Love and Hate

Love and Hate is the central emotional polarity in Patrick Süskind's Perfume, defining Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's relationship to humanity. Born without a personal scent and incapable of inspiring or feeling love, Grenouille experiences hatred as his only authentic emotion. His entire life trajectory—from a tick-like survival strategy through the creation of a superhuman perfume that forces others to adore him—is driven by a profound, unreciprocated hatred for humankind. The novel's climax reveals that when Grenouille finally achieves the love he ostensibly craved, he finds it unbearable because he cannot love in return, and his death is a final, failed attempt to provoke the hatred he understands.

The Absence of Love from the Beginning

Grenouille's life begins without the possibility of love. The cry that followed his birth was not an instinctive call for sympathy and love, but a calculated decision against love and nevertheless for life. Under the circumstances of his birth on a rubbish heap, life was possible only without love, and had the child demanded both, he would have come to a grisly end. He could have chosen the path from birth to death without a detour by way of life, but he decided in favour of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice. This decision was made vegetatively, as a bean decides whether to germinate, or like a tick that huddles in its tree, blind, deaf and dumb, and simply sniffs for the blood of some passing animal. The young Grenouille was such a tick: he lived encapsulated in himself, giving the world nothing but his dung—no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent. Security, attention, tenderness, love—whatever all those things are called that children are said to require—were utterly dispensable to him.

Hatred as the Only Authentic Emotion

Throughout his life, Grenouille's only genuine feeling toward other people is hatred. When he stands on the parade grounds in Grasse, having just used his stolen perfume to transform a crowd of ten thousand into an adoring, orgiastic mob, he experiences the greatest triumph of his life—and is terrified. He is terrified because he cannot enjoy one second of it. His whole disgust for humankind rises up within him and completely sours his triumph, so that he feels not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—becomes at the moment of its achievement unbearable, because he does not love them himself; he hates them. And suddenly he knows that he has never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.

The Unbearable Weight of Unwanted Love

The hate Grenouille feels for people remains without an echo. The more he hates them at this moment, the more they worship him, for they perceive only his counterfeit aura, his fragrant disguise, his stolen perfume. He would love to exterminate these people from the earth, every stupid, stinking, eroticized one of them, just as he had once exterminated alien odours from the world of his raven-black soul. He wants them to realize how much he hates them and, realizing that it is the only emotion he has ever truly felt, to return that hate and exterminate him just as they had originally intended. For once in his life, he wants to be like other people and empty himself of what is inside him—what they do with their love and their stupid adoration, he would do with his hate. For once, just for once, he wants to be apprehended in his true being, for other human beings to respond with an answer to his only true emotion, hatred. But nothing comes of that. He is masked with the best perfume in the world, and beneath his mask there is no face, but only his total odourlessness.

The Final Failure: Love Instead of Hatred

Grenouille's last hope for a genuine encounter is shattered when Antoine Richis, the father of his final victim, runs toward him not as an avenging angel but as a shaken, pitiably sobbing man who throws his arms around him and begs forgiveness. Grenouille had spread his arms wide to receive the angel storming down upon him, already feeling the thrust of the dagger or sword tickling at his breast, the blade passing through his armour of scent right to the middle of his cold heart—finally, finally, something in his heart, something other than himself. He sensed his deliverance already at hand. But instead of a liberating thrust of the dagger, there is only Richis's cheek wet with tears glued to his, and quivering lips that whimper forgiveness. With that, everything within him goes white before his eyes, while the world outside goes raven-black. The trapped fog condenses to a raging liquid, inundating him, pressing its unbearable weight against the inner shell of his body. He sinks down and loses consciousness.

The Cannibalistic Embrace: Love as Devouring

In the novel's final scene, Grenouille goes to the Cimetière des Innocents and unstoppers his perfume bottle, sprinkling himself with its contents. The thieves, murderers, whores, and desperadoes gathered there are drawn to him with a frenzied, alluring force. They lunge at him, pounce on him, throw him to the ground. Each of them wants to touch him, to have a piece of him. They tear away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they pluck him, they drive their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attack him like hyenas. In very short order, the angel is divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatches a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, drops back to devour it. A half-hour later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has disappeared utterly from the earth. The cannibals are amazed that it had been so very easy for them and that, embarrassed as they are, they do not feel the tiniest twinge of conscience. On the contrary! Though the meal lies rather heavy on their stomachs, their hearts are definitely light. All of a sudden there are delightful, bright flutterings in their dark souls. And on their faces is a delicate, virginal glow of happiness. For the first time they have done something out of Love. This final act of devouring is the only form of love Grenouille can inspire—a love that consumes him entirely, leaving no trace, and that he himself cannot feel or return.