Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

I came to Perfume because I kept hearing it described as a horror novel about smell, which sounded like a gimmick, and I wanted to know if a whole book could run on one sense. It can. Patrick Suskind first published the novel in German in 1985 as Das Parfum with Diogenes, and the English translation by John E. Woods came from Alfred A. Knopf in 1986 in a 272 page hardcover edition. The cover of my copy spells the author name Patrick Suskind without the umlaut, which is how many English editions print it. I finished it in three sittings and spent much of that time holding my breath without meaning to.

The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from birth to death in eighteenth century France. He is born with a perfect sense of smell and, oddly, with no scent of his own. He learns to distill and to preserve odors, then becomes fixed on capturing human scent, especially from young women, and he kills to get it. Suskind tells this in a cool, old fashioned narrator voice that treats Paris stink and Grasse flowers with the same attention. It is a murder story, a period piece, and a strange fable about being loved for what you make rather than who you are.

What surprised me was how physical the book feels. You smell fish guts, tanneries, smoke, lavender fields, crowded bedrooms. I had to put it down once during the early Paris chapters because the rot descriptions piled up. Then I kept going because Grenouille's methodical work pulled me along. He is not charming. He is barely human in how he thinks. But watching him solve a technical problem, how to keep a scent that fades, gives the middle its drive.

Born in fish guts and unwanted from the start

Grenouille is born on July 17, 1738, under a fish stall in the Paris market, in the heat and slime of the Cimetiere des Innocents quarter. His mother, a fish seller, has already let several infants die and tries to leave this one under the table among heads and entrails. The baby cries out, people gather, the mother is arrested and later executed. The opening pages do not ask for pity. They state a market world where infants die often and where this child survives by noise and stubbornness.

No one wants him for long. A wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie sends him back because he eats too much and because, she says, something about him feels wrong. She tells a priest, Father Terrier of St Merri, that the child has no smell, that he does not smell like other babies, and the priest first laughs and then is unnerved when he holds him. The boy goes to Madame Gaillard, who runs a boarding house for orphans and foundlings. She is a woman who lost her own sense of smell after beatings in youth and who feels nothing much for any child. She feeds them thin soup and waits for most to die. Grenouille lives.

As a small child he starts naming smells before he can speak properly. Wood, stone, water, cabbage, animals, people. He sniffs objects for hours. He can walk through a dark room and tell you where the stool stands. Other children beat him because he is strange and silent. He does not cry. He watches. Suskind writes these years with short, hard sentences that make Paris feel crowded and airless. I found this section strong and queasy in equal measure. The neglect is total, and Grenouille learns from it that love is not coming, only survival and smell.

At eight he is apprenticed to Grimal, a tanner in a brutal trade that uses lye and hides and dog dung. The work ruins hands and lungs. Grenouille survives anthrax and beatings that kill other boys. He sleeps on straw, eats scraps, carries skins. He does not complain because he has no terms for complaint. He waits for a chance to learn more about scent, and that chance comes when he is sent to deliver hides across town and catches a new odor on the wind.

The red haired girl and Baldini's workshop

The turning smell comes in the Rue des Marais, from a red haired girl cracking plums. She is young, poor, ordinary, and to Grenouille she smells complete in a way nothing else has. He follows her, not from lust as other men feel it but from a need to possess the odor. When she notices him in a quiet place, he strangles her quickly, holds her body while the scent cools, and smells her until it fades. Then he leaves her where she lies. It is his first murder, and Suskind presents it without heat, as a craftsman losing his material.

After that, Grenouille knows his life task. He wants to learn how perfumers trap scent so he can keep what he found. He forces his way to Giuseppe Baldini, an aging Paris perfumer on the Pont au Change whose business is failing to a rival named Pelissier. Baldini is vain, learned, full of rules about balance and tradition, and he keeps a young assistant to do the heavy work. Grenouille first amazes him by reproducing Pelissier's popular scent Amour and Psyche from memory after one sniff at a shop. Then he improves it. Baldini buys the formulas, gets rich again, and keeps Grenouille in a back room making hundreds of fashionable odors.

Baldini also teaches him the limits of Paris methods.

Seven years with no smell at all

On the way south, Grenouille avoids towns and climbs into the Massif Central, to a volcanic hill called the Plomb du Cantal. He finds a cave with no life and almost no odor, and he stays there for seven years. He sleeps on rock, eats lizards and roots, drinks seep water, and thinks of nothing but his inner collection of smells. He replays Paris markets, his mother's fish stall, wet wood, his first girl, and builds palaces of odor in his head where he is king. Suskind lets these pages stretch. Some readers will find them dull. I found them necessary. They show a mind that needs no people at all.

The cave idyll breaks when Grenouille realizes a simple fact. He can smell everything in memory except himself. He tries to sniff his own hands, his sweat, his breath, and finds nothing. Other people must have always known this without knowing they knew it, which is why nurses and priests pulled back. He understands for the first time that he is invisible in the way that matters. No one will love him because no one registers him.

That discovery sends him back to the world with a new plan. He will make a human scent to wear so people treat him as a person. He walks to Montpellier half wild, collapses, and is taken in by the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, a quack who believes bad air causes vice and who writes papers on vital force. The Marquis scrubs him, dresses him, presents him as proof that cave miasma deforms men, and Grenouille plays along just long enough to get clothes and money. He builds a cheap everyday odor from cat dung and cheese and vinegar, wears it, and notices people finally look at him without disgust. The lesson sticks. To be seen, he must paint himself in smell.

He reaches Grasse as a skilled worker and hires himself to Madame Arnulfi, a widow who owns a perfumery with her foreman Druot, a crude journeyman who sleeps with the widow and dreams of owning the shop. Grenouille works quietly, learns enfleurage properly, learns how to wash pomade with alcohol to get absolute, and waits. The town around him is rich with scent, orange blossom, rose de mai, jasmine picked at dawn by girls. He watches the pickers and chooses his victims.

Grasse and the killing of twenty five girls

Grenouille kills to keep scent, and in Grasse he systematizes it. He needs the odor of young women at the edge of adulthood, girls who smell, to him, ripe and untouched. He strikes at night or on lonely paths, strangles without assault, cuts hair and cloth where odor clings, and wraps bodies in ways that let him work quickly in his shed. He uses cold enfleurage on skin where possible and warm maceration where needed. He stores tiny vials of oil. The town notices girls missing and then found, naked and shaved in places, and fear spreads. Dogs fail. Watchmen fail. The bishop preaches. No one suspects the quiet assistant who sleeps little and washes his hands raw.

Suskind does not linger on each killing with relish. He counts and moves on, which somehow makes it colder. The victims stay mostly nameless except for the last, and that is a fair criticism of the book. They exist as vessels of odor rather than people, and Grenouille sees them that way too. The novel asks you to stay inside his nose, and his nose does not care about their lives. I kept wanting one scene where a victim becomes more than scent, and Suskind refuses it. That refusal is the point, but it leaves a chill that has little to do with fright.

The last target is Laure Richis, daughter of the wealthy Antoine Richis, a clear eyed merchant who loves his daughter and who, unlike the town, reasons out the pattern. Laure is widely called the most beautiful girl in Grasse, with red hair like the first girl in Paris, and her father tries to save her by taking her away to Grenoble for marriage. Grenouille follows by scent across miles, kills her in a locked house without waking others, and completes his stock. He now has the odor of twenty five girls, enough, in his mind, to make a perfume that will force the world to love him.

Richis returns to find her dead and understands his failure at once. The town hunts, and this time Grenouille is caught almost by accident through a hair and a shed full of cloth and fat. He confesses freely because the work is done. The vials are hidden. He waits for trial and death with a calm that frightens his jailers more than any curse.

The execution that turns into an orgy

The trial is short. The evidence is plain. Grenouille is sentenced to be broken on the cross in the town square, a brutal public death meant to restore order. On the day, a crowd fills Grasse, including Richis, the magistrates, priests, mothers of the dead. Grenouille is brought in chains, small and bald and unimpressive. Then, before he mounts the scaffold, he takes a handkerchief from his coat, puts one drop of his finished perfume on it, and walks through the crowd.

What happens next is the most famous passage in the book and the hardest to describe without sounding absurd. People smell him and weep. They think him innocent. They think him an angel. Fathers lift him. Women offer themselves. Men confess love. Richis, who knows he killed Laure, embraces him and calls him son. The executioner kneels. The crowd, overcome by tenderness and desire, moves to the fields and falls into a mass act of love while Grenouille watches from above. By morning the town agrees, without discussion, that no murders ever happened, that the dead girls died of other causes, that the stranger must be an angel who has left them. Grenouille walks away free.

The perfume works because Suskind has spent two hundred pages teaching you that smell bypasses reason. The scene is grotesque and comic and sad at once. I believed it inside the book's logic even while knowing it could never happen. It also reveals Grenouille's emptiness fully. He has forced total love and feels nothing from it. He expected triumph and finds boredom. The love of thousands does not fill the place where his own scent should be. That is the sharpest criticism the novel makes of its own monster. Power over others does not make a self.

Some readers find this chapter silly or overlong. I thought it earned its excess. The town's instant forgetting mirrors how quickly crowds rewrite shame when given a pleasant story. The church blesses what it condemned. Fathers who wanted revenge now claim they always doubted. Suskind writes the turn with a straight face, and the straight face makes it land. If the cave chapters test your patience, this chapter pays it back with interest.

Paris at the end and what the book withholds

Grenouille returns to Paris with his vials. He has money and skill enough to live as a master perfumer, but he wants no shop. He goes to the Cimetiere des Innocents at night, where he was born, where thieves and beggars gather around fires. He pours the whole bottle of the perfect perfume over his head and stands still. The men and women around him smell a beauty so complete they cannot bear it. They fall on him with love, tear his clothes, his hair, his flesh, and eat him on the spot. By morning nothing remains but his empty bottle and his clothes. The crowd later feels confused and oddly happy, as if they had done a deed of love.

That ending divides people, and I see why. It is literal and symbolic at once, and it refuses remorse. Grenouille does not repent. He does not speak a final truth. He tests his work to the end and proves it. He wanted to be loved once without disguise and found the only love his art can compel is hunger. Suskind closes with a flat report tone, as if recording weather, and the flatness makes the horror stick.

The book withholds warmth on purpose, and that is worth naming as a limit. Apart from Richis and perhaps Baldini, no one gets an inner life. Women exist to smell beautiful and die. The poor exist to stink and ignore. Grenouille himself stays a nose with hands. You learn how he works, never why he wants beyond wanting. If you need a character to root for, you will not find one here. Richis comes closest, a father using reason against superstition, but he arrives late and loses.

Still, I admire how controlled it is. The 272 pages have almost no waste. Paris smells of rot because Suskind lists markets and trades until your nose tires. Grasse smells of flowers because he names picking hours and fat temperatures. The technical passages about distillation and enfleurage read clear even if you know nothing about perfume. John E. Woods keeps the English crisp, with old words where needed and plain sentences where horror needs room. The research feels worn in rather than shown off.

Read it if you like historical crime with an uncanny edge, or if you want a villain study without excuses. Do not read it for comfort or for romance. It warns about making people into material rather than celebrating perfume. I closed it thinking less about scent and more about attention. Grenouille pays total attention to others and grants them no standing. That is his genius and his crime, and Suskind never lets him off by calling it art.