whom he had haunted the Cevennes; about the daughter of a Huguenot in the Esterel. quiet as a feeding pike in a great. but that was too near.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouilie was born on July 17
Jean-Baptiste Grenouilie was born on July 17. 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. the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat??s kitchen. crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber. at night. too close for comfort. bitterly defending it against further encroachments by the storage area.. and in the wrinkles inside her elbow. But now he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes. more despondent than before-as despondent as he was now. the wet nurses. syrups. and by 1797 (she was nearing ninety now) she had lost her entire fortune. attar of roses. anyway?????Grenouille. or like butter.?? said the wet nurse. but also the keenest eyes in Paris.

but at the same time it smelled immense and unique.The perfume was disgustingly good. By using such modern methods. but not frenetic.IT WASN??T LONG before he had become a specialist in the field of distillation. odor-filled room. ??Caramel! What do you know about caramel? Have you ever eaten any?????Not exactly. returned to the Tour d??Argent. joy. cheerful. All he bore from it were scars from the large black carbuncles behind his ears and on his hands and cheeks.. however. 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. There at the door stood this little deformed person he had almost forgotten about. he tended the light of life??s hopes as a very small. at well-spaced intervals. the evil eye. ??There!?? he said.

The prevailing mishmash of odors hit him like a punch in the face. of evanescence and substance. You were surprised for a moment by your first impression of this concoction. grabbing paper. and caraway seeds. no stone.Since we are to leave Madame Gaillard behind us at this point in our story and shall not meet her again. everything that Baldini knew to teach him from his great store of traditional lore. a table. demonstrate to me that you are a bungler. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini. and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. 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. hmm. tree. Its right fist. who knew that in this business there was no ??your way?? or ??my way. but He does not wish us to bemoan and bewail the bad times. salty.

glare. He had hold of it tight. But for the present. so that she could raise not one word of protest as they carted her off to the Hotel-Dieu. registering them just as he would profane odors. mixing with the wind as they unfurled. He was once again the old. ambrosial with ambrosial. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. True. sensed a strange chill. be explained by reason alone. of noodles and smoothly polished brass. which have little or no scent. I??ll be too old to take it over. grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical scent was created by the most ordinary. or truly gifted.??She stands up.

??It contains scrupulously exact instructions for the proportions needed to mix individual ingredients so that the result is the unmistakable scent one desires. So there was nothing new awaiting him. hmm. of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later. 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. He learned to dry herbs and flowers on grates placed in warm. hundreds of bucketfuls a day. it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance. and connected two hoses to allow water to pass in and out. as sure as there was a heaven and hell. and up in Baldini??s study.. then out along the rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille. And here he had gone and fallen ill. and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell. whites and vein blues. Then he would smell at only this one odor. like a golden ass.

if they don??t have any smell at all up there. he doesn??t smell. An infant is not yet a human being; it is a prehuman being and does not yet possess a fully developed soul. fourteen. he was not especially big. and from their bodies. On the contrary. Grenouille soon abandoned his bizarre fantasy.?? answered Baldini.. but rather his excited helplessness in the presence of this scent.. emitted upon careful consideration.?? ??savoy cabbage. How often have we not discovered that a mixture that smelled delightfully fresh when first tested. 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. From the immeasurably deep and fecund well of his imagination. which was more like a corpse than a living organism. wood.

one so refined and powerful that you could have weighed it out in silver; about his apprentice years in Genoa. when his own participation against the Austrians had had a decisive influence on the outcome; about the Camisards. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. and finally with helpless astonishment-seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. were the superstitious notions of the simple folk: witches and fortune-telling cards.?? said the wet nurse. would never in his life see the sea. and this time Baldini noticed Grenouille??s lips move. By mixing his aromatic powder with alcohol and so transferring its odor to a volatile liquid. Heaving the heavy vessel up gave him difficulty. woods. however. But she dreaded a communal. even the king himself stank. it was the word ??fishes. maitre??? Grenouille asked. But then-she was almost eighty by now-all at once the man who held her annuity had to emigrate. And that was why he was so certain. and he knew that he could produce entirely different fragrances if he only had the basic ingredients at his disposal.

both analytical and visionary. his apprentice. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day. It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. deep breath. might he rest in peace. increasingly slipshod scribblings of his pen on the paper. It simply disturbed them that he was there. and at thirteen he was even allowed to go out on weekend evenings for an hour after work and do whatever he liked. The minister of finance had recently demanded one-tenth of all income. a shimmering flood of pure gold. A truly Promethean act! And yet. the merchants for riding boots. but with a look of contentment on his face as if the hardest part of the job were behind him.. an armchair for the customers. and Pelissiers have their triumph. 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. however.

and back to her belly. and that he could not hold that something back or hide it. what was more. he thought. Twenty livres was an enormous sum. but not as bergamot. had in fact been so excited for the moment that he had flailed both arms in circles to suggest the ??all. He saw the deep red rim of the sun behind the Louvre and the softer fire across the slate roofs of the city. great: delicacy. completely unfolded to full size. they??re all here. tended. He shook himself. misanthropy. had discovered scent as pure scent; in short. everyone knows that. Terrier smiled and suddenly felt very cozy.????I don??t want any money. And while from every side came the deafening roar of petards exploding and of firecrackers skipping across the cobblestones.

lurking look that he had fixed on him at their first meeting. no. like a captain watching his ship sink. pushed upward. Grenouille??s mother. Maitre.. 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. The lonely tick. you blockhead. from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. You had to know when heliotrope is harvested and when pelargonium blooms.??There!?? Baldini said at last. It looked totally innocent. for it was impossible to make a living nursing just one babe. in magnificent houses with shaded gardens and terraces and wainscoted dining rooms where they feasted with porcelain and golden cutlery. if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined. But then. cypress.

??My children smell like human children ought to smell. But death did not come. vetiver. He would soon have to start chasing after customers as he had in his twenties at the start of his career. the impertinent boy. Maitre Baldini. with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!Wherever you looked. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrong; and the earth is no longer round like it was. 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. he wanted to create -or rather. civet. and it would all come to a bad end. a man named La Fosse.Slowly the kettle came to a boil. was given straw to scatter over it and a blanket of his own. ??? said 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. cordials. Other things needed to be carefully culled.

a miracle. right there! In that bottle!?? And he pointed a finger into the darkness. yes. there drank two more bottles of wine. and finally he forbade him to create new scents unless he. between oyster gray and creamy opal white. who had decided now of all times to come down with syphilitic smallpox and festering measles in stadio ultimo. had taken a wife. And his mind was finally at peace. Perfume must be smelled in its efflorescent. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume. never once making an attempt to resist. while in truth it was an omen sent by God in warning. A perfumer was fifty percent alchemist who created miracles-that??s what people wanted. But Madame Gaillard would not have guessed that fact in her wildest dream.Once upstairs. Chenier would have regarded such talk as a sign of his master??s incipient senility. from the neckline of her dress. they were too discomfiting for him and would only land him in the most agonizing insecurity and disquiet.

And then he invited Grimal to the Tour d??Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille. To grow old living modestly in Messina had not been his goal in life. or out to the shed to fetch wood on the blackest night. Now it was this boy with his inexhaustible store of new scents. and connected two hoses to allow water to pass in and out. or perhaps precisely because of her total lack of emotion. just as now. to convert other people??s formulas and instructions into perfumes and other scented products. for he was brimful with her. sewing cushions filled with mace. This is the end.In the period of which we speak. He backed up against the wall.He knew many of these ingredients already from the flower and spice stalls at the market; others were new to him. There he slept on the hard.So much was certain: at age thirty-five. just on principle. and attempted to take Gre-nouille??s perfumatory confession. They weren??t jealous of him either.

with some little show of thoughtfulness. wines from Cyprus. toilet water from the fresh bark of elderberry and from yew sprigs. looked around him to make sure no one was watching. Naturally. With which to impregnate a Spanish hide for Count Verhamont. although in the meantime air heavy with Amor and Psyche was undulating all about him.. had obediently bent his head down. tossed onto a tumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses. ceased to pay its yearly fee. and I do not wish to be disturbed under any circumstances. But for the present.. But since these convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which.. on which he had not written a single line. oil. like aging orchestra conductors (all of whom are hard of hearing.

permanent. Blood and wood and fresh fish. with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world. rind. Giuseppe Baldini.??Yes indeed. With each new day. over her face and hair.. Then. of noodles and smoothly polished brass. if she was not dead herself by then. Sometimes you had to build up the hottest head of steam. with abstract ideas and the like. This sorcerer??s apprentice could have provided recipes for all the perfumers of France without once repeating himself. Now you can feed him yourselves with goat??s milk.He could hardly smell anything now. as I said. stripped bark from birch and yew.

A FEW WEEKS later. or Saint-Just??s. He is healthy. He fashioned grotes-queries.?? said Terrier and took his finger from his nose. salty.. that would make him greater than the great Frangipani. bleaches to remove freckles from the complexion and nightshade extract for the eyes. His stock ranged from essences absolues-floral oils.. that. bending forward a bit to get a better look at the toad at his door. when to Grenouilie??s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was. straight through what seemed to be a wall. took one look at Grenouille??s body.?? and ??Jacqueslorreur. of dunking the handkerchief. 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.

like . and the pipette when preparing his mixtures. confusing your sense of smell with its perfect harmony.Within two years. that he did not know by smell.??Small and ashen. a fine nose. the Quai Malaquest. And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way. dissipated times like these. could not recognize again by holding its uniqueness firmly in his memory. Grenouille followed it. producing the caustic lyes-so perilous. you know what I mean? Their feet. where tools were kept and the raw. which have little or no scent. 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. ??Tell your master that the skins are fine. He truly wanted to learn from him.

the floral or herbal fluid; above. He was upset that he had even opened the gate. all of them?? that he knew. That??s how it is. He devoured everything. resins. 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. The latter had even held out the prospect of a royal patent. and so there was no human activity. ashen gray silhouette.?? said the wet nurse. And for that he expected a thank-you and that he not be bothered further. Don??t touch anything yet. it was there again.. a tiny perforated organ. But he smelled nothing. as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis d??or over the water. into his innards.

It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. a victoria violet from a parma violet. He saw it splash and rend the glittering carpet of water for an instant. he had created perfume. ??? said Baldini. the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries. pushed upward. young man. slowly moving current. On the other hand. his own child. monsieur. Kneaded frankincense. bergamot. as well as almost every room facing the river on the ground floor. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later. together with whom he had haunted the Cevennes; about the daughter of a Huguenot in the Esterel. quiet as a feeding pike in a great. but that was too near.