54 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick SüskindPerfume: The Story of a Murderer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Summary
Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries and Analyses discuss depictions of violence, murder, suicidal ideation, and cannibalization that feature in the source text.
Paris in the 18th century is a city of both profound cultural and historical import but is described here as a city filled to the brim with “a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women” (3), as all other cities were at the time. At a certain spot in Paris lays the “Cimetière des Innocents” (4), the cemetery in which the dead were buried for the better part of a millennium and which now functions as a fish market. In this spot, on July 17, 1738, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born. The child’s mother gave birth to four other children at this very spot in years past but faints after giving birth this time. Upon waking, she attempts to deny giving birth, but the baby is discovered among the fish scraps and she is arrested, tried, and found guilty of infanticide for letting her previous children die. A few weeks later, she is beheaded for her crime.
The child is placed into the care of the cloister of Saint-Merri and is eventually baptized under the name of Jean-Baptiste (though he is referred to as Grenouille throughout the text). He is given to a wet nurse for his care, a woman by the name of Jeanne Bussie. The wet nurse, however, quickly comes to believe that the child is possessed by the devil and leaves him in the care of a priest, Father Terrier, back at the cloister. Convinced that she is simply after money—“If it isn’t a beggar, it’s a merchant, and if it isn’t a merchant, it’s a tradesman, and if it isn’t alms he wants, then he presents me with a bill” (9)—the priest attempts to turn her away. The nurse refuses, believing him to be possessed due to the fact that he has no smell, unlike other babies she has tended.
Father Terrier is unconvinced but finds that he is unable to convince the nurse otherwise and takes the child into his care. Once the nurse takes her leave, however, the priest begins to believe that perhaps the nurse wasn’t so wrong after all. Highly educated, he generally refused to give any credence to common superstitions, but spending time with the infant begins to disturb him. Noticing that the child’s eyes don’t seem to be functioning very well, he realizes that the infant is “smelling at him shamelessly[…] establishing his scent! And all at once he felt as if he stank[…] He felt naked and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him” (18). Beginning to cry and wail, the child sets the priest’s teeth on edge, and he finds that he cannot bear to be in the infant’s presence any longer. He decides at that very instant to take the child across the city to a boarding house that specializes in taking in children, run by “a certain Madame Gaillard, who took children to board no matter of what age or sort” (19). He arrives, drops off the child, pays for the first year of boarding in advance, and quickly retreats to the cloister.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Summary
Aged beyond her years thanks to a life of suffering and abuse, Madame Gaillard is a paragon of consistency, possessed of “a merciless sense of order and justice” (20) that allows her to run the boarding home with an almost inhuman degree of efficiency. For the young Grenouille, however, Madame Gaillard’s house is a source of blessing and salvation. Surviving almost every manner of illness and injury while there, Grenouille even survives multiple assassination attempts when the other children realize they can’t stand his presence. Stopped by Madame Gaillard, the children eventually give up their murderous intent. They become convinced that he cannot be killed and began avoiding him altogether.
Objectively speaking, there is nothing about Grenouille’s appearance that is particularly terrifying. He is small, but not diminutive; he is weak, but not helpless; he is ugly, but not horrifically so. Not possessing any great intelligence, Grenouille does not speak until he turns four and speaks for many years with an extremely limited vocabulary and in only the simplest of sentences. Higher-level thought proves difficult for the boy, “with abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature” (26) proving extremely difficult for him to grasp. What he grasps intuitively, however, is language relating to smell. What he lacks in almost every other category of mental or emotional intelligence, he makes up for in a completely unprecedented ability to smell anything and everything, proving able to distinguish things purely by their smell. His sense of smell is stronger than most people’s sense of sight.
At the age of six, he is put into the local Catholic school and learns hardly more than how to spell his own name. Madame Gaillard has, by this time, begun to think of Grenouille as a medium or a magical child, convinced that he possesses “second sight,” but it is also at this time that the cloister ceases to pay his yearly fee for room and board. Madame Gaillard waits a week before doing anything out of a strict sense of justice, and upon receiving no more payment, takes Grenouille down by the river to place him into the service of a tanner by the name of Grimal.
Grimal often hires young laborers to perform the most menial and dangerous tasks, so Madame Gaillard sells Grenouille into his service for a mere 15 francs. Grenouille quickly realizes that Grimal is capable of beating him within an inch of his life, and so he falls into line, performing at Grimal’s every word. A year into his service, Grenouille survives an anthrax infection—a common (but deadly) disease in his line of work—and so his value increases as an apprentice servant that is immune to the disease. By the time Grenouille reaches the age of 13, he has gained enough trust to be allowed free time and roves around the city in the evenings. During these evening walks, he begins to contemplate what his olfactory skills may one day be capable of.
Part 1, Chapters 7-9 Summary
Grenouille considers Paris a utopia and is able to see and discern all that exists in the city merely by its scent, unraveling “the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors” (35). It is during his exploration of the city that Grenouille also discovers perfume for the first time. He is fascinated by the concept but unimpressed by the execution: “he knew that he could produce entirely different fragrances if he only had the basic ingredients at his disposal” (38). At this point in his life, however, he is content merely to smell and experience. His time for becoming a connoisseur of scents is yet to come.
On the evening of September 1, 1753, the city is in the midst of a fireworks display to commemorate the king’s coronation. Out and about, Grenouille detects a scent that he has never encountered before, “a tiny, hardly noticeable something, a crumb, an atom of scent […] one could understand nothing about odors if one did not understand this one scent, and his whole life would be bungled, if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it” (40). Following the scent to its source, Grenouille discovers that it is flowing from a young girl cleaning and preparing plums in a small courtyard.
Grenouille is enraptured, under the spell of a scent he considers “pure beauty,” and he slowly approaches the girl. Shocked into silence upon discovering Grenouille’s intrusion, the girl is unable to scream; it is too late, however, as Grenouille grasps her by the throat and proceeds to strangle her to death. Feeling elated at the experience and convinced now that his destiny is to find and create the greatest scents the world has ever known, he returns to his living quarters. Meanwhile, on the Pont-au-Change—a bridge that spans the Seine River—there is a business run by Giuseppe Baldini. The Pont-au-Change is home to some of the finest businesses in Paris, and Baldini’s perfumery is one of them.
Part 1, Chapters 10-11 Summary
Baldini demands his business associate Chenier’s assistance in taking over the storefront while he spends time in his study in an attempt to create a new perfume. Baldini has been commissioned to infuse a scent into wares for Count Verhamont that would mimic the scent of Amor and Psyche, a perfume by another famous perfumer named Pélissier. Chenier doubts that Baldini will be able to come up with anything remotely pleasing, and in his heart, Baldini knows it to be true as well. In his youth, he had been quite successful, but now “he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes” (52), and he is growing quite tired of the industry.
Sitting down at his desk, Baldini waits for inspiration to strike. What nobody knows about Baldini, however, is that even the two original and successful perfumes he sold in his younger days were not his own creations: one he had gotten from his father and the other he had bought from a traveling salesman. This fact does not bother Baldini; he merely wants to be a successful businessman. Without scruples, Baldini determines that he will simply replicate the Amor and Psyche perfume in order to fill his customer’s demands. Reflecting on the ingenious invention that allowed perfume to be created in the first place—a 15th-century discovery that “odors are soluble in rectified spirit” (57)—he allows his imagination to wander to other great landmarks in human history.
After this flight of imagination, Baldini returns to the work at hand and again curses the work of Pélissier, whose genius and speed of production are going to put him out of business. Baldini is convinced that the world is coming to ruin due to the radically changing morals and societal expectations that are coming into vogue: new technological inventions, disrespect for the monarchy, and even doubt and disbelief in God. Baldini begins to contemplate if his whole life has been a mistake.
Part 1, Chapters 1-11 Analysis
One of the things that makes Perfume distinct from other novels is the dedication to realism that Suskind, as the author, makes apparent throughout the novel. The characters and plot are all fictional, but the world they inhabit is not. The locations, the description of 18th-century France, the dangers of the tanning process, and the cutthroat nature of the perfume industry are all researched carefully and the story to life, lending vibrance and weight to the narrative. Three different areas stand out in these first chapters: the characterization of Grenouille as a monstrous social outcast, the worldbuilding of 18th-century Paris and the perfume industry, and the introduction of Grenouille’s first victim and the revelation of his true destiny.
When the reader is introduced to Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, he is an infant left to die in the muck of a stinking fish market. In any other circumstance, this would elicit stark feelings of sympathy and compassion, and for a few pages, Suskind achieves this pathos. However, Grenouille is almost immediately portrayed as something less than human and even perhaps supernaturally evil, as his wet nurse declares him to be possessed by the devil when he is barely a few weeks old. To characterize him as even more repulsive, the priest into whose care he is given can’t stand to be in his presence because of the unnatural manner in which the child tries to smell him. In this case, the infant child seems animalistic at best, and inexplicably evil at worst.
The children at the orphanage pick up on this, and they instinctively avoid even the basket in which Grenouille sleeps, later attempting several times to smother him to death. The reaction of every single person in his childhood is negative, as he is either neglected, abandoned, or the victim of attempted murder. The only person in Grenouille’s life who doesn’t actively seem to wish him harm is Madame Gaillard, but even she contributes to Grenouille’s negative image of himself as she considers him to be some kind of psychic or medium of supernatural powers rather than just another child. She is highly suspicious of what seems to her to be a supernatural power to see into the future or behind walls thanks to his unique ability to smell.
The first human interaction he experiences outside of Madame Gaillard’s house also proves to be how every person will treat for him the rest of his life. When he meets Grimal the tanner at the age of eight, he is put into his service to perform the most demanding and dangerous jobs because he is expendable. Grimal sees Grenouille simply as means to an end, tolerating his presence merely for his usefulness, a pattern that will be repeated by others. One of the principal themes of the novel is Grenouille’s sense of Alienation and the Search for Personal Identity. While the question of nature vs. nurture in Grenouille’s case is clearly a complex one, his homicidal tendencies arise from a brutal childhood, nourished by the fact that he is treated exclusively with disdain and as an object to be used as long as he is useful, and to be sold or abandoned once his usefulness runs its course. In a world in which he is abandoned as garbage among fish carcasses and sold to a tanner for 15 francs—in a word, dehumanized—it follows that Grenouille cannot see the humanity in others. Just as he is treated as an object, he views the young woman with the captivating scent as an object to possess rather than a person.
The second major concern of this section is establishing the intricacies of the perfume industry through the work and person of Giuseppe Baldini. The details of the tanning trade into which Grenouille is first initiated are harrowing and historically accurate in themselves, but the meat of the story lies in the industry that gives the novel its name. Grenouille’s facility in the perfume trade is foreshadowed in both the descriptions of his abilities and the narration of his first encounter with perfume. Grenouille’s almost supernatural ability to distinguish the most subtle of scents will prove to be the precise ability that Baldini does not possess in his attempt to discern the formula for the perfume sold by his competitor. The reader is told that Grenouille has cataloged literally millions of scents in the vast stores of his memory. Grenouille’s first encounter with perfume, likewise, proves to be prophetic as he finds it to be both artificial and superficial, roughly and uncarefully combined in a fashion that barely mimics the true scents of nature. He is convinced that he could craft perfumes of exponentially greater quality given the time and materials, a premonition that ultimately proves to be true in his apprenticeship to Baldini and beyond.
Finally, with Grenouille’s discovery of the girl with the plums, he realizes his destiny: He is meant to revolutionize the world of scents and perfumes. However, in claiming his calling violently, the narrative establishes a dark undercurrent to Grenouille’s genius and foreshadows his future violence and eventual demise. His experience with the girl in the Rue des Marais sets him on a path of destruction and death that will ultimately end in his own dismemberment and cannibalization. Perfume is characterized as a Bildungsroman, and as such, the reader sees Grenouille’s development as a character from birth to death; snuffing the life out of the girl with the plums is one of several key landmarks in Grenouille’s short life that stand out as life-changing experiences.
