Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (16 page)

Not far from the porte des Fénéants, in the rue de la Louve, Grenouille discovered a small perfumer’s workshop and asked for a job.

It turned out that the proprietor,
maître parfumeur
Honoré Arnulfi, had died the winter before and that his widow, a lively, black-haired woman of perhaps thirty, was managing the business alone, with the help of a journeyman.

After complaining at length about the bad times and her own precarious financial situation, Madame Arnulfi declared that she really could not afford a second journeyman, but on the other hand she needed one for all the upcoming work; that she could not possibly put up a second journeyman here in the house, but on the other hand she did have at her disposal a small cabin in an olive grove behind the Franciscan cloister—not ten minutes away—in which a young man of modest needs could sleep at a pinch; further, that as an honest mistress she certainly knew that she was responsible for the physical well-being of her journeymen, but that on the other hand she did not see herself in a position to provide two warm meals a day—in short (as Grenouille had of course smelled for some time already): Madame Arnulfi was a woman of solid prosperity and sound business sense. And since he was not concerned about money and declared himself satisfied with a salary of two francs a week and with the other niggardly provisions, they quickly came to an agreement. The first journeyman was called in, a giant of a man named Druot. Grenouille at once guessed that he regularly shared Madame’s bed and that she apparently did not make certain decisions without first consulting him. With legs spread wide and exuding a cloud of spermy odour, he planted himself before Grenouille, who looked ridiculously frail in the presence of this Hun, and inspected him, looked him straight in the eye—as if this technique would allow him to recognize any improper intentions or a possible rival—finally grinned patronizingly, and signalled his agreement with a nod.

That settled it. Grenouille got a handshake, a cold evening snack, a blanket and a key to the cabin—a windowless shack that smelled pleasantly of old sheep dung and hay, where he made himself at home as well as he could. The next day he began work for Madame Arnulfi.

It was jonquil season. Madame Arnulfi had the flowers grown on small parcels of land that she owned in the broad basin below the city, or she bought them from farmers, with whom she haggled fiercely over every ounce. The blossoms were delivered very early in the morning, emptied out in the workshop by the basketful into massive but light-weight and fragrant piles. Meanwhile, in a large cauldron Druot melted pork lard and beef tallow to make a creamy soup into which he pitched shovelfuls of fresh blossoms, while Grenouille constantly had to stir it all with a spatula as long as a broom. They lay on the surface for a moment, like eyes facing instant death, and lost all colour the moment the spatula pushed them down into the warm, oily embrace. And at almost the same moment they wilted and withered, and death apparently came so rapidly upon them that they had no choice but to exhale their last fragrant sighs into the very medium that drowned them; for—and Grenouille observed this with indescribable fascination—the more blossoms he stirred under into the cauldron, the sweeter the scent of the oil. And it was not that the dead blossoms continued to give off scent there in the oil—no, the oil itself had appropriated the scent of the blossoms.

Now and then the soup got too thick, and they had to pour it quickly through a sieve, freeing it of macerated cadavers to make room for fresh blossoms. Then they dumped and mixed and sieved some more, all day long without pause, for the procedure allowed no delays, until, as evening approached, all the piles of blossoms had passed through the cauldron of oil. Then—so that nothing might be wasted—the refuse was steeped in boiling water and wrung out to the last drop in a screw-press, yielding still more mildly fragrant oil. The majority of the scent, however, the soul of the sea of blossoms, had remained in the cauldron, trapped and preserved in an unsightly, slowly congealing greyish-white grease.

The following day, the maceration, as this procedure was called, continued—the cauldron was heated once again, the oil melted and fed with new blossoms. This went on for several days, from morning till evening. It was tiring work. Grenouille had arms of lead, calluses on his hands, and pains in his back as he staggered to his cabin in the evening. Although Druot was at least three times as strong as he, he did not once take a turn at stirring, but was quite content to pour in more feather-light blossoms, to tend the fire, and now and then, because of the heat, to go out for a drink. But Grenouille did not mutiny. He stirred the blossoms into the oil without complaint, from morning till night, and hardly noticed the exertion of stirring, for he was continually fascinated by the process taking place before his eyes and under his nose: the sudden withering of the blossoms and the absorption of their scent.

After a while, Druot would decide that the oil was finally saturated and could absorb no more scent. He would extinguish the fire, sieve the viscous soup one last time, and pour it into stoneware crocks, where almost immediately it solidified to a wonderfully fragrant pomade.

This was the moment for Madame Arnulfi, who came to assay the precious product, to label it, and to record in her books the exact quality and quantity of the yield. After she had personally capped the crocks, had sealed them and borne them to the cool depths of the cellar, she donned her black dress, took out her widow’s veil, and made the rounds of the city’s wholesalers and vendors of perfume. In touching phrases she described to these gentlemen her situation as a woman left all on her own, let them make their offers, compared the prices, sighed and finally sold—or did not sell. Perfumed pomades, when stored in a cool place, keep for a long time. And when the price leaves something to be desired, who knows, perhaps it will climb again come winter or next spring. Also you had to consider whether instead of selling to these hucksters you ought not to join with other small producers and together ship a load of pomade to Genoa or share in a convoy to the autumn fair in Beaucaire—risky enterprises, to be sure, but extremely profitable when successful. Madame Arnulfi carefully weighed these various possibilities against one another, and sometimes she would indeed sign a contract, selling a portion of her treasure, but hold another portion of it in reserve, and risk negotiating for a third part all on her own. But if during her inquiries she had got the impression that there was a glut on the pomade market and that in the foreseeable future there would be no scarcity to her advantage, she would hurry back home, her veil wafting behind her, and give Druot instructions to subject the whole yield to a lavage and transform it into an
essence absolue
.

And the pomade would be brought up again from the cellar, carefully warmed in tightly covered pots, diluted with rectified spirits, and thoroughly blended and washed with the help of a built-in stirring apparatus that Grenouille operated. Returned to the cellar, this mixture quickly cooled; the alcohol separated from the congealed oil of the pomade and could be drained off into a bottle. A kind of perfume had been produced, but one of enormous intensity, while the pomade that was left behind had lost most of its fragrance. Thus the fragrance of the blossoms had been transferred to yet another medium. But the operation was still not at an end. After carefully filtering the perfumed alcohol through gauze that retained the least little lump of oil, Druot filled a small alembic and distilled it slowly over a minimum flame. What remained in the matrass was a tiny quantity of a pale-hued liquid that Grenouille knew quite well, but had never smelled in such quality and purity either at Baldini’s or Runel’s: the finest oil of the blossom, its polished scent concentrated a hundred times over to a little puddle of
essence absolue
. This essence no longer had a sweet fragrance. Its smell was almost painfully intense, pungent and acrid. And yet one single drop, when dissolved in a quart of alcohol, sufficed to revitalize it and resurrect a whole field of flowers.

The yield was frightfully small. The liquid from the matrass filled three little flacons and no more. Nothing was left from the scent of hundreds of thousands of blossoms except those three flacons. But they were worth a fortune, even here in Grasse. And worth how much more once delivered to Paris or Lyon, to Grenoble, Genoa or Marseille! Madame Arnulfi’s glance was suffused with beauty when she looked at the little bottles, she caressed them with her eyes; and when she picked them up and stoppered them with snugly fitting glass stoppers, she held her breath to prevent even the least bit of the precious contents from being blown away. And to make sure that after stoppering not the tiniest atom would evaporate and escape, she sealed them with wax and encapsulated them in a fish bladder tightly tied around the neck of the bottle. Then she placed them in a crate stuffed with wadded cotton and put them under lock and key in the cellar.

In April they macerated broom and orange blossoms, in May a sea of roses, the scent from which submerged the city in a creamy, sweet, invisible fog for a whole month. Grenouille worked like a horse. Self-effacing and as acquiescent as a slave, he did every menial chore Druot assigned him. But all the while he stirred, spatulated, washed out tubs, cleaned the workshop or lugged firewood with apparent mindlessness, nothing of the essential business, nothing of the metamorphosis of scent, escaped his notice. Grenouille used his nose to observe and monitor more closely than Druot ever could have the migration of scent of the flower petals—through the oil and then via alcohol to the precious little flacons. Long before Druot noticed it, he would smell when the oil was overheated, smell when the blossoms were exhausted, when the broth was impregnated with scent. He could smell what was happening in the interior of the mixing pots and the precise moment when the distilling had to be stopped. And occasionally he let this be known—of course, quite unassumingly and without abandoning his submissive demeanour. It seemed to him, he said, that the oil might possibly be getting too hot; he almost thought that they could filter shortly; he somehow had the feeling that the alcohol in the alembic had evaporated now… And in time Druot, who was not fabulously intelligent, but not a complete idiot either, came to realize that his decisions turned out for the best when he did or ordered to be done whatever Grenouille ‘almost thought’ or ‘somehow had a feeling about’. And since Grenouille was never cocky or know-it-all when he said what he thought or felt, and because he never—particularly never in the presence of Madame Arnulfi!—cast Druot’s authority and superior position of first journeyman in doubt, not even ironically, Druot saw no reason not to follow Grenouille’s advice or, as time went on, not to leave more and more decisions entirely to his discretion.

It was increasingly the case that Grenouille did not just do the stirring, but also the feeding, the heating and the sieving, while Druot stepped round to the Quatre Dauphins for a glass of wine or went upstairs to discover how things were with Madame. He knew that he could depend on Grenouille. And although it meant twice the work, Grenouille enjoyed being alone, perfecting himself in these new arts and trying an occasional experiment. And with malicious delight, he discovered that the pomades he made were incomparably finer, that his
essence absolue
was several per cent purer than those that he produced together with Druot.

Jasmine season began at the end of July, August was for tuberoses. The perfume of these two flowers was both so exquisite and so fragile that not only did the blossoms have to be picked before sunrise, but they also demanded the most gentle and special handling. Warmth diminished their scent; suddenly to plunge them into hot, macerating oil would have completely destroyed it. The souls of these noblest of blossoms could not be simply ripped from them, they had to be methodically coaxed away. In a special impregnating room, the flowers were strewn on glass plates smeared with cool oil or wrapped in oil-soaked cloths; there they would die slowly in their sleep. It took three or four days for them to wither and exhale their scent into the adhering oil. Then they were carefully plucked off and new blossoms spread out. This procedure was repeated a good ten, twenty times, and it was September before the pomade had drunk its fill and the fragrant oil could be pressed from the cloths. The yield was considerably less than with maceration. But in purity and verisimilitude, the quality of the jasmine paste or the
huile antique de tubéreuse
won by such a cold enfleurage exceeded that of any other product of the perfumer’s art. Particularly with jasmine, it seemed as if the oiled surface were a mirror-image that radiated the sticky-sweet, erotic scent of the blossom with lifelike fidelity—
cum grano salis
, of course. For Grenouille’s nose obviously recognized the difference between the odour of the blossoms and their preserved scent: the specific odour of the oil—no matter how pure—lay like a gossamer veil over the fragrant tableau of the original, softening it, gently diluting its bravado—and, perhaps, only then making its beauty bearable for normal people… But in any case, cold enfleurage was the most refined and effective method to capture delicate scents. There was no better. And even if the method was not good enough completely to satisfy Grenouille’s nose, he knew quite well that it would suffice a thousand times over for duping a world of numbed noses. Just as with maceration, after only a brief time he had likewise surpassed his tutor Druot in the art of cold perfumery—and had made this clear to him in the approved discreet and grovelling fashion. Druot gladly left it to him to go to the slaughterhouse and buy the most suitable fats, to purify and render them, to filter them and adjust their proportions—a terribly difficult task that Druot himself was always skittish about performing, since an adulterated or rancid fat, or one that smelled too much of pig, sheep or cow, could ruin the most expensive pomade. He let Grenouille decide how to arrange the oiled plates in the impregnating room, when to rotate the blossoms, and whether the pomade was sufficiently impregnated. Druot soon let Grenouille make all the delicate decisions that he, just as Baldini before him, could only approximate with rules of thumb, but which Grenouille made by employing the wisdom of his nose—something Druot, of course, did not suspect.

‘He’s got a fine touch,’ said Druot. ‘He’s got a good feel for things.’ And sometimes he also thought: really and truly, he is more talented than me, a hundred times a better perfumer. And all the while he considered him to be a total nitwit, because Grenouille—or so he believed—did not cash in at all on his talent—whereas he, Druot, even with his more modest gifts, would soon become a master perfumer. And Grenouille encouraged him in this opinion, displaying doltish drudgery and not a hint of ambition, acting as if he comprehended nothing of his own genius and were merely executing the orders of the more experienced Druot, without whom he would be a cipher. After their fashion, they got along quite well.

Then came autumn and winter. Things were quieter in the workshop. The floral scents lay captive in their crocks and flacons in the cellar, and if Madame did not wish some pomade or other to be washed or for a sack of dried spices to be distilled, there was not all that much to do. There were still the olives, a couple of basketfuls every week. They pressed the virgin oil from them and put what was left through the oil-mill. And wine, some of which Grenouille distilled to rectified spirit.

Druot made himself more and more scarce. He did his duty in Madame’s bed, and when he did appear, stinking of sweat and semen, it was only to head off at once for the Quatre Dauphins. Nor did Madame come downstairs often. She was busy with her investments and with converting her wardrobe for the period that would follow her year of mourning. For days, Grenouille might often see no one except the maid who fixed his midday soup and his evening bread and olives. He hardly went out at all. He took part in corporate life—in the regular meetings and processions of the journeymen—only just often enough as to be conspicuous neither by his absence nor by his presence. He had no friends or close acquaintances, but took careful pains not to be considered arrogant or a misfit. He left it to the other journeymen to find his society dull and unprofitable. He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool—though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.