had their virginity intact, which scared the villagers.

Eventually, after two years of murders have passed, Laure's father pieces together the pattern of murders and realises that Laure, the most beautiful and beloved young woman in the city and just going through puberty, is most likely to be the next victim. He flees with Laure to hide and protect her, but Grenouille pursues them and kills Laure, capturing her scent.

Grenouille is apprehended soon after completing his perfume and sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, the intoxicating scent of Laure combined with the backdrop essences of the 24 virgins he murdered overwhelms all present, and instead of an execution the whole town is overwhelmed by a mix of divine reverence and carnal passion, erupting into a massive orgy.

Grenouille is pardoned for his crimes, blessed and revered, and Laure's father even wants to adopt him. Just then Grenouille discovers that he wants to be felt as a person, not for the perfume that he makes. But he quickly dismisses this, and goes to Paris, seeing that he could become a living god with his perfume.

In Paris, Grenouille approaches a group of low-life people (thieves, murderers, whores, etc.). He is not wearing any scent, so they do not notice him. When they do notice Grenouille, it is when he sprinkles some of his perfume on himself. Overcome with a sudden carnal passion and love, even more so than the people of Grasse, they jump on him with the desire to keep him to themselves. fighting for Grenouille, they draw knives and butcher him, consuming his body. After the passion wears off, the people look around and feel slightly disgusted having just eaten a human being, but they have an overwhelming internal sense of happiness. They are "uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love."

Characters (in order of appearance)

• Grenouille's mother – Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was her fifth baby. She had claimed her first four were stillbirths or "semi-stillbirths". In her mid-twenties, with most of her teeth left, "some hair on her head", and a touch of gout, syphilis and consumption (tuberculosis), she was still quite pretty.
• Jean-Baptiste Grenouille – Protagonist. Born July 17, 1738.
• Jeanne Bussie' – One of Grenouille's many wet-nurses. She is the first person to realise he has no scent and claims he is sucking all the life out of her.
• Father Terrier – He is in charge of the church's charities and distribution of its money to the poor and needy. He first thinks Grenouille is a cute baby, but once Grenouille begins to sniff Terrier, the priest is highly disturbed and sends the baby to a boarding house.
• Madame Gaillard – She has no sense of smell, due to being hit across the face with a poker in her younger years, so she does not know that Grenouille has no scent. In charge of a boarding house, her goal in life is to save enough money to have a proper death and funeral. Madame's poor sense of smell and ignorance about Grenouille's gifts, coupled with his assistance in finding her hidden money through his olfactory ability, caused Madame to believe he had second sight (psychic). She believed that people with second sight bring bad luck and death. Out of this fear, Madame sells Grenouille to the tanner, Grimal. She loses all her money in old age, dies a miserable death in the Hôtel Dieu (Hotel of God) and is not even buried after her death, but rather thrown into a mass grave.
• Children at the Boarding House – They are repulsed by Grenouille and even try, in vain, to suffocate him with rags and blankets while Grenouille is asleep.
• Grimal – A tanner who lives near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie. Grenouille works for him from age eight into his early youth until Baldini pays for him to be released. With this immense new income of money, he wastes it on alcohol in one go, allowing his drunkenness to cause him to fall in to a river and die.
• The Plum Girl – Her natural scent is that of sea breeze, water lillies, and apricot blossoms; it is a rich, perfectly balanced and magical scent. She has red hair and wears a gray, sleeveless dress. She is halving plums when Grenouille kills her as his first victim.
• Giuseppe Baldini – An old perfumer. Lacking a gift for it, he merely knows the art of perfumery. He owns a perfume shop filled with a strong amalgam of scents. The shop is so intoxicating that it scares away potential customers; Baldini is too dense to realise this fact. The shop is located in the middle of a bridge, the Pont-au-Change. He takes on Grenouille as an apprentice and becomes rich from the perfumes that Grenouille creates for him. He ends up giving Grenouille journeyman papers, which will help Grenouille in his future travels. After Grenouille leaves him, his house and warehouses plunge into the river below as the bridge finally collapses.
• Chénier – Baldini's assistant. He is somewhat younger than Baldini. He knows Baldini is talentless, but still boasts Baldini's skills in hopes that one day he will inherit Baldini's perfume shop.
• Pélissier – Never actually appears in novel. He is only talked about because he is considered the most innovative perfumer in Paris, despite not having any formal training.
• Taillade-Espinasse – Marquis, liege lord of a town of Pierrefort and a member of parliament, is an amateur scientist who develops indulgent and ridiculous theses (fluidal theory), which he supposedly demonstrates on Grenouille — feeding him, providing him with new clothes and giving him the opportunity to create a perfume. The Marquis dies soon after Grenouille's "disappearance" while pursuing his fluidal theory by attempting to live alone on a secluded mountain.
• Madame Arnulfi – A lively, black-haired woman of around thirty. She has been widowed for almost a year. She owns the perfume business of her dead husband and has a journeyman named Druot, who is also her lover. She hires Grenouille as her second journeyman.
• Dominique Druot – Arnulfi's journeyman and lover. He is the size of a Hun and is of average intelligence. Grenouille works under him as second journeyman. Druot is later hanged for Grenouille's crimes.
• Antoine Richis – Second consul and the richest man in Grasse, Laure's father.
• Laure Richis – A beautiful red-headed girl, daughter of Antoine Richis. Her scent is the fragrance of Grenouille's dreams and is central to his plans of creating a perfume that will make people love him.

Adaptations

• A film adaptation, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, co-written and directed by Tom Tykwer (who also composed the film score), premiered in Germany on 14 September 2006.
• A Russian musical adaptation of the novel, Perfumer, premiered on 5 December 2010 in Moscow. Composer and singer Igor Demarin received Süskind's approval after communicating with a representative of his for two years.^[1]
• The song "Scentless Apprentice", by the American grunge band Nirvana, was inspired by Perfume. It appears on their 1993 album In Utero. The band's singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain often described the novel as one of his favourite books.
• The song "Herr Spiegelmann" from the Portuguese gothic-doom metal band Moonspell contains an excerpt from the book.
• The song "Red Head Girl" by French downtempo duo Air is inspired by Perfume.
• The song "Du riechst so gut" (German for "You smell so good") by Rammstein was inspired by the book, which is one of lead singer Till Lindemann's favourite books.
• Marilyn Manson credits the novel as one of the inspirations behind the title of his second album, Smells Like Children.
• The episode "Sense Memory" of the television show Criminal Minds bears many similarities to the novel.
• The song "Nearly Witches (Ever Since We Met)" by Panic! at the Disco is inspired by Perfume.

References

• Süskind, Patrick. Perfume. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage International, 1986.

1. ^ Yelena, Andrusenko (December 7, 2010). ""Perfumer": Russian Version". Voice of Russia. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. http://www.webcitation.org/5vKqB4bj0. Retrieved December 29, 2010.