Hôpital de la Charité

The Hôpital de la Charité in Grasse is a charitable hospital that, within the world of Patrick Süskind's Perfume, functions as a site of both medical charity and olfactory horror. It is where Grenouille, perfecting his art of stealing human scent, first successfully extracts the individual odour of a dead man, and where the collective fear of the town's serial murders turns the institution into a target of mob violence.

Location and Setting

The Hôpital de la Charité is a charitable hospital in Grasse, a town that is the center of the perfume industry in eighteenth-century France. The hospital is located off to one side of the parade grounds where Grenouille's execution is scheduled to take place. During the preparations for the execution, the executioner's assistants lease the rooms of the patients in the Hôpital de la Charité and resell them to curious spectators at a handsome profit, demonstrating how the event commercializes even the space of the sick and dying.

Grenouille's Olfactory Experiment

Grenouille uses the Hôpital de la Charité as a source for his experiments in capturing human scent. He manages to pilfer sheets that were supposed to be burned because the journeyman sack-maker who had lain wrapped in them for two months had just died of consumption. The cloth was so drenched in the exudations of the sack-maker that it had absorbed them like an enfleurage paste and could be directly subjected to lavage. The result is eerie: right under Grenouille's nose, the sack-maker rises olfactorily from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there as an olfactory personage. Grenouille perceives the phantom as a small man of about thirty, blond, with a bulbous nose, short limbs, flat, cheesy feet, swollen genitalia, choleric temperament and a stale mouth odour. For one whole night Grenouille lets the scent-spectre flutter about his cabin while he sniffs at it again and again, happy and deeply satisfied with the sense of power that he has won over the aura of another human being. He pours it away the next day.

Target of Mob Violence

During the period of the murders of young women in Grasse, the Hôpital de la Charité becomes a target of the town's collective fear and rage. Fires are set at the Hôpital de la Charité, as the mob, unable to find the real murderer, turns its anger on the institution. The hospital is also mentioned in the context of the town council's desperation: the council, composed of the richest and most influential commoners and nobles, condescends to write an abject petition begging the bishop to curse the monster who murders young girls, just as his predecessor had done in 1708 when terrible locusts had threatened the land. The hospital, as a place housing the vulnerable and the insane, becomes a scapegoat for the community's impotent rage.

Narrative Significance

The Hôpital de la Charité serves as a key location for Grenouille's development as a perfumer and a hunter of human scent. It is where he moves from experimenting on animals to successfully capturing the individual odour of a human being, a crucial step toward his ultimate goal of possessing the scent of Laure Richis. The hospital also represents the intersection of charity, sickness, and social disorder in Grasse, and its role as a target of mob violence underscores the town's descent into paranoia and irrationality during the murder spree.