As a young boy, Grenouille could smell a splinter of wood and (once he learned to talk) tell you what kind of wood it was, from which lumberyard it came and who cut it.  He knew who was about to enter his room before they came in—not because he heard their voice, or recognized their gait—but because he could smell their essence.  Abandoned by the wet nurses, he spent the early years of his childhood in an orphanage. But even the warden couldn't stand him.  She kicked him out, too, because she thought he possessed "second sight" and would steal the fortune she'd hidden beneath her bedroom's floorboards. But Grenouille didn't have "second sight;" he had "second smell."

Tossed like an unwanted doll from institution to institution, Grenouille finds work at a tannery, where he treats hides with chemicals so harsh as to kill an ordinary man in a matter of a few years. But for Grenouille, this work is fortifying rather than weakening.  With each passing day he grows stronger and stronger—like an oily cockroach that, when faced with an unforgiving climate, finds a way to adapt and survive.

But one day, Grenouille meets his match. On his way home from work one day, reeking from lyes and toxins, Grenouille is stopped in his tracks by a smell so intoxicating, it nearly lifts him off the ground.  He traces the scent like a bloodhound--through alleyways, over bridges, into sewers, under fences until he finds its source:

"For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so beautiful as this girl—although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight. He meant, of course, he had never smelled anything so beautiful...Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as a bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms...and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless."

Faced with the odor's divine source, Grenouille is brought to his knees. Never has he smelled anything so pure, so innocent, so beautiful. Grenouille wants nothing more than to possess this smell, to make it part of his skin, his body, his being. With a quick, firm crack of the neck, she becomes his. The smell is his.  He sniffs every inch of her body, like a ravenous hyena devouring the left-over carrion of another's meal. He sniffs and snorts until he had absorbed every single molecule of her being. Later, while pondering this gruesome, olfactory feast, Grenouille realizes he has found his calling in life. It is to create the greatest perfume man would ever know: the pure, fragrant innocence of a young virgin. Next >>>