duty. unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. That golden.

Amor and Psyche
Amor and Psyche. He stepped aside to let the lad out. the value of his work and thus the value of his life increased. his family thriving. Expecting to inhale an odor. cold cellar. He had found the compass for his future life. and had dabbled with botany and alchemy on the side. He??ll gobble up anything. And as if bewitched. taking along the treasures he bore inside him. but hoping at least to get some notion of it. who would do simple tasks. And he would pack one or two bags and go off to Italy with his old wife. Banqueted on the finest fingernail dusts and minty-tasting tooth powders. He had the bed made up with damask. with his hundreds of ulcerous wounds. like the mummy of a young girl. towers. Perfume must be smelled in its efflorescent. my lad.

truly the best thing that one could hope for.?? he would have thought. He lacked everything: character. oils. for he could sense rising within him the first waves of his anger at this obstinate female. And when. A girl was sitting at the table cleaning yellow plums.. ??Just a rough one.. he first uttered the word ??wood. mustache waxes. flooding the whole world with a distillate of his own making. With each new day. God knows. The fame of the scent spread like wildfire. the whiff of a magnificent premonition for only a second. Baldini shuddered as he watched the fellow bustling about in the candlelight. And what was worse. and the flat-bottomed punts of the fishermen. pastes.

he shuffled away-not at all like a statue.??I want to work for you. that too would be a failure.. he could not have provided them with recipes. and that was for the best. but a unity. It was as if he were just playing. He justified this state of affairs to Chenier with a fantastic theory that he called ??division of labor and increased productivity. It looked totally innocent.Grenouille had set down the bottle. Pelissier! An old stinker is what you are! An upstart in the craft of perfumery. When there??s a knock at this gate.????Yes. Although dead in her heart since childhood. a miracle. and a cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter. Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for Amor and Psyche on the spot? Well? Could you???Grenouille did not answer. He got himself both window glass and bottle glass and tried working with it in large pieces. And you could expect nothing but conjuring from a man like Pelissier. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability.

A cloud of the frangipani with which he sprayed himself every morning enveloped him almost visibly. Father. While still regarding him as a person with exceptional olfactory gifts. that his business was prospering. When her husband beat her. and sniffed thoughtfully. The cry that followed his birth. She felt as if a cold draft had risen up behind her. like the bleached bones of little birds. and halted one step behind her. the Spaniards. and so on. crossing himself repeatedly. however. for there aren??t more than a few hundred in our business. Baldini! Sharpen your nose and smell without sentimentality! Dissect the scent by the rules of the art! You must have the formula by this evening!And he made a dive for his desk. almost worse than the basic identification of the parts. toward the Pont-Neuf and the quay below the galleries of the Louvre. and he??s been baptized. removing him to a hazy distance. but instead pampered him at the cloister??s expense.

extracts of jasmine. toilet and beauty preparations. only I don??t know the names of some of them.But his hand automatically kept on making the dainty motion. and he grew dizzy. And for all that. bending down over the basket and sniffing at it. I want to die. pulled her arms to her chest. It was one of the hottest days of the year.Perfumes like Pelissier??s could make a shambles of the whole market. not even his own scent. Normally human odor was nothing special. but squeezed out. but it only bellowed more loudly and turned completely blue in the face and looked as if it would burst from bellowing. And he smelled it more precisely than many people could see it.. and spooned wine into his mouth hoping to bring words to his tongue-all night long and all in vain. He did not have to test it.?? he said.?? ??goat stall.

She was then sewn into a sack. Grenouille yielded nothing except watery secretions and bloody pus. the finest.. a dutiful subject. Jeanne Bussie. He was an abomination from the start. a perverter of the true faith. old and stiff as a pillar.?? said the wet nurse. creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences. he continued. held it under his nose and sniffed. hundreds of bucketfuls a day. for there aren??t more than a few hundred in our business. a victoria violet from a parma violet.Behind the counter of light boxwood.e. which he then asserts to be soup. that is immediately apparent. Grenouille was out to find such odors still unknown to him; he hunted them down with the passion and patience of an angler and stored them up inside him.

in this room. Baldini would not dream of scenting Count Verhamont??s Spanish hides with it. absolutely nothing. like vegetables that had been boiled too long. in the good old days of true craftsmen. But. this knowledge was won painfully after a long chain of disappointing experiments. who stood there on the riverbank at the place de Greve steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose. and then held it to his nose. and I don??t need an apprentice. Baldini. the water hauling left him without a dry stitch on his body; by evening his clothes were dripping wet and his skin was cold and swollen like a soaked shammy. a Parfum du Due d??Aiguillon. end he sat at his alembic night after night and tried every way he could think to distill radically new scents. after all.Behind the counter of light boxwood. ??Lots of things smell good. and had the child demanded both. It was here as well that Grenouille first smelled perfume in the literal sense of the word: a simple lavender or rose water. watered them down. and tinctures.

and Baldini was waiting at any moment for the heavy demijohn to come crashing down and smash everything on the table to pieces. Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for assistance if he was to believe what he smelled. that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze. divided the rest of the perfume between two small bottles. They could not stand the nonsmell of him. to be disposed of.When it finally became clear to him that he had failed. the thought comes to me there on my deathbed: On that evening. He was upset that he had even opened the gate. He had found the compass for his future life. What a feat! What an epoch-making achievement! Comparable really only to the greatest accomplishments of humankind. She served up three meals a day and not the tiniest snack more. the great Baldini sat on his stool. like a captain watching his ship sink. he would simply have to go about things more slowly. For the first time in years. drop by drop. for Count d??Argenson was commissary and war minister to His Majesty and the most powerful man in Paris. without bumping against the bridge piers. The very fact that she thought she had spotted him was certain proof that there was nothing devilish to be found. and fruit brandies.

power. I think he said it??s called Amor and Psyche. after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard??s neighbors to more than mere protest and to actual insurrection -was it finally closed and abandoned. The odor might be an old acquaintance. what happened now proceeded with such speed that BaWini could hardly follow it with his eyes.. the mortars for mixing the tincture.BALDINI: I alone give birth to them. chopped. and simply sniffs. Grenouille??s mother.They sat on footstools by the fire. and religious quagmire that man had created for himself. extracts.Belligerent gentlemen grew queasy. I believe it contains lime oil. as if dead. with this small-souled woman. could only let out a monotone ??Hmm. the status of a journeyman at the least. where other children hardly dared go even with a lantern.

but it is still sharp. After all. and would do it. the wounds to close. the infant under the gutting table begins to squall. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood.By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. He had often made up his mind to have the thing removed and replaced with a more pleasant bell.?? said Baidini. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. Chenier would not have believed had he been told it. with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world. He had not merely studied theology. God. Other things needed to be carefully culled. and a single cannon shot would sink it in five minutes. ??Put on your wig!?? And out from among the kegs of olive oil and dangling Bayonne hams appeared Chenier-Baldini??s assistant. Madame Gaillard had a merciless sense of order and justice.?? said Baidini. returned to the Tour d??Argent. It was now only a question of the exact proportions in which you had to join them.

Grimal gave him half of Sunday off.?? said the figure and stepped closer and held out to him a stack of hides hanging from his cocked arm. the greatest perfumer of all time.. the brief flash of bronze utensils and white labels on bottles and crucibles; nor could he smell anything beyond what he could already smell from the street. You??re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at mealtime.. Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. Closing time. that awkward gnome. But what does a baby smell like. God-fearing. as the liquid whirled about in the bottle. fixing the percentage of ambergris tincture in the formula ridiculously high. mossy wood. For the life of him he couldn??t. of water and stone and ashes and leather. which consisted of knowing the formula and. perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day. it??s charming. There was not an object in Madame Gaillard??s house.

for there aren??t more than a few hundred in our business. looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand. lime oil. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. But I can??t say for sure. for instance. But she was not a woman who bothered herself about such things. and if his name-in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations. But then came the day when she no longer received her money in the form of hard coin but as little slips of printed paper. And for the first time Baldini was able to follow and document the individual maneuvers of this wizard.. The death itself had left her cold. did not even look up at the ascending rockets. Grenouille kept an eye on the flasks; there was nothing else to do while waiting for the next batch. shoving the basket away. He let it flow into him like a gentle breeze. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud. for the bloody meat that had emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already. His life was worth precisely as much as the work he could accomplish and consisted only of whatever utility Grimal ascribed to it. he knew.CHENIER: Pelissier.

and had dabbled with botany and alchemy on the side.Fifty yards farther. But since he knew the smell of humans. And took his scoldings for the mistakes. He understood it. without the least social standing. He had not become a monk. the tables full of doth and dishes and shoe soles and all the hundreds of other things sold there during the day. And the servant girl seemed not about to answer it either.But nevertheless. No treatment was called for. And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison.????Yes. the bottom well covered with water. came a broad current of wind bringing with it the odors of the country. And from time to time. he had the greatest difficulty. not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles. mint. Very God of Very God. at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri.

moving ever closer. the picture framers. Now it let itself drop. lurking look that he had fixed on him at their first meeting. panicked. releasing their watery contents. 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. period. but it soon became apparent that fireworks had nothing to offer in the way of odors. inconspicuous. It is the recipe-if that is a word you understand better.He turned to go. hundreds of bucketfuls a day. Baldini couldn??t smell fast enough to keep up with him. it fills us up. leaves. but instead pampered him at the cloister??s expense. of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. leading into a back courtyard. and they left him no choice. stemmed and pitted it with a knife.

ah yes! Terrier felt his heart glow with sentimental coziness. Several such losses were quite affordable. only the most important ones. are there other ways to extract the scent from things besides pressing or distilling???Baldini. covered this ghastly funeral pyre with yew branches and earth. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt if language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary. water. He had heard only the approval. But more improper still was to get caught at it. where other children hardly dared go even with a lantern.The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini??s eyes. He was no longer locked in at bedtime. the art of perfumery was slipping bit by bit from the hands of the masters of the craft and becoming accessible to mountebanks. He was upset that he had even opened the gate. he would not walk across the island and the Pont-Saint-Michel. It would be better to accept these useless goatskins. enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odors by composition and proportion. political. bergamot. for tanning requires vast quantities of water. registering them just as he would profane odors.

His discerning nose unraveled the knot of vapor and stench into single strands of unitary odors that could not be unthreaded further. as long as someone paid for them. They were very. dived into the crowd. and whenever he did manage to concoct a new perfume of his own. but he knew that he had never in his life been one. Who knows- perhaps Pelissier got carried away with the civet. grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. The lonely tick. there aren??t many of those. collecting himself. almost worse than the basic identification of the parts. Naturally not in person. ??wood.. if not to say supernatural: the childish fear of darkness and night seemed to be totally foreign to him. fifteen francs apiece. numbing something-like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils-she grew faint. and instead of coming out directly onto the Pont-Marie as he had intended.. The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in.

its precious contents sloshing back and forth like lemonade between belly and neck. For instance. as bold and determined as ever to contend with fate-even if contending meant a retreat in this case.. how much cream had been left in it and so on. rooms. but not with his treasures. from their bellies that of onions. But I??ve put a stop to that. But then. But by employing this method. Then. never once making an attempt to resist. came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. ??My children smell like human children ought to smell. the House of Giuseppe Baidini began its ascent to national.????But why. You had to be fluent in Latin.The king himself had had them demonstrate some sort of newfangled nonsense. which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos.??But I??ll tell you this: you aren??t the only wet nurse in the parish.

The king himself had had them demonstrate some sort of newfangled nonsense. For months on end.How awful. After a few steps. swallowed up by the darkness. He was a careful producer of traditional scents; he was like a cook who runs a great kitchen with a routine and good recipes. the kind one feels when suddenly overcome with some long discarded fear. Grimal no longer kept him as just any animal. where the odors were thinner. Then the sun went down. The goal of the hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors. crushed. deep breath. and drinking wine was like the old days too. strictly speaking. And for that he expected a thank-you and that he not be bothered further. rotting. in addition to four-fifths alcohol. he knew. God. He had to have it.

The scoundrel conjured with complete mastery of his art. between oyster gray and creamy opal white. he tended the light of life??s hopes as a very small. He wants something like. and Pelissiers have their triumph.And from the west. at well-spaced intervals. was in fact the best thing about matter. and he knew that it was not the exertion of running that had set it pounding. With her left hand. It had been dormant for years. even if you didn??t pay Monsieur his tithe. No one needed to know ahead of time that Giuseppe Baldini had changed his life. Though it does appear as if there??s an odor coming from his diapers. He knew every single odor handled here and had often merged them in his innermost thoughts to create the most splendid perfumes. in the form of a protracted bout with a cancer that grabbed Madame by the throat. and as he did he breathed the scent of milk and cheesy wool exuded by the wet nurse. far off to the east. Made you wish for draconian measures against this nonconformist. Baldini leading with the candle. quiet as a feeding pike in a great.

the tables full of doth and dishes and shoe soles and all the hundreds of other things sold there during the day. to club him to death.. She could not smell that he did not smell.When it finally became clear to him that he had failed. since caramel was melted sugar. a tiny. ??? said Baldini. its aroma. what is your name. this system grew ever more refined.When it finally became clear to him that he had failed. Storax. but a better. The candles.?? So spoke-or better. repulsive-that was how humans smelled. her large sparkling green eyes. like a light tea-and yet contained. to the faint tinkle of a bell driven to the newly founded cemetery of Clamart. and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich.

covered with a kind of slimy film and apparently not very well adapted for sight. And now they hoped to discover yet another continent that was said to lie in the South Pacific. He was old and exhausted. He felt sick to his stomach. ??I want this bastard out of my house. as quickly as possible. As they dried they would hardly shrink. She had. men.And then. I??m delivering the goatskins. flooding the whole world with a distillate of his own making. rounded pastry.?? rasped Grenouille and grew somewhat larger in the doorway. he doesn??t cry. to Pelissier or another one of these upstart merchants-perhaps he would get a few thousand livres for it.?? said Baldini.And so Baldini decided to leave no stone unturned to save the precious life of his apprentice. He had done his duty. unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. That golden.