Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Madame Gaillard is the head of the orphanage and boarding institution that eventually takes in Grenouille (after he is abandoned, in quick succession, by his mother, his wet nurse, and a priest). While technically still in the prime of her adulthood, “not yet thirty years old” (20), her life circumstances have caused her to age well beyond her years: “T two, three, a hundred times older, like the mummy of a young girl[… ]on the inside she was long since dead” (20). Beaten as a child by her father, the abuse she suffered as a young girl ensured that “tenderness had become as foreign to her as enmity” (20).

Madame Gaillard’s emotional stunting causes her to run her boarding house with total, impassioned justice, allowing the young Grenouille to exist and get through the time spent there with a minimal amount of personal attacks. She also comes to be wary of Grenouille, but not for the same reasons as the children in the house. She thinks of him as clairvoyant thanks to his ability to smell things through walls or at a great distance and generally avoids him. Eventually, she succumbs to throat cancer, dying in the same sick ward in which her husband died years ago, before being unceremoniously tossed into a mass grave.

Grimal is a tanner who lives by the river. He takes the young Grenouille into his service after he is kicked out of Madame Gaillard’s house due to the convent’s failure to pay his yearly room and board. Grimal doesn’t treat Grenouille with any amount of excessive violence or abuse, but he does work him nearly to death, forcing him to work 16-hour days. Notorious for his hard-driving ways—"by all normal standards Grenouille would have no chance of survival in Grimal’s tannery” (30)—Grimal had a reputation for treating his wards more like machines or farm animals than human beings.

Even at his most tender, he treats Grenouille not better than “a useful house pet” (34), though he does eventually allow Grenouille a small amount of personal freedom after proving himself to be the most useful help he ever employed. Grimal has his share of vices, and he drinks himself into a drunken stupor after selling Grenouille to Baldini. He falls into the river and dies face down in the shallows.

Giuseppe Baldini is a master perfumer and glover who owns a shop on the Pont-au-change, the bridge that spans the river. In his older age, however, he has become a bit of a caricature of himself, waiting around in his shop: “old and stiff as a pillar, in a silver-powdered wig and a blue coat” and drenched in the perfume (48). His shop itself, characterized by “indescribable chaos” (49), is a cornucopia of thousands of items he acquired over the years. His shop is so full that potential customers are crowded out of the store. Renowned for his craft and ingenuity in his youth, he is facing a crisis at the moment when he happens to meet Grenouille.

Under considerable stress from the up-and-coming perfumers in the city, especially his archnemesis Pélissier—for whom Baldini has a genuine respect, calling him a “virtuoso” (63)—the narrative reveals that he has actually never invented an original scent, to begin with. Weighed down by his imposter syndrome, Baldini simultaneously suffers from delusions of grandeur and is convinced of his own genius. Despite Grenouille working completely on his own, Baldini “came to believe that he made a not insignificant contribution to the success of these sublime scents” (95. Consumed with thoughts of expanding his empire on the back of Grenouille’s talent, Baldini eventually dies a very rich man, crushed to death by the collapse of his house the very night he bids farewell to Grenouille.