1782

The year 1782 is a hinge point in two separate arcs of Perfume: the belated, ironic conclusion of Madame Gaillard's life and the technical education of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in the art of scent extraction. For Madame Gaillard, it is the year she finally executes the plan that has governed her entire adult existence—to retire from her foster-care business and purchase an annuity that will guarantee her a private, sheltered death. For Grenouille, it is the period during which, working under the journeyman Dominique Druot in the workshop of Madame Arnulfi in Grasse, he perfects the cold enfleurage technique that will allow him to capture the most delicate floral scents and, ultimately, the scent of a human being.

Madame Gaillard's Retirement and Downfall

In 1782, just short of her seventieth birthday, Madame Gaillard gives up her business, purchases her annuity as planned, and sits in her little house waiting for death. But death does not come. Instead, a revolution transforms all social, moral, and transcendental affairs. At first this revolution has no effect on her personal fate, but then—when she is almost eighty—the man who holds her annuity is forced to emigrate, stripped of his holdings, and his possessions are auctioned off to a trouser manufacturer. For a while it looks as if even this change will have no fatal effect, for the trouser manufacturer continues to pay her annuity punctually. But then the day comes when she no longer receives her money in hard coin but as little slips of printed paper, and that marks the beginning of her economic downfall. Within two years, the annuity is no longer worth enough to pay for her firewood. She is forced to sell her house at a ridiculously low price, receiving only these stupid slips of paper in return, and within another two years they are as good as worthless. By 1797, nearing ninety, she has lost her entire fortune, scraped together from almost a century of hard work, and is living in a tiny furnished room in the rue des Coquilles. Only then—ten, twenty years too late—does death arrive, in the form of a protracted cancer that robs her first of her appetite and then of her voice, so that she can raise not one word of protest as they cart her off to the Hôtel-Dieu. There they put her in a ward populated with hundreds of the mortally ill, the same ward in which her husband had died, lay her in a bed shared with total strangers, pressing body upon body with five other women, and for three long weeks let her die in public view. She is then sewn into a sack, tossed onto a tumbrel at four in the morning with fifty other corpses, driven to the newly founded cemetery of Clamart, a mile beyond the city gates, and laid in her final resting place, a mass grave beneath a thick layer of quicklime. This is in the year 1799. The narrator notes that thank God Madame had suspected nothing of this fate as she walked home that day in 1746, leaving Grenouille behind, or she might possibly have lost her faith in justice and with it the only meaning that she could make of life.

Grenouille's Technical Apprenticeship in Grasse

In the same period, Grenouille is working in Grasse, where he learns the techniques of maceration and cold enfleurage. During the jonquil season, he and Druot melt pork lard and beef tallow in a large cauldron, then pitch shovelfuls of fresh blossoms into the warm, oily embrace. The blossoms lose all color the moment the spatula pushes them down, and death comes so rapidly that they have no choice but to exhale their last fragrant sighs into the very medium that drowns them. Grenouille observes with indescribable fascination that the more blossoms he stirs under into the cauldron, the sweeter the scent of the oil—the oil itself has appropriated the scent of the blossoms. The process is repeated for several days, from morning till evening, until Druot decides the oil is finally saturated and can absorb no more scent. He then pours the viscous soup into stoneware crocks, where it solidifies to a wonderfully fragrant pomade. Madame Arnulfi assays the precious product, labels it, and records the exact quality and quantity of the yield. If she decides the market is glutted, she instructs Druot to subject the whole yield to a lavage and transform it into an essence absolue. The pomade is 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 operates. The mixture cools, the alcohol separates from the congealed oil, and is drained off into a bottle. After carefully filtering the perfumed alcohol through gauze, Druot fills a small alembic and distills it slowly over a minimum flame. What remains in the matrass is a tiny quantity of a pale-hued liquid: the finest oil of the blossom, its polished scent concentrated a hundred times over to a little puddle of essence absolue. The yield is frightfully small—the liquid from the matrass fills three little flacons and no more—but they are worth a fortune.

The Significance of 1782 in the Narrative

1782 thus serves as a temporal marker that underscores the novel's themes of time, decay, and the fragility of human plans. Madame Gaillard's meticulously calculated path to a private death is undone by historical forces she could not have anticipated, while Grenouille's technical mastery, acquired in the same years, equips him for his own catastrophic project. The year also highlights the contrast between the two characters: Madame Gaillard, who has no sense of smell and no human passions, is destroyed by the very economic system she trusted; Grenouille, who possesses an unparalleled olfactory genius, uses the techniques of the same system to pursue his monstrous ambition.