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 3, Chapters 35-42Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapters 35-37 Summary
A few days after leaving Montpellier, Grenouille arrives at his chosen destination: the small town of Grasse, of which Baldini told him all those years ago, “the uncontested center for production of and commerce in scents, perfumes, soaps, and oils” (172). Grenouille intends to learn new techniques for perfumery here. The town itself is filthy, though this doesn’t bother Grenouille, and he wanders the streets simply observing the comings and goings of the townspeople. All at once, however, he is stopped in his tracks.
Something nearby is giving off a scent that holds him in rapture, “a scent so exquisite that in all his life his nose had never before encountered one like it—or, indeed, only once before…” (175). Tracking the scent, he eventually finds its source in a garden that comes right up the town wall. The scent is so similar to that of the girl with the plums that he hardly knows whether he is here or there, so totally is he struck by the scent. Slowly Grenouille realizes that this scent is not quite the same. This delights him, for he knows that this smell is even greater than the one he experienced before.
Realizing that this new scent similarly comes from a young girl, he determines to possess the scent if it is the last thing he does, “to peel it from her like skin and to make her scent his own” (178). How is not sure how to do it, but he knows that he has at least two years before the girl matures into the prime of her life, thus bringing with it a maturity of scent. Grenouille determines to use that two-year window to perfect a technique to capture her scent.
Returning to the middle of town, Grenouille hunts down a perfume shop and asks for a job, journeyman’s papers in hand. He sets up shop under a man named Druot, the first journeyman of the business in Madame Arnulfi’s house, a recently widowed woman with whom he is having an affair. Working under the guidance of Druot, Grenouille discovers new ways to extract scents from their sources, specifically a method of oil extraction in which he dumps flower blossoms into heated oil over the course of several days. The oil then retains and appropriates the scent of the blossoms, keeping their scent when the flowers are cleaned out of the oil. This scented oil can be poured into jars for use as hair pomade or other toiletries, or even purified and condensed through a different process by which “one single drop, when dissolved in a quart of alcohol, sufficed to revitalize it and resurrect a whole field of flowers” (183).
Over the spring and into summer, Grenouille continues to learn the tricks of this new method of oil extraction. Over time, Druot realizes how skilled Grenouille is and leaves most of the work to him, content to let Grenouille be alone and without supervision. As the year goes on, Grenouille makes himself responsible for the majority of the business workings while convincing the town that he is nothing more than an ordinary second journeyman.
Part 3, Chapters 38-40 Summary
In order to ensure total secrecy of his true motives, Grenouille convinces Druot that he is working on experiments in crafting new scents. In reality, Grenouille’s first order of business is to create more perfume for himself to manipulate people into perceiving him in particular ways. He designs one perfume to be “inconspicuous” and another to give himself “a coarser appearance and made people believe he was in hurry and on urgent business” (189). He even designs a perfume to make people have sympathy for him, and another to make him almost completely unapproachable. All of these perfumes are designed to subconsciously bring out particular attitudes and emotions in other people without them ever being aware of the source of their own emotions.
Once he perfects these, Grenouille moves on to experiments in the oil extraction method. First, he tests inert objects like doorknobs, stones, and other things before moving on to test living things like flies, rats, and even cats, drowning them in oil and leaving them to macerate long enough for the oil to extract their scent. Grenouille quickly discovers that larger living things need to be killed before submerging them in oil, so he perfects his method of killing as well. Having achieved a sense of proficiency, Grenouille finally moves on to begin experimenting with extracting the scent of human beings.
At first, Grenouille contents himself with leaving oil-laden strips of cloth in areas where he knows people will congregate at the local inn and the local cathedral. He moves on to extract the odors of individual human beings. He pilfers the used bedsheets of a recently deceased person from the hospital and then pays an elderly woman to wear the oily cloths on her naked skin, which he later collects. Thanks to his lengthy experimentation process, he refines the best recipe for the oil and fat mixture for rendering the scents. With that, he rests from his labors for the time being.
In the middle of January, Druot and the widow Arnulfi are married, and Grenouille becomes the only journeyman in the household as Druot becomes the master of the house and business. In spring, Grenouille decides to pay the garden with the girl a visit, just to see how things are going. Later that night, reflecting on how he still has a year to wait, he conjures up the memory of her scent and begins to drift off to sleep. However, “at the very instant when he closed his eyes, in the moment of the single breath it takes to fall asleep, it deserted him, was suddenly gone” (197-98). He suddenly realizes that even if he manages to extract the scent, there might be a time when the scent runs out. With this realization, Grenouille determines that he will not simply extract the scent but make the most perfect perfume of the scent that has ever existed. In this way, he will be able to preserve the scent for as long as humanly possible.
In May, Grenouille takes his first victim, killing a 15-year-old girl as his first experiment. Dumping the body east of town, the victim is discovered completely naked and with her hair almost completely shorn off. Unable to discern a suspect, the town is put into a state of fear, but after several weeks, the police chief puts an end to the investigation as no more clues are found. Shortly after, two more female victims are found. Fear is now widespread, and even though the town sets watchmen and exists in a state of high alert, bodies continue to appear with absolutely no trace of the killer.
Part 3, Chapters 41-42 Summary
In the fall, the murders stop for a span of two months. One man in town, however, is still on high alert. This man is Antoine Richis, and he has a daughter named Laure, his only child. Laure is the most beautiful girl in the region, having just turned 16, and Antoine plans to marry her off to the son of a local baron. Antoine is a widower, and he is fabulously wealthy, but he desires power and influence. To realize his plans, he needs to join his family line to that of the baron, then hopefully marry again and have sons to create a family empire. Antoine has incestuous thoughts and desires his daughter but never acts on them.
Nevertheless, his uncommon affection for his daughter combined with this desire to use her as a pawn in his political schemes keeps him on high alert about the undiscovered murderer. Unwilling to send her far away from town due to his own pride and stubbornness, he keeps her close by his side out of a desire to protect her. One night, however, he has a dream in which he finds Laure murdered just like all the other girls found in town. The nightmare awakens him with a start, and he begins to ponder the details of the various murders (of whose aftermath he had seen several). Antoine realizes that there is a pattern to the killings and that the victims all seem to share various characteristics, musing that “the very choice of victims betrayed intentions almost economical in their planning” (210).
With this realization, Antoine comes to a stunning conclusion: “Laure had quite obviously been the goal of all the murderer’s endeavors from the beginning” (211). Having arrived at what he believed to be the murderer’s true goal, Antoine is filled with a new sense of courage and resolve. He decides to defeat the killer’s scheme with his own plans.
Part 3, Chapters 35-42 Analysis
Grenouille’s arrival in Grasse signals the endgame, both of Grenouille’s destiny and of the climax of the novel’s narrative arc. His discovery of Laure Richis signals the final movement of the story and builds tension in a unique way; Grenouille has targeted his victim, and yet, there are still two years to wait until his plan comes to fruition and the time to strike comes. The author uses this plot point to foreshadow the final conflict and simultaneously build tension in this rising action.
Grenouille’s desire surpasses anything he has ever felt before, even what he felt for the girl with the plums. With scent being Grenouille’s most intimate mode of relating to another human being—the closest equivalent for a normal person would be lust—nothing can prevent Grenouille from treating this desire with the utmost reverence. There is a sense that he views his expectation of gaining Laure’s scent as an encounter with something sacred; after all, Grenouille is convinced that A Thing’s Scent is Its Soul. To capture a scent is to capture the soul of an object, and so capturing Laure’s scent will be capturing her soul. He ends his first encounter with her in a way that makes his pseudoreligious sentiments abundantly clear: “He stood up, almost reverently, as if leaving behind something sacred or someone in deep sleep” (178).
In the meantime, Grenouille continues to perfect his abilities regarding extracting scents and creating perfumes, both those to be sold and those to be used for his own ends. This latter art Grenouille takes to a level that surpasses anything he has done up to this point. He creates perfumes that can speak as eloquently and persuasively as the greatest rhetorician: “he made it a matter of pride to acquire a personal odor, or better yet, a number of personal odors” (189). In crafting these unique scents, he finds that he can evoke any emotion he desires from other people merely by the kind of scent he wears. On the one hand, Grenouille wears his unique scents in the way a spy would don specific articles of clothing to blend into an environment or a crowd; everything about his personality and goals benefit from being able to weave in and out of company in precisely the way he wants. On the other hand, his perfume also serves as a kind of armor, protecting him from unwanted attention and allowing him to be undisturbed in his errands simply by choosing the right perfume.
With this perfume-as-camouflage perfected, Grenouille is free to pursue his true goal: perfecting his craft so he can harvest—possess—Laure Richis. Leading up to this, Grenouille’s abduction and murder of two dozen other young girls terrorize the village and surrounding countryside. While ostensibly introduced as Grenouille’s antagonist, Antoine Richis, who witnesses the brutal aftermath of Grenouille’s killings, proves to be Grenouille’s mirror in depravity. While possessing neither Grenouille’s unique sensory gifts nor his homicidal intentions, Antoine views Laure—his very own daughter—in a way that truly reflects Grenouille’s perspective. Antoine, like Grenouille, views Laure as an object with which he can achieve his desired ends. Antoine’s master plan is to use Laure to secure his dreams of nobility, honor, and influence by arranging for her an advantageous marriage. It is his own habit of manipulation and scheming that allows him to see the pattern in the various murders and to realize they revolve around Laure rather than exclude her. As such, he correctly deduces that Laure is the murderer’s desired final goal. Antoine’s great concern to protect Laure, though, has nothing to do with paternal love and everything to do with his own ambitions. Antoine proves himself equally ruthless as Grenouille; he simply has different goals in mind. His appearance as Grenouille’s mirror complicates characterizations of Grenouille as uniquely evil. He is not simply demonic because he has no scent; rather, the way he has been mistreated due to being different led to his alienation, which gave him the opportunity to cultivate his darkest desires. Antoine’s musings—misogynistic and self-serving—indicate that many in this world are cultivating their own dark desires.
