Perfume (novel)

In order of appearance:

• Grenouille's mother – Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was her fifth baby. She had claimed her first four were stillbirths or "semi-stillbirths". In her mid-twenties, with most of her teeth left, "some hair on her head", and a touch of gout, syphilis, and consumption, she was still quite pretty.
• Jean-Baptiste Grenouille – The novel's protagonist, born 17 July 1738 with an innate prodigious sense of smell (and also for unexplained reasons no personal scent of his own). His awareness of scent eventually causes him to conceive of capturing human scents, specifically those able to inspire love, which he lacks in his life. When he does succeed in this goal, he discovers it gives him no pleasure, and causes him only to despise others for being so easily fooled. Unable to find happiness, he is killed by a crowd after he pours his final perfume over himself. Grenouille's motivation for killing is described in the novel as purely the result of his desire to possess those rare scents capable of inspiring love towards their possessor:

"Grenouille let it go at that. He refrained from overpowering some whole, live person ... that sort of thing would have ... resulted in no new knowledge. He knew he was master of the techniques needed to rob a human of his or her scent, and knew it was unnecessary to prove this fact anew. Indeed, human odour was of no importance to him whatsoever. He could imitate human odour quite well enough with surrogates. What he coveted was the odour of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. Those were his victims."[3]

• Jeanne Bussie – One of Grenouille's many wet-nurses. She is the first person to realise he does not have a scent and claims he is sucking all the life out of her.
• Father Terrier – A clergyman in charge of the church's charities and the distribution of its money to the poor and needy. He first thinks Grenouille is a cute baby, but once Grenouille begins to sniff Terrier, the priest becomes worried and sends the baby to a boarding house.
• Madame Gaillard – She does not have a sense of smell, due to being hit across the face with a poker during her younger years, so she does not know that Grenouille is scentless. In charge of a boarding house, her goal in life is to save enough money to have a proper death and funeral. Madame's poor sense of smell and ignorance about Grenouille's gifts, coupled with his assistance in finding her hidden money through his olfactory ability, cause Madame to believe he is psychic. Believing that psychic people bring bad luck and death, Madame sells Grenouille to the tanner Grimal. She loses all her money in old age, dies a miserable death in the Hôtel Dieu, and is not even buried individually after her death, but rather thrown into a mass grave.
• Children at the Boarding House – They are repulsed by Grenouille and even try, in vain, to suffocate him with rags and blankets while Grenouille is asleep.
• Grimal – A tanner who lives near the river in the rue de la Mortellerie. Grenouille works for him from age eight into his early youth until Baldini pays for him to be released. Grimal wastes this immense new income on an alcoholic binge; his drunkenness causes him to fall into a river and drown.
• The Plum Girl – Her natural scent is that of sea breeze, water lilies, and apricot blossoms; it is a rich, perfectly balanced, and magical scent. She has red hair and wears a gray, sleeveless dress. She is halving plums when Grenouille kills her as his first victim. Unable to retain her scent, her death motivates his quest to learn how human scent may be preserved.
• Giuseppe Baldini – An old traditional perfumer who sees his once-great reputation now fading away. He yearns for the old days when tastes in perfume did not change so quickly, and is angry at what he feels are upstarts in the now fast-moving perfume trade. He knows secretly that he never had a particular gift for creating and analyzing new scents; rather he had obtained the recipes which made his reputation from other sources. Lacking natural talent, he merely knows the art and business of perfumery and maintains a strict mystique to conceal the truth. His shop, located in the middle of the bridge Pont-au-Change, is filled with a mixture of scents so intoxicating that it scares away most potential customers. Baldini reluctantly permits Grenouille to demonstrate the copying of a competitor's perfume and is about to send Grenouille away when he realizes the copy is a faithful one; Grenouille then creates on the spot an exceptionally improved version of the original. Recognizing Grenouille's genius, Baldini buys him from Grimal as his apprentice and starts to rebuild his declining business. He becomes rich and famous once again from the new perfumes that Grenouille creates for him, though does not credit Grenouille for his contributions. He eventually gives Grenouille his journeyman papers. The very same night that Grenouille leaves Paris, Baldini's house and shop plunge into the river Seine when the bridge collapses, and the recipes for hundreds of Grenouille's perfumes are lost.
• Chénier – Baldini's assistant and apprentice for more than 30 years. He is somewhat younger than Baldini. He knows Baldini is talentless, but still boasts Baldini's skills in the hope that one day he will inherit Baldini's perfume shop.
• Pélissier – Baldini's chief rival, considered the most innovative perfumer in Paris despite not having any formal training. He is only mentioned and never appears in the novel.
• Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse – Liege lord of the town of Pierrefort and a member of parliament. He is an amateur scientist who develops indulgent and ridiculous theses (his "fluidal theory"), which he attempts to demonstrate on Grenouille — also feeding him, providing him with new clothes, and giving him the opportunity to create a perfume. The Marquis dies soon after Grenouille's "disappearance", while pursuing his fluidal theory by attempting to live alone on the Pic du Canigou, a secluded mountain.
• Madame Arnulfi – A lively, black-haired woman of about thirty years of age. She has been widowed for almost a year. She owns the perfume business of her dead husband and has a journeyman named Druot, who is also her paramour. She hires Grenouille as her second journeyman.
• Dominique Druot – Madame Arnulfi's journeyman and paramour. He is the size of a Hun and is of average intelligence. Grenouille works for him as second journeyman. Druot is later hanged for Grenouille's crimes.
• Antoine Richis – Second consul and the richest man in Grasse, and Laure's father.
• Laure Richis – A beautiful red-headed girl, daughter of Antoine Richis, and the second girl whose scent is perceived as demanding capture by Grenouille. She is the inspiration for his lengthy killing spree as well as his final victim.

The real-life story of Spanish serial killer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809–1863), also known as the "Tallow Man,” who killed several women and children, sold their clothes, and extracted their body fat to make soap, resembles Grenouille's methods in some ways.

The name of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille might be inspired by the French perfumer Paul Grenouille, who changed his name into Grenoville when he opened his luxury perfume house in 1879.

The style of the novel can be characterized by the way it blends fantasy and fiction with factual information.[4] That combination creates two distinguishable narrative lines[5] – the fantastic one, which is conveyed in Grenouille's supernatural sense of smell, his odorlessness, and fairy-tale tones in the story, as well as the realistic one, composed of the socio-historical circumstances of the plot and naturalistic descriptions of i.a. the environment, the perfume production and murders.[6] The novel’s realism is also visible in thorough descriptions of historical perfumery practices.[7] According to Rindisbacher, the work “gathered together and phrased in popular terms the state of the art of olfactory and perfumistic knowledge and spun it into the realm of fantasy and imagination.”[7]

The diction of the novel evokes vivid sensory images.[8] It links typically visual cognitive activities with the sense of smell, which is represented by the way Grenouille perceives the world.[9] He understands more through olfaction, rather than vision, and that is reflected in the language of the novel, as the verbs in the literature normally associated with visual perception relate, in Grenouille’s case, to the process of smelling.[10]

Another conspicuous stylistic feature of the work is an extensive use of intertextuality, which has been met with both positive and negative critical response.[11] Literary allusions identified by the critics include, references to works by Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann[12] and Goethe. In the literature, for instance, there were observed some resemblances to the story of Faust.[13] While Perfume received much praise for being original and imaginative,[14] its citational structure has been either received enthusiastically for speaking to the literary acumen of the reader,[15] or recognized as problematic, due to the overload of constant allusion and pastiche,[16] or being considered a “parody” of other works.[15]

• Süskind, Patrick. Perfume. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage International, 1986.