Death of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the monstrous genius of scent who murdered twenty-five virgins to create the ultimate perfume, meets his end not by execution but by being devoured by a Parisian mob that, under the spell of his own perfume, consumes him out of love. After escaping Grasse, where his execution had degenerated into a mass orgy of adoration, Grenouille traveled by night through Provence and the Auvergne, avoiding cities and highways, feeding on grasses, mushrooms, flowers, dead birds, and worms. He crossed the Rhone south of Orange in a stolen boat, followed the Ardèche into the Cévennes, and then the Allier northwards. In the Auvergne he drew close to the Plomb du Cantal, seeing it huge and silver grey in the moonlight and smelling the cool wind that came from it, but he felt no urge to visit his old cave. He no longer yearned for that life, which had proved unliveable, just as life among human beings had proved unliveable. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all. He wanted to go to Paris and die. From time to time he reached in his pocket and closed his hand around the little glass flacon of his perfume. The bottle was still almost full; he had used only a drop of it for his performance in Grasse. There was enough left to enslave the whole world. He could be feted in Paris by hundreds of thousands, have the King kiss his feet, write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new Messiah, be anointed in Notre-Dame as Supreme Emperor or even as God come to earth. He possessed the invincible power to command the love of mankind. There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself. Though his perfume might allow him to appear before the world as a god, if he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume. He crossed the Loire at Sully. The next day he had the odour of Paris in his nose. On 25 June 1766, at six in the morning, he entered the city via the rue Saint-Jacques. It turned out to be the hottest day of the year. The thousands of odours and stenches oozed out as if from thousands of festering boils. Not a breeze stirred. The vegetables in the market stalls shrivelled up. Meat and fish rotted. Tainted air hung in the narrow streets. Even the river seemed to have stagnated. It stank. It was a day like the one on which Grenouille was born. He walked across the Pont-Neuf to the right bank, and then down to Les Halles and the Cimetière des Innocents. He sat down in the arcades of the charnel house bordering the rue aux Fers. Before him lay the cemetery grounds like a cratered battlefield, burrowed and ditched and trenched with graves, sown with skulls and bones, not a tree, bush or blade of grass, a garbage dump of death. Not a soul was to be seen. The stench of corpses was so heavy that even the grave-diggers had retreated. Only after the sun had gone down did they come out again to scoop out holes for the dead by torchlight until late into the night. But after midnight, when the grave-diggers had left, the place came alive with all sorts of riff-raff: thieves, murderers, cut-throats, whores, deserters, young desperadoes. A small campfire was lit for cooking and in the hope of masking the stench. When Grenouille came out of the arcades and mixed in with these people, they at first took no notice of him. He was able to walk up to the fire unchallenged, as if he were one of them. The little man in the blue frock coat had suddenly simply been there, as if he had sprouted out of the ground, and he had had a little bottle in his hand that he unstoppered. That was the first thing that any of them could recall: that he had stood there and unstoppered a bottle. And then he had sprinkled himself all over with the contents of the bottle and all at once he had been bathed in beauty like blazing fire. For a moment they fell back in awe and pure amazement. But in the same instant they sensed their falling back was more like preparing for a running start, that their awe was turning to desire, their amazement to rapture. They felt themselves drawn to this angel of a man. A frenzied, alluring force came from him, a rip-tide no human could have resisted, all the less because no human would have wanted to resist it, for what that tide was pulling under and dragging away was the human will itself: straight to him. They formed a circle around him, twenty, thirty people, and their circle grew smaller and smaller. Soon the circle could not contain them all, they began to push, to shove, and to elbow, each of them trying to be closest to the centre. And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked him like hyenas. But the human body is tough and not easily dismembered, even horses have great difficulty accomplishing it. And so the flash of knives soon followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of axes and cleavers aimed at the joints, hacking and crushing the bones. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it. A half-hour later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly from the earth. When the cannibals found their way back together after disposing of their meal, no one said a word. Someone would belch a bit, or spit out a fragment of bone, or softly smack with his tongue, or kick a leftover shred of blue frock coat into the flames. They were all a little embarrassed and afraid to look at one another. They had all, whether man or woman, committed a murder or some other despicable crime at one time or another. But to eat a human being? They would never, so they thought, have been capable of anything that horrible. And they were amazed that it had been so very easy for them and that, embarrassed as they were, they did not feel the tiniest twinge of conscience. On the contrary! Though the meal lay rather heavy on their stomachs, their hearts were definitely light. All of a sudden there were delightful, bright flutterings in their dark souls. And on their faces was a delicate, virginal glow of happiness. Perhaps that was why they were shy about looking up and gazing into one another's eyes. When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.