Distillation

Distillation is the foundational technique of perfumery in the novel, a process that uses fire, water, and a cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter. For Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, it represents both a gateway to his art and a profound limitation, as he discovers that not every substance yields its essence to this method, forcing him to seek other techniques in Grasse.

The Apparatus and the Process

The distillation apparatus that Giuseppe Baldini brings out for special occasions is a copper distilling vessel topped with a head for condensing liquids, which he proudly calls a "moor's head alembic." He had used it forty years before for distilling lavender on the open southern exposures of Liguria's slopes and on the heights of the Lubéron. The procedure requires speed: while Grenouille chops what is to be distilled, Baldini hectically bustles about heating a brick-lined hearth, placing on it a copper kettle with water covering the bottom. He throws in the minced plants, quickly closes off the double-walled moor's head, and connects two hoses to allow water to pass in and out for cooling—a clever mechanism he added later, since out in the field one had simply used bellowed air. Slowly the kettle comes to the boil, and the distillate starts to flow out of the moor's head's third tap into a Florentine flask, at first hesitantly, drop by drop, then a threadlike stream. The brew separates into two different liquids: below, the floral or herbal fluid; above, a thick floating layer of oil. If one carefully pours off the fluid through the lower spout of the Florentine flask, the pure oil is left behind—the essence, the heavily scented principle of the plant.

Grenouille's Fascination and Experiments

Grenouille is fascinated by the process. If ever anything in his life had kindled his enthusiasm—a hidden excitement burning with a cold flame—it is this procedure for using fire, water, steam, and a cunning apparatus to snatch the scented soul from matter. That scented soul, that ethereal oil, is the best thing about matter, the only reason for his interest in it; the rest—blossoms, leaves, rind, fruit, color, beauty, vitality—are mere husk and ballast to be disposed of. When the distillate grows watery and clear, they take the alembic from the fire, open it, and shake out the cooked muck, which looks flabby and pale like soggy straw, like the bleached bones of little birds, disgustingly cadaverous and almost totally robbed of its own odour. They throw it out of the window into the river. Grenouille stares uninterruptedly at the tube at the top of the alembic, imagining that he himself is such an alembic, simmering away inside, out of which there likewise gushes a distillate—a better, newer, unfamiliar distillate of those exquisite plants that he tends within him.

Discovery of Limitations

Having observed what a sure hand Grenouille has with the apparatus, Baldini gives him free rein with the alembic, and Grenouille takes full advantage of that freedom. While mixing perfumes and producing other scented products during the day, he occupies himself at night exclusively with the art of distillation. His plan is to create entirely new basic odours, and with them to produce at least some of the scents that he bears within him. He succeeds in producing oils from nettles and from cress seeds, toilet water from the fresh bark of elderberry and from yew sprigs. But there are also substances with which the procedure is a complete failure. He tries to distill the odour of glass—the clayey, cool odour of smooth glass, something a normal human being cannot perceive at all—working with window glass and bottle glass in large pieces, fragments, slivers, and dust, all without the least success. He distills brass, porcelain, leather, grain, gravel, plain dirt, blood, wood, fresh fish, his own hair, and finally plain water from the Seine, the distinctive odour of which seems worth preserving. He does not know that distillation is nothing more than a process for separating complex substances into volatile and less volatile components, and that it is only useful in perfumery because the volatile essential oils of certain plants can be extracted from the rest. For substances lacking these essential oils, the distilling process is wholly pointless. For months on end he sits at his alembic night after night, trying every way he can think to distill radically new scents that have never existed on earth in a concentrated form. Except for a few ridiculous plant oils, nothing comes of it. From the immeasurably deep and fecund well of his imagination, he has pumped not a single drop of a real and fragrant essence.

The Turn to Other Methods

When it finally becomes clear to him that he has failed, Grenouille halts his experiments and falls mortally ill. Lying in bed, near death, he asks Baldini if there are other ways to extract the scent from things besides pressing or distilling. Baldini tells him there are three: enfleurage à chaud, enfleurage à froid, and enfleurage à l'huile, which are superior to distillation in several ways and used for extraction of the finest scents—jasmine, rose, and orange blossom—in the south, above all in the town of Grasse. This knowledge sets Grenouille on the path to Grasse, where he will master the techniques that distillation could not provide, ultimately enabling him to capture the scent of living human beings.