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“How did you ever get the absurd idea that I would use someone else’s perfume to…”
“You reek of it!” Grenouille hissed. “You have it on your forehead, and in your right coat pocket is a handkerchief soaked with it. It’s not very good, this Amor and Psyche, it’s bad, there’s too much bergamot and too much rosemary and not enough attar of roses.”
“Aha!” Baldini said, totally surprised that the conversation had veered from the general to the specific. “What else?”
“Orange blossom, lime, clove, musk, jasmine, alcohol, and something that I don’t know the name of, there, you see, right there! In that bottle!” And he pointed a finger into the darkness. Baldini held the candlestick up in that direction, his gaze following the boy’s index finger toward a cupboard and falling upon a bottle filled with a grayish yellow balm.
“Storax?” he asked.
Grenouille nodded. “Yes. That’s in it too. Storax.” And then he squirmed as if doubling up with a cramp and muttered the word at least a dozen times to himself: “Storaxstoraxstoraxstorax…”
Baldini held his candle up to this lump of humankind wheezing “storax” and thought: Either he is possessed, or a thieving impostor, or truly gifted. For it was perfectly possible that the list of ingredients, if mixed in the right proportions, could result in the perfume Amor and Psyche-it was, in fact, probable. Attar of roses, clove, and storax-it was those three ingredients that he had searched for so desperately this afternoon. Joining them with the other parts of the composition-which he believed he had recognized as well-would unite the segments into a pretty, rounded pastry. It was now only a question of the exact proportions in which you had to join them. To find that out, he, Baldini, would have to run experiments for several days, a horrible task, almost worse than the basic identification of the parts, for it meant you had to measure and weigh and record and all the while pay damn close attention, because the least bit of inattention-a tremble of the pipette, a mistake in counting drops-could ruin the whole thing. And every botched attempt was dreadfully expensive. Every ruined mixture was worth a small fortune…
He wanted to test this mannikin, wanted to ask him about the exact formula for Amor and Psyche. If he knew it, to the drop and dram, then he was obviously an impostor who had somehow pinched the recipe from Pelissier in order to gain access and get a position with him, Baldini. But if he came close, then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini’s professional interest. Not that Baldini would jeopardize his firm decision to give up his business! This perfume by Pelissier was itself not the important thing to him. Even if the fellow could deliver it to him by the gallon, Baldini would not dream of scenting Count Verhamont’s Spanish hides with it, but… But he had not been a perfumer his life long, had not concerned himself his life long with the blending of scents, to have lost all professional passions from oae moment to the next. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume, and beyond that, in studying the gifts of this mysterious boy, who had parsed a scent right off his forehead. He wanted to know what was behind that. He was quite simply curious.
“You have, it appears, a fine nose, young man,” he said, once Grenouille had ceased his wheezings; and he stepped back into the workshop, carefully setting the candlestick on the worktable, “without doubt, a fine nose, but…”
“I have the best nose in Paris, Maitre Baldini,” Grenouille interrupted with a rasp. “I know all the odors in the world, all of them, only I don’t know the names of some of them, but I can learn the names. The odors that have names, there aren’t many of those, there are only a few thousand. I’ll learn them all, I’ll never forget the name of that balm, storax, the balm is called storax, it’s called storax…”
“Silence!” shouted Baldini. “Do not interrupt me when I’m speaking! You are impertinent and insolent. No one knows a thousand odors by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odors, they are simply stenches.”
During the rather lengthy interruption that had burst from him, Grenouille had almost unfolded his body, had in fact been so excited for the moment that he had flailed both arms in circles to suggest the “all, all of them” that he knew. But at Baldini’s reply he collapsed back into himself, like a black toad lurking there motionless on the threshold.
“I have, of course, been aware,” Baldini continued, “for some time now that Amor and Psyche consisted of storax, attar of roses, and cloves, plus bergamot and extract of rosemary et cetera. All that is needed to find that out is, as I said, a passably fine nose, and it may well be that God has given you a passably fine nose, as He has many, many other people as well— particularly at your age. A perfumer, however”-and here Baldini raised his index finger and puffed out his chest-”a perfumer, however, needs more than a passably fine nose. He needs an incorruptible, hardworking organ that has been trained to smell for many decades, enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odors by composition and proportion, as well as to create new, unknown mixtures of scent. Such a nose”-and here he tapped his with his finger-”is not something one has, young man! It is something one acquires, by perseverance and diligence. Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you?”
Grenouille did not answer.
“Could you perhaps give me a rough guess?” Baldini said, bending forward a bit to get a better look at the toad at his door. “Just a rough one, an estimation? Well, speak up, best nose in Paris!”
But Grenouille was silent.
“You see?” said Baldini, equally both satisfied and disappointed; and he straightened up. “You can’t do it. Of course you can’t. You’re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at mealtime. That’s fine, there’s something to be said for that. But that doesn’t make you a cook, not by a long shot. Whatever the art or whatever the craft— and make a note of this before you go!-talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.”
He was reaching for the candlestick on the table, when from the doorway came Grenouille’s pinched snarl: “I don’t know what a formula is, maitre. I don’t know that, but otherwise I know everything!”
“A formula is the alpha and omega of every perfume,” replied Baldini sternly, for he wanted to end this conversation-now. “It contains scrupulously exact instructions for the proportions needed to mix individual ingredients so that the result is the unmistakable scent one desires. That is a formula. It is the recipe-if that is a word you understand better.”
“Formula, formula,” rasped Grenouille and grew somewhat larger in the doorway. “I don’t need a formula. I have the recipe in my nose. Can I mix it for you, maitre, can I mix it, can I?”
“How’s that?” pried Baldini in a rather loud voice and held the candle up to the gnome’s face. “How would you mix it?”
For the first time, Grenouille did not flinch. “Why, they’re all here, all the ones you need, the scents, they’re all here, in this room,” he said, pointing again into the darkness. “There’s attar of roses! There’s orange blossom! That’s clove! That’s rosemary, there…!”
“Certainly they’re here!” roared Baldini. “They are all here. But I’m telling you, you blockhead, that is of no use if one does not have the formula!”
“… There’s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!” Grenouille went on crowing, and at each name he pointed to a different spot in the room, although it was so dark that at best you could surmise the shadows of the cupboards filled with bottles.
“You can see in the dark, can you?” Baldini went on. “You not only have the best nose, but also the keenest eyes in Paris, do you? Now if you have passably good ears, then open them up, because I’m telling you: you are a little swindler. You probably picked up your information at Pelissier’s, did some spying, is that it? And now you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, right?”
Grenouille was now standing up, completely unfolded to full size, so to speak, in the doorway, his legs slightly apart, his arms slightly spread, so that he looked like a black spider that had latched onto the threshold and frame. “Give me ten minutes,” he said in close to a normal, fluent pattern of speech, “and I will produce for you the perfume Amor and Psyche. Right now, right here in this room. Maitre, give me just five minutes!”
“Do you suppose I’d let you slop around here in my laboratory? With essences that are worth a fortune? You?”
“Yes,” said Grenouille.
“Bah!” Baldini shouted, exhaling all at once every bit of air he had in him. Then he took a deep breath and a long look at Grenouille the spider, and thought it over. Basically it makes no difference, he thought, because it will all be over tomorrow anyway. I know for a fact that he can’t do what he claims he can, can’t possibly do it. Why, that would make him greater than the great Frangipani. But why shouldn’t I let him demonstrate before my eyes what I know to be true? It is possible that someday in Messina-people do grow very strange in old age and their minds fix on the craziest ideas-I’ll get the notion that I had failed to recognize an olfactory genius, a creature upon whom the grace of God had been poured out in superabundance, a wunderkind… It’s totally out of the question. Everything my reason tells me says it is out of the question-but miracles do happen, that is certain. So what if, when I lie dying in Messina someday, the thought comes to me there on my deathbed: On that evening, back in Paris, I shut my eyes to a miracle…? That would not be very pleasant, Baldini. Let the fool waste a few drops of attar of roses and musk tincture; you would have wasted them yourself if Pelissier’s perfume had still interested you. And what are a few drops-though expensive ones, very, very expensive!-compared to certain knowledge and a peaceful old age?
“Now pay attention!” he said with an affectedly stern voice. “Pay attention! I… what is your name, anyway?”
“Grenouille,” said Grenouille. “Jean-Baptiste Gre-nouille,”
“Aha,” said Baldini. “All right then, now pay attention, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. You shall have the opportunity, now, this very moment, to prove your assertion. Your grandiose failure will also be an opportunity for you to learn the virtue of humility, which-although one may pardon the total lack of its development at your tender age-will be an absolute prerequisite for later advancement as a member of your guild and for your standing as a man, a man of honor, a dutiful subject, and a good Christian. I am prepared to teach you this lesson at my own expense. For certain reasons, I am feeling generous this evening, and, who knows, perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day. But do not suppose that you can dupe me! Giuseppe Baldini’s nose is old, but it is still sharp, sharp enough immediately to recognize the slightest difference between your mixture and this product here.” And at that he pulled the handkerchief drenched in Amor and Psyche from his pocket and waved it under Grenouille’s nose. “Come closer, best nose in Paris! Come here to the table and show me what you can do. But be careful not to drop anything or knock anything over. Don’t touch anything yet. Let me provide some light first. We want to have lots of illumination for this little experiment, don’t we?”
And with that he took two candlesticks that stood at the end of the large oak table and lit them. He placed all three next to one another along the back, pushed the goatskins to one side, cleared the middle of the table. Then, with a few composed yet rapid motions, he fetched from a small stand the utensils needed for the task-the big-bellied mixing bottle, the glass funnel, the pipette, the small and large measuring glasses -and placed them in proper order on the oaken surface.
Grenouille had meanwhile freed himself from the doorframe. Even while Baldini was making his pompous speech, the stiffness and cunning intensity had fallen away from him. He had heard only the approval, only the “yes,” with the inner jubilation of a child that has sulked its way to some— permission granted and thumbs its nose at the limitations, conditions, and moral admonitions tied to it. Standing there at his ease and letting the rest of Baldini’s oration flow by, he was for the first time more human than animal, because he knew that he had already conquered the man who had yielded to him.
While Baldini was still fussing with his candlesticks at the table, Grenouille had already slipped off into the darkness of the laboratory with its cupboards full of precious essences, oils, and tinctures, and following his sure-scenting nose, grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. There were nine altogether: essence of orange blossom, lime oil, attars of rose and clove, extracts of jasmine, bergamot, and rosemary, musk tincture, and storax balm, all quickly plucked down and set at the ready on the edge of the table. The last item he lugged over was a demijohn full of high-proof rectified spirit. Then he placed himself behind Baldini-who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry, moving this glass back a bit, that one over more to one side, so that everything would be in its old accustomed order and displayed to its best advantage in the candlelight— and waited, quivering with impatience, for the old man to get out of the way and make room for him.
“There!” Baldini said at last, stepping aside. “I’ve lined up everything you’ll require for-let us graciously call it-your ‘experiment.’ Don’t break anything, don’t spill anything. Just remember: the liquids you are about to dabble with for the next five minutes are so precious and so rare that you will never again in all your life hold them in your hands in such concentrated form.”
“How much of it shall I make for you, maitre?” Grenouille asked.
“Make what…?” said Baldini, who had not yet finished his speech.
“How much of the perfume?” rasped Grenouille. “How much of it do you want? Shall I fill this big bottle here to the rim?” And he pointed to a mixing bottle that held a gallon at the very least.
“No, you shall not!” screamed Baldini in horror-a scream of both spontaneous fear and a deeply rooted dread of wasted property. Embarrassed at what his scream had revealed, he followed it up by roaring, “And don’t interrupt me when I am speaking, either!” Then in a calm voice tinged with irony, he continued, “Why would we need a gallon of a perfume that neither of us thinks much of? Haifa beakerful will do, really. But since such small quantities are difficult to measure, I’ll allow you to start with a third of a mixing bottle.”
“Good,” said Grenouille. “I’m going to fill a third of this bottle with Amor and Psyche. But, Maitre Baidini, I will do it in my own way. I don’t know if it will be how a craftsman would do it. I don’t know how that’s done. But I will do it my own way.”
“As you please,” said Baidini, who knew that in this business there was no “your way” or “my way,” but one and only one way, which consisted of knowing the formula and, using the appropriate calculations for the quantity one desired, creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences, which then had to be volatilized into a true perfume by mixing it in a precise ratio with alcohol-usually varying between one-to-ten and one-to-twenty. There was no other way, that he knew. And therefore what he was now called upon to witness-first with derisive hauteur, then with dismay, and finally with helpless astonishment-seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day.
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
“You reek of it!” Grenouille hissed. “You have it on your forehead, and in your right coat pocket is a handkerchief soaked with it. It’s not very good, this Amor and Psyche, it’s bad, there’s too much bergamot and too much rosemary and not enough attar of roses.”
“Aha!” Baldini said, totally surprised that the conversation had veered from the general to the specific. “What else?”
“Orange blossom, lime, clove, musk, jasmine, alcohol, and something that I don’t know the name of, there, you see, right there! In that bottle!” And he pointed a finger into the darkness. Baldini held the candlestick up in that direction, his gaze following the boy’s index finger toward a cupboard and falling upon a bottle filled with a grayish yellow balm.
“Storax?” he asked.
Grenouille nodded. “Yes. That’s in it too. Storax.” And then he squirmed as if doubling up with a cramp and muttered the word at least a dozen times to himself: “Storaxstoraxstoraxstorax…”
Baldini held his candle up to this lump of humankind wheezing “storax” and thought: Either he is possessed, or a thieving impostor, or truly gifted. For it was perfectly possible that the list of ingredients, if mixed in the right proportions, could result in the perfume Amor and Psyche-it was, in fact, probable. Attar of roses, clove, and storax-it was those three ingredients that he had searched for so desperately this afternoon. Joining them with the other parts of the composition-which he believed he had recognized as well-would unite the segments into a pretty, rounded pastry. It was now only a question of the exact proportions in which you had to join them. To find that out, he, Baldini, would have to run experiments for several days, a horrible task, almost worse than the basic identification of the parts, for it meant you had to measure and weigh and record and all the while pay damn close attention, because the least bit of inattention-a tremble of the pipette, a mistake in counting drops-could ruin the whole thing. And every botched attempt was dreadfully expensive. Every ruined mixture was worth a small fortune…
He wanted to test this mannikin, wanted to ask him about the exact formula for Amor and Psyche. If he knew it, to the drop and dram, then he was obviously an impostor who had somehow pinched the recipe from Pelissier in order to gain access and get a position with him, Baldini. But if he came close, then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini’s professional interest. Not that Baldini would jeopardize his firm decision to give up his business! This perfume by Pelissier was itself not the important thing to him. Even if the fellow could deliver it to him by the gallon, Baldini would not dream of scenting Count Verhamont’s Spanish hides with it, but… But he had not been a perfumer his life long, had not concerned himself his life long with the blending of scents, to have lost all professional passions from oae moment to the next. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume, and beyond that, in studying the gifts of this mysterious boy, who had parsed a scent right off his forehead. He wanted to know what was behind that. He was quite simply curious.
“You have, it appears, a fine nose, young man,” he said, once Grenouille had ceased his wheezings; and he stepped back into the workshop, carefully setting the candlestick on the worktable, “without doubt, a fine nose, but…”
“I have the best nose in Paris, Maitre Baldini,” Grenouille interrupted with a rasp. “I know all the odors in the world, all of them, only I don’t know the names of some of them, but I can learn the names. The odors that have names, there aren’t many of those, there are only a few thousand. I’ll learn them all, I’ll never forget the name of that balm, storax, the balm is called storax, it’s called storax…”
“Silence!” shouted Baldini. “Do not interrupt me when I’m speaking! You are impertinent and insolent. No one knows a thousand odors by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odors, they are simply stenches.”
During the rather lengthy interruption that had burst from him, Grenouille had almost unfolded his body, had in fact been so excited for the moment that he had flailed both arms in circles to suggest the “all, all of them” that he knew. But at Baldini’s reply he collapsed back into himself, like a black toad lurking there motionless on the threshold.
“I have, of course, been aware,” Baldini continued, “for some time now that Amor and Psyche consisted of storax, attar of roses, and cloves, plus bergamot and extract of rosemary et cetera. All that is needed to find that out is, as I said, a passably fine nose, and it may well be that God has given you a passably fine nose, as He has many, many other people as well— particularly at your age. A perfumer, however”-and here Baldini raised his index finger and puffed out his chest-”a perfumer, however, needs more than a passably fine nose. He needs an incorruptible, hardworking organ that has been trained to smell for many decades, enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odors by composition and proportion, as well as to create new, unknown mixtures of scent. Such a nose”-and here he tapped his with his finger-”is not something one has, young man! It is something one acquires, by perseverance and diligence. Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you?”
Grenouille did not answer.
“Could you perhaps give me a rough guess?” Baldini said, bending forward a bit to get a better look at the toad at his door. “Just a rough one, an estimation? Well, speak up, best nose in Paris!”
But Grenouille was silent.
“You see?” said Baldini, equally both satisfied and disappointed; and he straightened up. “You can’t do it. Of course you can’t. You’re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at mealtime. That’s fine, there’s something to be said for that. But that doesn’t make you a cook, not by a long shot. Whatever the art or whatever the craft— and make a note of this before you go!-talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.”
He was reaching for the candlestick on the table, when from the doorway came Grenouille’s pinched snarl: “I don’t know what a formula is, maitre. I don’t know that, but otherwise I know everything!”
“A formula is the alpha and omega of every perfume,” replied Baldini sternly, for he wanted to end this conversation-now. “It contains scrupulously exact instructions for the proportions needed to mix individual ingredients so that the result is the unmistakable scent one desires. That is a formula. It is the recipe-if that is a word you understand better.”
“Formula, formula,” rasped Grenouille and grew somewhat larger in the doorway. “I don’t need a formula. I have the recipe in my nose. Can I mix it for you, maitre, can I mix it, can I?”
“How’s that?” pried Baldini in a rather loud voice and held the candle up to the gnome’s face. “How would you mix it?”
For the first time, Grenouille did not flinch. “Why, they’re all here, all the ones you need, the scents, they’re all here, in this room,” he said, pointing again into the darkness. “There’s attar of roses! There’s orange blossom! That’s clove! That’s rosemary, there…!”
“Certainly they’re here!” roared Baldini. “They are all here. But I’m telling you, you blockhead, that is of no use if one does not have the formula!”
“… There’s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!” Grenouille went on crowing, and at each name he pointed to a different spot in the room, although it was so dark that at best you could surmise the shadows of the cupboards filled with bottles.
“You can see in the dark, can you?” Baldini went on. “You not only have the best nose, but also the keenest eyes in Paris, do you? Now if you have passably good ears, then open them up, because I’m telling you: you are a little swindler. You probably picked up your information at Pelissier’s, did some spying, is that it? And now you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, right?”
Grenouille was now standing up, completely unfolded to full size, so to speak, in the doorway, his legs slightly apart, his arms slightly spread, so that he looked like a black spider that had latched onto the threshold and frame. “Give me ten minutes,” he said in close to a normal, fluent pattern of speech, “and I will produce for you the perfume Amor and Psyche. Right now, right here in this room. Maitre, give me just five minutes!”
“Do you suppose I’d let you slop around here in my laboratory? With essences that are worth a fortune? You?”
“Yes,” said Grenouille.
“Bah!” Baldini shouted, exhaling all at once every bit of air he had in him. Then he took a deep breath and a long look at Grenouille the spider, and thought it over. Basically it makes no difference, he thought, because it will all be over tomorrow anyway. I know for a fact that he can’t do what he claims he can, can’t possibly do it. Why, that would make him greater than the great Frangipani. But why shouldn’t I let him demonstrate before my eyes what I know to be true? It is possible that someday in Messina-people do grow very strange in old age and their minds fix on the craziest ideas-I’ll get the notion that I had failed to recognize an olfactory genius, a creature upon whom the grace of God had been poured out in superabundance, a wunderkind… It’s totally out of the question. Everything my reason tells me says it is out of the question-but miracles do happen, that is certain. So what if, when I lie dying in Messina someday, the thought comes to me there on my deathbed: On that evening, back in Paris, I shut my eyes to a miracle…? That would not be very pleasant, Baldini. Let the fool waste a few drops of attar of roses and musk tincture; you would have wasted them yourself if Pelissier’s perfume had still interested you. And what are a few drops-though expensive ones, very, very expensive!-compared to certain knowledge and a peaceful old age?
“Now pay attention!” he said with an affectedly stern voice. “Pay attention! I… what is your name, anyway?”
“Grenouille,” said Grenouille. “Jean-Baptiste Gre-nouille,”
“Aha,” said Baldini. “All right then, now pay attention, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. You shall have the opportunity, now, this very moment, to prove your assertion. Your grandiose failure will also be an opportunity for you to learn the virtue of humility, which-although one may pardon the total lack of its development at your tender age-will be an absolute prerequisite for later advancement as a member of your guild and for your standing as a man, a man of honor, a dutiful subject, and a good Christian. I am prepared to teach you this lesson at my own expense. For certain reasons, I am feeling generous this evening, and, who knows, perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day. But do not suppose that you can dupe me! Giuseppe Baldini’s nose is old, but it is still sharp, sharp enough immediately to recognize the slightest difference between your mixture and this product here.” And at that he pulled the handkerchief drenched in Amor and Psyche from his pocket and waved it under Grenouille’s nose. “Come closer, best nose in Paris! Come here to the table and show me what you can do. But be careful not to drop anything or knock anything over. Don’t touch anything yet. Let me provide some light first. We want to have lots of illumination for this little experiment, don’t we?”
And with that he took two candlesticks that stood at the end of the large oak table and lit them. He placed all three next to one another along the back, pushed the goatskins to one side, cleared the middle of the table. Then, with a few composed yet rapid motions, he fetched from a small stand the utensils needed for the task-the big-bellied mixing bottle, the glass funnel, the pipette, the small and large measuring glasses -and placed them in proper order on the oaken surface.
Grenouille had meanwhile freed himself from the doorframe. Even while Baldini was making his pompous speech, the stiffness and cunning intensity had fallen away from him. He had heard only the approval, only the “yes,” with the inner jubilation of a child that has sulked its way to some— permission granted and thumbs its nose at the limitations, conditions, and moral admonitions tied to it. Standing there at his ease and letting the rest of Baldini’s oration flow by, he was for the first time more human than animal, because he knew that he had already conquered the man who had yielded to him.
While Baldini was still fussing with his candlesticks at the table, Grenouille had already slipped off into the darkness of the laboratory with its cupboards full of precious essences, oils, and tinctures, and following his sure-scenting nose, grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. There were nine altogether: essence of orange blossom, lime oil, attars of rose and clove, extracts of jasmine, bergamot, and rosemary, musk tincture, and storax balm, all quickly plucked down and set at the ready on the edge of the table. The last item he lugged over was a demijohn full of high-proof rectified spirit. Then he placed himself behind Baldini-who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry, moving this glass back a bit, that one over more to one side, so that everything would be in its old accustomed order and displayed to its best advantage in the candlelight— and waited, quivering with impatience, for the old man to get out of the way and make room for him.
“There!” Baldini said at last, stepping aside. “I’ve lined up everything you’ll require for-let us graciously call it-your ‘experiment.’ Don’t break anything, don’t spill anything. Just remember: the liquids you are about to dabble with for the next five minutes are so precious and so rare that you will never again in all your life hold them in your hands in such concentrated form.”
“How much of it shall I make for you, maitre?” Grenouille asked.
“Make what…?” said Baldini, who had not yet finished his speech.
“How much of the perfume?” rasped Grenouille. “How much of it do you want? Shall I fill this big bottle here to the rim?” And he pointed to a mixing bottle that held a gallon at the very least.
“No, you shall not!” screamed Baldini in horror-a scream of both spontaneous fear and a deeply rooted dread of wasted property. Embarrassed at what his scream had revealed, he followed it up by roaring, “And don’t interrupt me when I am speaking, either!” Then in a calm voice tinged with irony, he continued, “Why would we need a gallon of a perfume that neither of us thinks much of? Haifa beakerful will do, really. But since such small quantities are difficult to measure, I’ll allow you to start with a third of a mixing bottle.”
“Good,” said Grenouille. “I’m going to fill a third of this bottle with Amor and Psyche. But, Maitre Baidini, I will do it in my own way. I don’t know if it will be how a craftsman would do it. I don’t know how that’s done. But I will do it my own way.”
“As you please,” said Baidini, who knew that in this business there was no “your way” or “my way,” but one and only one way, which consisted of knowing the formula and, using the appropriate calculations for the quantity one desired, creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences, which then had to be volatilized into a true perfume by mixing it in a precise ratio with alcohol-usually varying between one-to-ten and one-to-twenty. There was no other way, that he knew. And therefore what he was now called upon to witness-first with derisive hauteur, then with dismay, and finally with helpless astonishment-seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day.
Fifteen
THE LITTLE MAN named Grenouille first uncorked the demijohn of alcohol. Heaving the heavy vessel up gave him difficulty. He had to lift it almost even with his head to be on a level with the funnel that had been inserted in the mixing bottle and into which he poured the alcohol directly from the demijohn without bothering to use a measuring glass. Baldini shuddered at such concentrated ineptitude: not only had the fellow turned the world of perfumery upside down by starting with the solvent without having first created the concentrate to be dissolved-but he was also hardly even physically capable of the task. He was shaking with exertion, and Baldini was waiting at any moment for the heavy demijohn to come crashing down and smash everything on the table to pieces. The candles, he thought, for God’s sake, the candles! There’s going to be an explosion, he’ll burn my house down…! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman’s hands when Grenouille set it down himself, getting it back on the floor all in one piece, and stoppered it. A clear, light liquid swayed in the bottle-not a drop spilled. For a few moments Grenouille panted for breath, but with a look of contentment on his face as if the hardest part of the job were behind him. And indeed, what happened now proceeded with such speed that BaWini could hardly follow it with his eyes, let alone keep track of the order in which it occurred or make even partial sense of the procedure.
Grenouille grabbed apparently at random from the row of essences in their flacons, pulled out the glass stoppers, held the contents under his nose for an instant, splashed a bit of one bottle, dribbled a drop or two of another, poured a dash of a third into the funnel, and so on. Pipette, test tube, measuring glass, spoons and rods-all the utensils that allow the perfumer to control the complicated process of mixing-Grenouille did not so much as touch a single one of them. It was as if he were just playing, splashing and swishing like a child busy cooking up some ghastly brew of water, grass, and mud, which he then asserts to be soup. Yes, like a child, thought Baldini; all at once he looks like a child, despite his ungainly hands, despite his scarred, pockmarked face and his bulbous old-man’s nose. I took him to be older than he is; but now he seems much younger to me; he looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. There was just such a fanatical child trapped inside this young man, standing at the table with eyes aglow, having forgotten everything around him, apparently no longer aware that there was anything else in the laboratory but himself and these bottles that he tipped into the funnel with nimble awkwardness to mix up an insane brew that he would confidently swear-and would truly believe!-to be the exquisite perfume Amor and Psyche. Baldini shuddered as he watched the fellow bustling about in the candlelight, so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. In the old days-so he thought, and for a moment he felt as sad and miserable and furious as he had that afternoon while gazing out onto the city glowing ruddy in the twilight-in the old days people like that simply did not exist; he was an entirely new specimen of the race, one that could arise only in exhausted, dissipated times like these…, But he was about to be taught his lesson, the impertinent boy. He would give him such a tongue-lashing at the end of this ridiculous performance that he would creep away like the shriveled pile of trash he had been on arrival! Vermin! One dared not get involved with anyone at all these days, the world was simply teeming with absurd vermin!
Baldini was so busy with his personal exasperation and disgust at the age that he did not really comprehend what was intended when Grenouille suddenly stoppered up all the flacons, pulled the funnel out of the mixing bottle, grabbed the neck of the bottle with his right hand, capped it with the palm of his left, and shook it vigorously. Only when the bottle had been spun through the air several times, its precious contents sloshing back and forth like lemonade between belly and neck, did Baldini let loose a shout of rage and horror. “Stop it!” he screeched. “That’s enough! Stop it this moment! Basta! Put that bottle back on the table and don’t touch anything else, do you understand, nothing else! I must have been crazy to listen to your asinine gibberish. The way you handle these things, your crudity, your primitive lack of judgment, demonstrate to me that you are a bungler, a barbaric bungler, and a beastly, cheeky, snot-nosed brat besides. You wouldn’t make a good lemonade mixer, not even a good licorice-water vendor, let alone a perfumer! Just be glad, be grateful and content that your master lets you slop around in tanning fluids! Do not dare it ever again, do you hear me? Do not dare ever again to set a foot across the threshold of a perfumer’s shop!”
Thus spoke Baldini. And even as he spoke, the air around him was saturated with the odor of Amor and Psyche. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.
Grenouille had set down the bottle, removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirttail. One, two steps back-and the clumsy way he hunched his body together under Baldini’s tirade sent enough waves rolling out into the room to spread the newly created scent in all directions. Nothing more was needed. True, Baldini ranted on, railed and cursed, but with every breath his outward show of rage found less and less inner nourishment. He sensed he had been proved wrong, which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos. And when he fell silent, had been silent for a good while, he had no need of Grenouille’s remark: “It’s all done.” He knew that already.
But nevertheless, although in the meantime air heavy with Amor and Psyche was undulating all about him, he stepped up to the old oak table to make his test. He pulled a fresh snowy white lace handkerchief from his coat pocket, the left one, unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. He waved the handkerchief with outstretched arm to aerate it and then pulled it past his nose with the delicate, well-practiced motion, soaking up its scent. Letting it out again in little puffs, he sat down on a stool. Where before his face had been bright red with erupting anger, all at once he had grown pale. “Incredible,” he murmured softly to himself, “by God— incredible.” And he pressed the handkerchief to his nose again and again and sniffed and shook his head and muttered, “Incredible.” It was Amor and Psyche, beyond the shadow of a doubt Amor and Psyche, that despicable, ingenious blend of scents, so exactly copied that not even Pelissier himself would have been able to distinguish it from his own product. “Incredible…”
Small and ashen, the great Baldini sat on his stool, looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand, pressing it to his nose like an old maid with the sniffles. By now he was totally speechless. He didn’t even say “incredible” anymore, but nodding gently and staring at the contents of the mixing bottle, could only let out a monotone “Hmm, hrnm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm.” After a while, Gre-nouille approached, stepping up to the table soundlessly as a shadow.
“It’s not a good perfume,” he said. “It’s been put together very bad, this perfume has.”
“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini, and Grenouille continued, “If you’ll let me, maitre, I’ll make it better. Give me a minute and I’ll make a proper perfume out of it!”
“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini and nodded. Not in consent, but because he was in such a helplessly apathetic condition that he would have said “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and nodded to anything. And he went on nodding and murmuring “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and made no effort to interfere as Grenouille began to mix away a second time, pouring the alcohol from the demijohn into the mixing bottle a second time (right on top of the perfume already in it), tipping the contents of flacons a second time in apparently random order and quantity into the funnel. Only at the end of the procedure-Grenouille did not shake the bottle this time, but swirled it about gently like a brandy glass, perhaps in deference to Baldini’s delicacy, perhaps because the contents seemed more precious to him this time-only then, as the liquid whirled about in the bottle, did Baldini awaken from his numbed state and stand up, the handkerchief still pressed to his nose, of course, as if he were arming himself against yet another attack upon his most private self.
“It’s all done, maitre,” Grenouille said. “Now it’s a really good scent.”
“Yes, yes, fine, fine,” Baldini replied and waved him off with his free hand.
“Don’t you want to test it?” Grenouille gurgled on. “Don’t you want to, maitre? Aren’t you going to test it?”
“Later. I’m not in the mood to test it at the moment… have other things on my mind. Go now! Come on!”
And he picked up one of the candlesticks and passed through the door into the shop. Grenouille followed him. They entered the narrow hallway that led to the servants’ entrance. The old man shuffled up to the doorway, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. He stepped aside to let the lad out.
“Can’t I come to work for you, maitre, can’t I?” Grenouille asked, standing on the threshold, hunched over again, the lurking look returning to his eye.
“I don’t know,” said Baldini. “I shall think about it. Go.”
And then Grenouille had vanished, gone in a split second, swallowed up by the darkness. Baldini stood there and stared into the night. In his right hand he held the candlestick, in his left the handkerchief, like someone with a nosebleed, but in fact he was simply frightened. He quickly bolted the door. Then he took the protective handkerchief from his face, shoved it into his pocket, and walked back through the shop to his laboratory.
The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini’s eyes. He did not have to test it, he simply stood at the table in front of the mixing bottle and breathed. The perfume was glorious. It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. And it was more. Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were awakened within him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of Naples; he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss, now! now at this very moment! He forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, some toiletry. It was something completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine…
The hairs that had ruffled up on Baldini’s arm fell back again, and a befuddling peace took possession of his soul. He picked up the leather, the goat leather lying at the table’s edge, and a knife, and trimmed away. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. He fixed a pane of glass over the basin, divided the rest of the perfume between two small bottles, applied labels to them, and wrote the words Nuit Napolitaine on them. Then he extinguished the candles and left.
Once upstairs, he said nothing to his wife while they ate. Above all, he said nothing about the solemn decision he had arrived at that afternoon. And his wife said nothing either, for she noticed that he was in good spirits, and that was enough for her. Nor did he walk over to Notre-Dame to thank God for his strength of character. Indeed, that night he forgot, for the first time ever, to say his evening prayers.
Grenouille grabbed apparently at random from the row of essences in their flacons, pulled out the glass stoppers, held the contents under his nose for an instant, splashed a bit of one bottle, dribbled a drop or two of another, poured a dash of a third into the funnel, and so on. Pipette, test tube, measuring glass, spoons and rods-all the utensils that allow the perfumer to control the complicated process of mixing-Grenouille did not so much as touch a single one of them. It was as if he were just playing, splashing and swishing like a child busy cooking up some ghastly brew of water, grass, and mud, which he then asserts to be soup. Yes, like a child, thought Baldini; all at once he looks like a child, despite his ungainly hands, despite his scarred, pockmarked face and his bulbous old-man’s nose. I took him to be older than he is; but now he seems much younger to me; he looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. There was just such a fanatical child trapped inside this young man, standing at the table with eyes aglow, having forgotten everything around him, apparently no longer aware that there was anything else in the laboratory but himself and these bottles that he tipped into the funnel with nimble awkwardness to mix up an insane brew that he would confidently swear-and would truly believe!-to be the exquisite perfume Amor and Psyche. Baldini shuddered as he watched the fellow bustling about in the candlelight, so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. In the old days-so he thought, and for a moment he felt as sad and miserable and furious as he had that afternoon while gazing out onto the city glowing ruddy in the twilight-in the old days people like that simply did not exist; he was an entirely new specimen of the race, one that could arise only in exhausted, dissipated times like these…, But he was about to be taught his lesson, the impertinent boy. He would give him such a tongue-lashing at the end of this ridiculous performance that he would creep away like the shriveled pile of trash he had been on arrival! Vermin! One dared not get involved with anyone at all these days, the world was simply teeming with absurd vermin!
Baldini was so busy with his personal exasperation and disgust at the age that he did not really comprehend what was intended when Grenouille suddenly stoppered up all the flacons, pulled the funnel out of the mixing bottle, grabbed the neck of the bottle with his right hand, capped it with the palm of his left, and shook it vigorously. Only when the bottle had been spun through the air several times, its precious contents sloshing back and forth like lemonade between belly and neck, did Baldini let loose a shout of rage and horror. “Stop it!” he screeched. “That’s enough! Stop it this moment! Basta! Put that bottle back on the table and don’t touch anything else, do you understand, nothing else! I must have been crazy to listen to your asinine gibberish. The way you handle these things, your crudity, your primitive lack of judgment, demonstrate to me that you are a bungler, a barbaric bungler, and a beastly, cheeky, snot-nosed brat besides. You wouldn’t make a good lemonade mixer, not even a good licorice-water vendor, let alone a perfumer! Just be glad, be grateful and content that your master lets you slop around in tanning fluids! Do not dare it ever again, do you hear me? Do not dare ever again to set a foot across the threshold of a perfumer’s shop!”
Thus spoke Baldini. And even as he spoke, the air around him was saturated with the odor of Amor and Psyche. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.
Grenouille had set down the bottle, removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirttail. One, two steps back-and the clumsy way he hunched his body together under Baldini’s tirade sent enough waves rolling out into the room to spread the newly created scent in all directions. Nothing more was needed. True, Baldini ranted on, railed and cursed, but with every breath his outward show of rage found less and less inner nourishment. He sensed he had been proved wrong, which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos. And when he fell silent, had been silent for a good while, he had no need of Grenouille’s remark: “It’s all done.” He knew that already.
But nevertheless, although in the meantime air heavy with Amor and Psyche was undulating all about him, he stepped up to the old oak table to make his test. He pulled a fresh snowy white lace handkerchief from his coat pocket, the left one, unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. He waved the handkerchief with outstretched arm to aerate it and then pulled it past his nose with the delicate, well-practiced motion, soaking up its scent. Letting it out again in little puffs, he sat down on a stool. Where before his face had been bright red with erupting anger, all at once he had grown pale. “Incredible,” he murmured softly to himself, “by God— incredible.” And he pressed the handkerchief to his nose again and again and sniffed and shook his head and muttered, “Incredible.” It was Amor and Psyche, beyond the shadow of a doubt Amor and Psyche, that despicable, ingenious blend of scents, so exactly copied that not even Pelissier himself would have been able to distinguish it from his own product. “Incredible…”
Small and ashen, the great Baldini sat on his stool, looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand, pressing it to his nose like an old maid with the sniffles. By now he was totally speechless. He didn’t even say “incredible” anymore, but nodding gently and staring at the contents of the mixing bottle, could only let out a monotone “Hmm, hrnm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm.” After a while, Gre-nouille approached, stepping up to the table soundlessly as a shadow.
“It’s not a good perfume,” he said. “It’s been put together very bad, this perfume has.”
“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini, and Grenouille continued, “If you’ll let me, maitre, I’ll make it better. Give me a minute and I’ll make a proper perfume out of it!”
“Hmm, hmm, hmm,” said Baldini and nodded. Not in consent, but because he was in such a helplessly apathetic condition that he would have said “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and nodded to anything. And he went on nodding and murmuring “hmm, hmm, hmm,” and made no effort to interfere as Grenouille began to mix away a second time, pouring the alcohol from the demijohn into the mixing bottle a second time (right on top of the perfume already in it), tipping the contents of flacons a second time in apparently random order and quantity into the funnel. Only at the end of the procedure-Grenouille did not shake the bottle this time, but swirled it about gently like a brandy glass, perhaps in deference to Baldini’s delicacy, perhaps because the contents seemed more precious to him this time-only then, as the liquid whirled about in the bottle, did Baldini awaken from his numbed state and stand up, the handkerchief still pressed to his nose, of course, as if he were arming himself against yet another attack upon his most private self.
“It’s all done, maitre,” Grenouille said. “Now it’s a really good scent.”
“Yes, yes, fine, fine,” Baldini replied and waved him off with his free hand.
“Don’t you want to test it?” Grenouille gurgled on. “Don’t you want to, maitre? Aren’t you going to test it?”
“Later. I’m not in the mood to test it at the moment… have other things on my mind. Go now! Come on!”
And he picked up one of the candlesticks and passed through the door into the shop. Grenouille followed him. They entered the narrow hallway that led to the servants’ entrance. The old man shuffled up to the doorway, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. He stepped aside to let the lad out.
“Can’t I come to work for you, maitre, can’t I?” Grenouille asked, standing on the threshold, hunched over again, the lurking look returning to his eye.
“I don’t know,” said Baldini. “I shall think about it. Go.”
And then Grenouille had vanished, gone in a split second, swallowed up by the darkness. Baldini stood there and stared into the night. In his right hand he held the candlestick, in his left the handkerchief, like someone with a nosebleed, but in fact he was simply frightened. He quickly bolted the door. Then he took the protective handkerchief from his face, shoved it into his pocket, and walked back through the shop to his laboratory.
The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini’s eyes. He did not have to test it, he simply stood at the table in front of the mixing bottle and breathed. The perfume was glorious. It was to Amor and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. And it was more. Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were awakened within him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of Naples; he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss, now! now at this very moment! He forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, some toiletry. It was something completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine…
The hairs that had ruffled up on Baldini’s arm fell back again, and a befuddling peace took possession of his soul. He picked up the leather, the goat leather lying at the table’s edge, and a knife, and trimmed away. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. He fixed a pane of glass over the basin, divided the rest of the perfume between two small bottles, applied labels to them, and wrote the words Nuit Napolitaine on them. Then he extinguished the candles and left.
Once upstairs, he said nothing to his wife while they ate. Above all, he said nothing about the solemn decision he had arrived at that afternoon. And his wife said nothing either, for she noticed that he was in good spirits, and that was enough for her. Nor did he walk over to Notre-Dame to thank God for his strength of character. Indeed, that night he forgot, for the first time ever, to say his evening prayers.
Sixteen
THE NEXT MORNING he went straight to Grimal. First he paid for his goat leather, paid in full, without a grumble or the least bit of haggling. And then he invited Grimal to the Tour d’Argent for a bottle of white wine and negotiations concerning the purchase of Grenouille, his apprentice. It goes without saying that he did not reveal to him the why’s and wherefore’s of this purchase. He told some story about how he had a large order for scented leather and to fill it he needed unskilled help. He required a lad of few needs, who would do simple tasks, cutting leather and so forth. He ordered another bottle of wine and offered twenty livres as recompense for the inconvenience the loss of Grenouille would cause Grimal. Twenty livres was an enormous sum. Grimal immediately took him up on it. They walked to the tannery, where, strangely enough, Grenouille was waiting with his bundle already packed. Baldini paid the twenty livres and took him along at once, well aware that he had just made the best deal of his life.
Grimal, who for his part was convinced that he had just made the best deal of his life, returned to the Tour d’Argent, there drank two more bottles of wine, moved over to the Lion d’Or on the other bank around noon, and got so rip-roaring drunk there that when he decided to go back to the Tour d’Argent late that night, he got the rue Geoffroi L’Anier confused with the rue des Nonaindieres, and instead of coming out directly onto the Pont-Marie as he had intended, he was brought by ill fortune to the Quai des Ormes, where he splashed lengthwise and face first into the water like a soft mattress. He was dead in an instant. The river, however, needed considerable time to drag him out from the shallows, past the barges moored there, into the stronger main current, and not until the early morning hours did Grimal the tanner-or, better, his soaked carcass-float briskly downriver toward the west.
As he passed the Pont-au-Change, soundlessly, without bumping against the bridge piers, sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed. A bunk had been set up for him in a back corner of Baldini’s laboratory, and he was now about to take possession of it-while his former employer floated down the cold Seine, all four limbs extended. Grenouille rolled himself up into a little ball like a tick. As he fell off to sleep, he sank deeper and deeper into himself, leading the triumphant entry into his innermost fortress, where he dreamed of an odoriferous victory banquet, a gigantic orgy with clouds of incense and fogs of myrrh, held in his own honor.
Grimal, who for his part was convinced that he had just made the best deal of his life, returned to the Tour d’Argent, there drank two more bottles of wine, moved over to the Lion d’Or on the other bank around noon, and got so rip-roaring drunk there that when he decided to go back to the Tour d’Argent late that night, he got the rue Geoffroi L’Anier confused with the rue des Nonaindieres, and instead of coming out directly onto the Pont-Marie as he had intended, he was brought by ill fortune to the Quai des Ormes, where he splashed lengthwise and face first into the water like a soft mattress. He was dead in an instant. The river, however, needed considerable time to drag him out from the shallows, past the barges moored there, into the stronger main current, and not until the early morning hours did Grimal the tanner-or, better, his soaked carcass-float briskly downriver toward the west.
As he passed the Pont-au-Change, soundlessly, without bumping against the bridge piers, sixty feet directly overhead Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was going to bed. A bunk had been set up for him in a back corner of Baldini’s laboratory, and he was now about to take possession of it-while his former employer floated down the cold Seine, all four limbs extended. Grenouille rolled himself up into a little ball like a tick. As he fell off to sleep, he sank deeper and deeper into himself, leading the triumphant entry into his innermost fortress, where he dreamed of an odoriferous victory banquet, a gigantic orgy with clouds of incense and fogs of myrrh, held in his own honor.
Seventeen
WITH THE acquisition of Grenouille, the House of Giuseppe Baidini began its ascent to national, indeed European renown. The Persian chimes never stopped ringing, the herons never stopped spewing in the shop on the Pont-au-Change.
The very first evening, Grenouille had to prepare a large demijohn full of Nuit Napolitaine, of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. The fame of the scent spread like wildfire. Chenier’s eyes grew glassy from the moneys paid and his back ached from all the deep bows he had to make, for only persons of high, indeed highest, rank-or at least the servants of persons of high and highest rank— appeared. One day the door was flung back so hard it rattled; in stepped the footman of Count d’Argenson and shouted, as only footmen can shout, that he wanted five bottles of this new scent. Chenier was still shaking with awe fifteen minutes later, for Count d’Argenson was commissary and war minister to His Majesty and the most powerful man in Paris.
While Chenier was subjected to the onslaught of customers in the shop, Baidini had shut himself up in his laboratory with his new apprentice. He justified this state of affairs to Chenier with a fantastic theory that he called “division of labor and increased productivity.” For years, he explained, he had patiently watched while Pelissier and his ilk-despisers of the ancient craft, all-had enticed his customers away and made a shambles of his business. His forbearance was now at an end. He was accepting their challenge and striking back at these cheeky parvenus, and, what was more, with their own weapons. Every season, every month, if necessary every week, he would play trumps, a new perfume. And what perfumes they would be! He would draw fully upon his creative talents. And for that it was necessary that he— assisted only by an unskilled helper-would be solely and exclusively responsible for the production of scents, while Chenier would devote himself exclusively to their sale. By using such modern methods, they would open a new chapter in the history of perfumery, sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes, he had consciously and explicitly said “they,” because he intended to allow his old and trusted journeyman to share a given percentage of these incomparable riches.
Only a few days before, Chenier would have regarded such talk as a sign of his master’s incipient senility. “Ready for the Charite,” he would have thought. “It won’t be long now before he lays down the pestle for good.” But now he was not thinking at all. He didn’t get around to it, he simply had too much to do. He had so much to do that come evening he was so exhausted he could hardly empty out the cashbox and siphon off his cut. Not in his wildest dreams would he have doubted that things were not on the up and up, though Baldini emerged from his laboratory almost daily with some new scent.
And what scents they were! Not just perfumes of high, indeed highest, quality, but also cremes and powders, soaps, hair tonics, toilet waters, oils… Everything meant to have a fragrance now smelled new and different and more wonderful than ever before. And as if bewitched, the public pounced upon everything, absolutely everything-even the newfangled scented hair ribbons that Baldini created one day on a curious whim. And price was no object. Everything that Baldini produced was a success. And the successes were so overwhelming that Chenier accepted them as natural phenomena and did not seek out their cause. That perhaps the new apprentice, that awkward gnome, who was housed like a dog in the laboratory and whom one saw sometimes when the master stepped out, standing in the background wiping off glasses and cleaning mortars-that this cipher of a man might be implicated in the fabulous blossoming of their business, Chenier would not have believed had he been told it.
Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it. Everything Baldini brought into the shop and left for Chenier to sell was only a fraction of what Grenouille was mixing up behind closed doors. Baldini couldn’t smell fast enough to keep up with him. At times he was truly tormented by having to choose among the glories that Grenouille produced. This sorcerer’s apprentice could have provided recipes for all the perfumers of France without once repeating himself, without once producing something of inferior or even average quality. As a matter of fact, he could not have provided them with recipes, i.e., formulas, for at first Grenouille still composed his scents in the totally chaotic and unprofessional manner familiar to Baldini, mixing his ingredients impromptu and in apparent wild confusion. Unable to control the crazy business, but hoping at least to get some notion of it, Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales, measuring glasses, and the pipette when preparing his mixtures, even though he considered them unnecessary; further, he was to get used to regarding the alcohol not as another fragrance, but as a solvent to be added at the end; and, for God’s sake, he would simply have to go about things more slowly, at an easier and slower pace, as befitted a craftsman.
Grenouille did it. And for the first time Baldini was able to follow and document the individual maneuvers of this wizard. Paper and pen in hand, constantly urging a slower pace, he sat next to Grenouille and jotted down how many drams of this, how many level measures of that, how many drops of some other ingredient wandered into the mixing bottles. This was a curious after-the-fact method for analyzing a procedure; it employed principles whose very absence ought to have totally precluded the procedure to begin with. But by employing this method, Baldini finally managed to obtain such synthetic formulas. How it was that Grenouille could mix his perfumes without the formulas was still a puzzle, or better, a miracle, to Baldini, but at least he had captured this miracle in a formula, satisfying in part his thirst for rules and order and preventing the total collapse of his perfumer’s universe.
In due time he ferreted out the recipes for all the perfumes Grenouille had thus far invented, and finally he forbade him to create new scents unless he, Baldini, was present with pen and paper to observe the process with Argus eyes and to document it step by step. In his fastidious, prickly hand, he copied his notes, soon consisting of dozens of formulas, into two different little books-one he locked in his fireproof safe and the other he always carried with him, even sleeping with it at night. That reassured him. For now, should he wish, he could himself perform Gre-nouille’s miracles, which had on first encounter so profoundly shaken him. He believed that by collecting these written formulas, he could exorcise the terrible creative chaos erupting from his apprentice. Also the fact that he no longer merely stood there staring stupidly, but was able to participate in the creative process by observing and recording it, had a soothing effect on Baldini and strengthened his self-confidence. After a while he even came to believe that he made a not insignificant contribution to the success of these sublime scents. And when he had once entered them in his little books and entrusted them to his safe and his bosom, he no longer doubted that they were now his and his alone.
But Grenouille, too, profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him. He was not dependent on them himself. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later, for he never forgot an odor. But by using the obligatory measuring glasses and scales, he learned the language of perfumery, and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him. After a few weeks Grenouille had mastered not only the names of all the odors in Baldini’s laboratory, but he was also able to record the formulas for his perfumes on his own and, vice versa, to convert other people’s formulas and instructions into perfumes and other scented products. And not merely that! Once he had learned to express his fragrant ideas in drops and drams, he no longer even needed the intermediate step of experimentation. When Baldini assigned him a new scent, whether for a handkerchief cologne, a sachet, or a face paint, Grenouille no longer reached for flacons and powders, but instead simply sat himself down at the table and wrote the formula straight out. He had learned to extend the journey from his mental notion of a scent to the finished perfume by way of writing down the formula. For him it was a detour. In the world’s eyes-that is, in Baldini’s-it was progress. Grenouille’s miracles remained the same. But the recipes he now supplied along with therii removed the terror, and that was for the best. The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in the conventional language of perfumery-and the less his master feared and suspected him. While still regarding him as a person with exceptional olfactory gifts, Baldini no longer considered him a second Frangipani or, worse, some weird wizard-and that was fine with Grenouille. The regulations of the craft functioned as a welcome disguise. He virtually lulled Baldini to sleep with his exemplary procedures, weighing ingredients, swirling the mixing bottles, sprinkling the test handkerchief. He could shake it out almost as delicately, pass it beneath his nose almost as elegantly as his master. And from time to time, at well-spaced intervals, he would make mistakes that could not fail to capture Baldini’s notice: forgetting to filter, setting the scales wrong, fixing the percentage of ambergris tincture in the formula ridiculously high. And took his scoldings for the mistakes, correcting them then most conscientiously. Thus he managed to lull Baldini into the illusion that ultimately this was all perfectly normal. He was not out to cheat the old man after all. He truly wanted to learn from him. Not how to mix perfumes, not how to compose a scent correctly, not that of course! In that sphere, there was no one in the world who could have taught him anything, nor would the ingredients available in Baldini’s shop have even begun to suffice for his notions about how to realize a truly great perfume. The scents he could create at Baldini’s were playthings compared with those he carried within him and that he intended to create one day. But for that, he knew, two indispensable prerequisites must be met. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability, the status of a journeyman at the least, under the protection of which he could indulge his true passions and follow his true goals unimpeded. The second was the knowledge of the craft itself, the way in which scents were produced, isolated, concentrated, preserved, and thus first made available for higher ends. For Grenouille did indeed possess the best nose in the world, both analytical and visionary, but he did not yet have the ability to make those scents realities.
The very first evening, Grenouille had to prepare a large demijohn full of Nuit Napolitaine, of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. The fame of the scent spread like wildfire. Chenier’s eyes grew glassy from the moneys paid and his back ached from all the deep bows he had to make, for only persons of high, indeed highest, rank-or at least the servants of persons of high and highest rank— appeared. One day the door was flung back so hard it rattled; in stepped the footman of Count d’Argenson and shouted, as only footmen can shout, that he wanted five bottles of this new scent. Chenier was still shaking with awe fifteen minutes later, for Count d’Argenson was commissary and war minister to His Majesty and the most powerful man in Paris.
While Chenier was subjected to the onslaught of customers in the shop, Baidini had shut himself up in his laboratory with his new apprentice. He justified this state of affairs to Chenier with a fantastic theory that he called “division of labor and increased productivity.” For years, he explained, he had patiently watched while Pelissier and his ilk-despisers of the ancient craft, all-had enticed his customers away and made a shambles of his business. His forbearance was now at an end. He was accepting their challenge and striking back at these cheeky parvenus, and, what was more, with their own weapons. Every season, every month, if necessary every week, he would play trumps, a new perfume. And what perfumes they would be! He would draw fully upon his creative talents. And for that it was necessary that he— assisted only by an unskilled helper-would be solely and exclusively responsible for the production of scents, while Chenier would devote himself exclusively to their sale. By using such modern methods, they would open a new chapter in the history of perfumery, sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich-yes, he had consciously and explicitly said “they,” because he intended to allow his old and trusted journeyman to share a given percentage of these incomparable riches.
Only a few days before, Chenier would have regarded such talk as a sign of his master’s incipient senility. “Ready for the Charite,” he would have thought. “It won’t be long now before he lays down the pestle for good.” But now he was not thinking at all. He didn’t get around to it, he simply had too much to do. He had so much to do that come evening he was so exhausted he could hardly empty out the cashbox and siphon off his cut. Not in his wildest dreams would he have doubted that things were not on the up and up, though Baldini emerged from his laboratory almost daily with some new scent.
And what scents they were! Not just perfumes of high, indeed highest, quality, but also cremes and powders, soaps, hair tonics, toilet waters, oils… Everything meant to have a fragrance now smelled new and different and more wonderful than ever before. And as if bewitched, the public pounced upon everything, absolutely everything-even the newfangled scented hair ribbons that Baldini created one day on a curious whim. And price was no object. Everything that Baldini produced was a success. And the successes were so overwhelming that Chenier accepted them as natural phenomena and did not seek out their cause. That perhaps the new apprentice, that awkward gnome, who was housed like a dog in the laboratory and whom one saw sometimes when the master stepped out, standing in the background wiping off glasses and cleaning mortars-that this cipher of a man might be implicated in the fabulous blossoming of their business, Chenier would not have believed had he been told it.
Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it. Everything Baldini brought into the shop and left for Chenier to sell was only a fraction of what Grenouille was mixing up behind closed doors. Baldini couldn’t smell fast enough to keep up with him. At times he was truly tormented by having to choose among the glories that Grenouille produced. This sorcerer’s apprentice could have provided recipes for all the perfumers of France without once repeating himself, without once producing something of inferior or even average quality. As a matter of fact, he could not have provided them with recipes, i.e., formulas, for at first Grenouille still composed his scents in the totally chaotic and unprofessional manner familiar to Baldini, mixing his ingredients impromptu and in apparent wild confusion. Unable to control the crazy business, but hoping at least to get some notion of it, Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales, measuring glasses, and the pipette when preparing his mixtures, even though he considered them unnecessary; further, he was to get used to regarding the alcohol not as another fragrance, but as a solvent to be added at the end; and, for God’s sake, he would simply have to go about things more slowly, at an easier and slower pace, as befitted a craftsman.
Grenouille did it. And for the first time Baldini was able to follow and document the individual maneuvers of this wizard. Paper and pen in hand, constantly urging a slower pace, he sat next to Grenouille and jotted down how many drams of this, how many level measures of that, how many drops of some other ingredient wandered into the mixing bottles. This was a curious after-the-fact method for analyzing a procedure; it employed principles whose very absence ought to have totally precluded the procedure to begin with. But by employing this method, Baldini finally managed to obtain such synthetic formulas. How it was that Grenouille could mix his perfumes without the formulas was still a puzzle, or better, a miracle, to Baldini, but at least he had captured this miracle in a formula, satisfying in part his thirst for rules and order and preventing the total collapse of his perfumer’s universe.
In due time he ferreted out the recipes for all the perfumes Grenouille had thus far invented, and finally he forbade him to create new scents unless he, Baldini, was present with pen and paper to observe the process with Argus eyes and to document it step by step. In his fastidious, prickly hand, he copied his notes, soon consisting of dozens of formulas, into two different little books-one he locked in his fireproof safe and the other he always carried with him, even sleeping with it at night. That reassured him. For now, should he wish, he could himself perform Gre-nouille’s miracles, which had on first encounter so profoundly shaken him. He believed that by collecting these written formulas, he could exorcise the terrible creative chaos erupting from his apprentice. Also the fact that he no longer merely stood there staring stupidly, but was able to participate in the creative process by observing and recording it, had a soothing effect on Baldini and strengthened his self-confidence. After a while he even came to believe that he made a not insignificant contribution to the success of these sublime scents. And when he had once entered them in his little books and entrusted them to his safe and his bosom, he no longer doubted that they were now his and his alone.
But Grenouille, too, profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him. He was not dependent on them himself. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later, for he never forgot an odor. But by using the obligatory measuring glasses and scales, he learned the language of perfumery, and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him. After a few weeks Grenouille had mastered not only the names of all the odors in Baldini’s laboratory, but he was also able to record the formulas for his perfumes on his own and, vice versa, to convert other people’s formulas and instructions into perfumes and other scented products. And not merely that! Once he had learned to express his fragrant ideas in drops and drams, he no longer even needed the intermediate step of experimentation. When Baldini assigned him a new scent, whether for a handkerchief cologne, a sachet, or a face paint, Grenouille no longer reached for flacons and powders, but instead simply sat himself down at the table and wrote the formula straight out. He had learned to extend the journey from his mental notion of a scent to the finished perfume by way of writing down the formula. For him it was a detour. In the world’s eyes-that is, in Baldini’s-it was progress. Grenouille’s miracles remained the same. But the recipes he now supplied along with therii removed the terror, and that was for the best. The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in the conventional language of perfumery-and the less his master feared and suspected him. While still regarding him as a person with exceptional olfactory gifts, Baldini no longer considered him a second Frangipani or, worse, some weird wizard-and that was fine with Grenouille. The regulations of the craft functioned as a welcome disguise. He virtually lulled Baldini to sleep with his exemplary procedures, weighing ingredients, swirling the mixing bottles, sprinkling the test handkerchief. He could shake it out almost as delicately, pass it beneath his nose almost as elegantly as his master. And from time to time, at well-spaced intervals, he would make mistakes that could not fail to capture Baldini’s notice: forgetting to filter, setting the scales wrong, fixing the percentage of ambergris tincture in the formula ridiculously high. And took his scoldings for the mistakes, correcting them then most conscientiously. Thus he managed to lull Baldini into the illusion that ultimately this was all perfectly normal. He was not out to cheat the old man after all. He truly wanted to learn from him. Not how to mix perfumes, not how to compose a scent correctly, not that of course! In that sphere, there was no one in the world who could have taught him anything, nor would the ingredients available in Baldini’s shop have even begun to suffice for his notions about how to realize a truly great perfume. The scents he could create at Baldini’s were playthings compared with those he carried within him and that he intended to create one day. But for that, he knew, two indispensable prerequisites must be met. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability, the status of a journeyman at the least, under the protection of which he could indulge his true passions and follow his true goals unimpeded. The second was the knowledge of the craft itself, the way in which scents were produced, isolated, concentrated, preserved, and thus first made available for higher ends. For Grenouille did indeed possess the best nose in the world, both analytical and visionary, but he did not yet have the ability to make those scents realities.
Eighteen
AND SO HE gladly let himself be instructed in the arts of making soap from lard, sewing gloves of chamois, mixing powders from wheat flour and almond bran and pulverized violet roots. Rolled scented candles made of charcoal, saltpeter, and sandalwood chips. Pressed Oriental pastilles of myrrh, benzoin, and powdered amber. Kneaded frankincense, shellac, vetiver, and cinnamon into balls of incense. Sifted and spatulated poudre impermle out of crushed rose petals, lavender flowers, cascarilla bark. Stirred face paints, whites and vein blues, and molded greasy sticks of carmine for the lips. Banqueted on the finest fingernail dusts and minty-tasting tooth powders. Mixed liquids for curling periwigs and wart drops for corns, bleaches to remove freckles from the complexion and nightshade extract for the eyes, Spanish fly for the gentlemen and hygienic vinegars for the ladies… Grenouille learned to produce all such eauxand powders, toilet and beauty preparations, plus teas and herbal blends, liqueurs, marinades, and such-in short, he learned, with no particular interest but without complaint and with success, everything that Baldini knew to teach him from his great store of traditional lore.
He was an especially eager pupil, however, whenever Baldini instructed him in the production of tinctures, extracts, and essences. He was indefatigable when it came to crushing bitter almond seeds in the screw press or mashing musk pods or mincing dollops of gray, greasy ambergris with a chopping knife or grating violet roots and digesting the shavings in the finest alcohol. He learned how to use a separatory funnel that could draw off the purest oil of crushed lemon rinds from the milky dregs. He learned to dry herbs and flowers on grates placed in warm, shady spots and to preserve what was once rustling foliage in wax-sealed crocks and caskets. He learned the art of rinsing pomades and producing, filtering, concentrating, clarifying, and rectifying infusions.
He was an especially eager pupil, however, whenever Baldini instructed him in the production of tinctures, extracts, and essences. He was indefatigable when it came to crushing bitter almond seeds in the screw press or mashing musk pods or mincing dollops of gray, greasy ambergris with a chopping knife or grating violet roots and digesting the shavings in the finest alcohol. He learned how to use a separatory funnel that could draw off the purest oil of crushed lemon rinds from the milky dregs. He learned to dry herbs and flowers on grates placed in warm, shady spots and to preserve what was once rustling foliage in wax-sealed crocks and caskets. He learned the art of rinsing pomades and producing, filtering, concentrating, clarifying, and rectifying infusions.