Carriage

The carriage that conveyed Jean-Baptiste Grenouille to the parade ground outside Grasse on 15 April 1766 was the instrument of the most astonishing reversal in a story already crowded with grotesque inversions. It was not the customary open donkey cart that brought the condemned man to the scaffold, but a closed coach drawn by a pair of horses, with a liveried driver, footmen, and a mounted guard. The police lieutenant had insisted on this unprecedented mode of transport, fearing that otherwise he could not guarantee the safety of the prisoner. The crowd, ten thousand strong, initially approved the spectacle as an appropriately imaginative cruelty: to lead a murderer from an upholstered equipage to the St Andrew's cross seemed a refinement of torment.

The Arrival and the Miracle

When the carriage stopped midway between the scaffold and the grandstand, the footmen jumped down, opened the door, and folded down the steps. The police lieutenant climbed out, followed by an officer of the guard, and finally Grenouille himself. He was wearing a blue frock coat, a white shirt, white silk stockings, and buckled black shoes. He was not bound. No one led him by the arm. He got out of the carriage as if he were a free man. And then a miracle occurred—or something very like a miracle. From one moment to the next, the ten thousand people felt themselves infused with the unshakeable belief that the man in the blue frock coat could not possibly be a murderer. He was innocence personified. The executioner, Monsieur Papon, who had been practising blows on carcasses at the slaughterhouse, found his arms too weak to lift the iron rod. The footman beside Grenouille sank to his knees, then to full prostration. The officer of the guard and the police lieutenant wept, removed their hats, cast themselves to the ground, and fell into each other's arms. The noble personages in the grandstand abandoned themselves to their emotions: women fainted, gentlemen sprang up and down, the bishop slumped forward and banged his forehead against his knees, his little green hat rolling away.

The Orgy and the Triumph

The scheduled execution degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses and threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. Men copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with freemason's wife. The air was heavy with the sweet odour of sweating lust. Grenouille stood there and smiled—an ugly, cynical smirk reflecting both his total triumph and his total contempt. He had performed a Promethean feat. He had created an aura more radiant than any human being had ever possessed before him. He was in very truth his own God. But in that moment of his greatest triumph, he was terrified. He could not enjoy one second of it. The hate he felt for people remained without an echo; the more he hated them, the more they worshipped him, perceiving only his counterfeit aura, his fragrant disguise, his stolen perfume.

The Aftermath and the Adoption

When Grenouille came to, he was lying in Laure Richis's bed. Antoine Richis was sitting on a footstool beside him, stroking his hand. The magistrate had overturned the verdict; all the witnesses had recanted. Richis, who had lost a daughter, wanted to gain Grenouille as a son. 'You are beautiful like her,' he said. 'Your hair, your mouth, your hand… Will you be my son?' Grenouille nodded. Richis kissed him on the mouth and left him to sleep. But Grenouille lay there until he could no longer hear a sound in the house or the town. At dawn he got up, dressed, and stole away. He crossed the garden and climbed over the wall. The miracle was over. He no longer had any scent. He walked straight across the fields towards the west, never once turning to look back. He wanted to go to Paris and die.

The Final Journey and Death

He travelled by night, steering clear of cities, feeding on whatever he found on the way. He crossed the Loire at Sully and on 25 June 1766 entered Paris via the rue Saint-Jacques. It was the hottest day of the year, a day like the one on which he was born. He walked to the Cimetière des Innocents and sat down in the arcades of the charnel house bordering the rue aux Fers. After midnight, when the grave-diggers had left, the place came alive with thieves, murderers, whores, and desperadoes. Grenouille walked up to their campfire and unstoppered his little bottle of perfume. He sprinkled himself all over with its contents. The people fell back in awe, then their awe turned to desire, their amazement to rapture. They lunged at him, pounced on him, tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin. Knives flashed, axes and cleavers hacked at the joints. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself and devoured it. A half-hour later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly from the earth. They were all a little embarrassed, but they did not feel the tiniest twinge of conscience. On the contrary, their hearts were light. For the first time they had done something out of Love.