Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in 1738 in the filth of a Paris fish market to an unwed mother who is promptly executed for infanticide, leaving him to be raised in squalor through a succession of orphanages and a brutal tannery apprenticeship. Despite his wretched circumstances, Grenouille possesses a preternatural sense of smell — he can identify and catalogue every odor in the world with extraordinary precision. While working as a tanner's delivery boy, he encounters a young red-haired woman in the streets of Paris whose scent transfixes him utterly. Desperate to possess and preserve her scent, he instinctively strangles her — his first murder — and is devastated when her smell fades after death, realizing he lacks any means to capture it.

Driven by obsession, Grenouille apprentices himself to Giuseppe Baldini, an aging and failing master perfumer. He reveals his gift by effortlessly replicating and improving rival formulas, reviving Baldini's reputation and business. In exchange, Baldini teaches Grenouille the technical craft of perfumery. Baldini eventually reveals that the most advanced scent-preservation techniques — enfleurage in particular — are practiced in Grasse, in the south of France, and Grenouille sets off there.

En route, repulsed by the stench of humanity, Grenouille retreats alone into a remote mountain cave where he lives in isolation for seven years. During this period of quasi-mystical withdrawal, he constructs an elaborate inner world built entirely from scent memories. He eventually makes a shocking self-discovery: he himself has no personal odor whatsoever. This absence, which had always made others instinctively uneasy around him, confirms his sense of radical otherness. He fabricates a synthetic human body odor to pass unnoticed among people and descends back into society, briefly attaching himself to the eccentric Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, who exploits Grenouille's apparent transformation for his own pseudoscientific theories. Grenouille merely observes, growing more contemptuous of human credulity.

Arriving in Grasse, Grenouille becomes fixated on Laure Richis, the beautiful young daughter of a prosperous merchant, whose scent mirrors and surpasses that of his very first victim. Recognizing that he needs to master enfleurage before he can preserve her scent, he embarks on a systematic murder campaign, killing twenty-four young women across the region — each chosen for her distinctive scent — and extracting their essences through the enfleurage process. The killings terrify the region; Laure's father, Antoine Richis, deduces that his daughter is the killer's intended final victim and attempts to spirit her away. Grenouille tracks them down, murders Laure, and completes his ultimate perfume.

Arrested and condemned to death, Grenouille is brought to his public execution before a massive crowd in Grasse. He opens his vial of perfume. The scent — compounded from the essences of twenty-five murdered women — overwhelms every person present with an irresistible sensation of love and adoration. The crowd, magistrates, and even Antoine Richis himself are overcome; the execution is abandoned, Grenouille is pardoned and embraced, and the crowd dissolves into a frenzied, ecstatic orgy in the square.

Grenouille, however, feels nothing. He has achieved absolute power over human emotion and found it entirely hollow — he himself is incapable of love and cannot be moved by the adoration he has manufactured. He travels back to Paris, to the very fish market where he was born. There, surrounded by the city's underclass, he pours the remainder of his perfume over himself. The crowd, intoxicated beyond reason, is seized by an overwhelming compulsion and tears him apart, devouring him. Afterward, they feel only a vague, inexplicable sense that they had done something they loved.

Sources: Wikipedia