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The science of perfumery was an old tradition in Montpellier, and although in more recent times it had lost ground to its competitor, the town of Grasse, there were still several good perfumers and glovers residing in the city. The most prestigious of them, a certain Runel-well aware of the trade he enjoyed with the house of the marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse as its purveyor of soaps, oils, and scents— declared himself prepared to take the unusual step of surrendering his studio for an hour to the strange journeyman perfumer from Paris who had been conveyed thither in a sedan chair. The latter refused all instructions, did not even want to know where things were; he knew his way around, he said, would manage well enough. And he locked himself in the laboratory and stayed there a good hour, while Runel joined the marquis’s majordomo for a couple of glasses of wine in a tavern, where he was to learn why his violet cologne was no longer a scent worth smelling.
Runel’s laboratory and shop fell far short of being so grandly equipped as Baldini’s perfume shop in Paris had been in its day. An average perfumer would not have made any great progress with its few floral oils, colognes, and spices. Grenouille, however, recognized with the first inhaled sniff that the ingredients on hand would be quite sufficient for his purposes. He did not want to create a great scent; he did not want to create a prestigious cologne such as he had once made for Baldini, one that stood out amid a sea of mediocrity and tamed the masses. Nor was even the simple orange blossom scent that he had promised the marquis his true goal. The customary essences of neroli, eucalyptus, and cypress were meant only as a cover for the actual scent that he intended to produce: that was the scent of huma
That aura, however, the highly complex, unmistakable code of a personal odor, was not perceptible for most people in any case. Most people did not know that they even had such a thing, and moreover did everything they could to disguise it under clothes or fashionable artificial odors. Only that basic odor, the primitive human effluvium, was truly familiar to them; they lived exclusively within it and it made them feel secure; and only a person who gave off that standard vile vapor was ever considered one of their own.
It was a strange perfume that Grenouille created that day. There had never before been a stranger one on earth. It did not smell like a scent, but like a human being who gives off a scent. If one had smelled this perfume in a dark room, one would have thought a second person was standing there. And if a human being, who smelled like a human being, had applied it, that person would have seemed to have the smell of two people, or, worse still, to be a monstrous double creature, like some figure that you can no longer clearly pinpoint because it looks blurred and out of focus, like something at the bottom of a lake beneath the shiver of waves.
And to imitate this human odor-quite unsatisfactorily, as he himself knew, but cleverly enough to deceive others-Grenouille gathered up the most striking ingredients in Runel’s workshop.
There was a little pile of cat shit behind the threshold of the door leading out to the courtyard, still rather fresh. He took a half teaspoon of it and placed it together with several drops of vinegar and finely ground salt in a mixing bottle. Under the worktable he found a thumbnail-sized piece of cheese, apparently from one of Runel’s lunches. It was already quite old, had begun to decompose, and gave off a biting, pungent odor. From the lid of a sardine tub that stood at the back of the shop, he scratched off a rancid, fishy something-or-other, mixed it with rotten egg and castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings, and singed pork rind, finely ground. To this he added a relatively large amount of civet, mixed these ghastly ingredients with alcohol, let it digest, and filtered it into a second bottle. The bilge smelled revolting. Its stink was putrid, like a sewer, and if you fa
On top of this disgusting base, which smelled more like a cadaver than a human being, Grenouille spread a layer of fresh, oily scents: peppermint, lavender, turpentine, lime, eucalyptus, which he then simultaneously disguised and tamed with the pleasant bouquet of fine floral oils-geranium, rose, orange blossom, and jasmine. After a second dilution with alcohol and a splash of vinegar there was nothing left of the disgusting basic odor on which the mixture was built. The latent stench lay lost and u
Grenouille filled two flacons with it, stoppered them, and stuck them in his pocket. Then he washed the bottles, mortars, fu
After he had poured the second perfume into flacons, he stripped and sprinkled his clothes with the first. Then he dabbed himself in the armpits, between the toes, on the genitals, on the chest, neck, ears, and hair, put his clothes back on, and left the laboratory.
Thirty-two
AS HE CAME OUT onto the street, he was suddenly afraid, for he knew that for the first time in his life he was giving off a human odor. He found that he stank, stank quite disgustingly. And because he could not imagine that other people would not also perceive his odor as a stench, he did not dare go directly into the tavern where Runel and the marquis’s majordomo were waiting for him. It seemed less risky to him first to try out his new aura in an anonymous environment.
He slipped down toward the river through the darkest and narrowest alleyways, where ta
From his youth on, he had been accustomed to people’s passing him and taking no notice of him whatever, not out of contempt-as he had once believed-but because they were quite unaware of his existence. There was no space surrounding him, no waves broke from him into the atmosphere, as with other people; he had no shadow, so to speak, to cast across another’s face. Only if he ran right into someone in a crowd or in a street-corner collision would there be a brief moment of discernment; and the person encountered would bounce off and stare at him for a few seconds as if gazing at a creature that ought not even to exist, a creature that, although undeniably there, in some way or other was not present-and would take to his heels and have forgotten him, Grenouille, a moment later…