Mirror

The mirror in Montpellier is the first mirror Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has ever seen, and it confronts him with a shocking revelation: he looks utterly normal, like any other man, yet he remains completely odorless. This moment crystallizes his lifelong crisis of identity—he can imitate humanity through a crafted perfume, but he can never possess the innate human scent that would make him real to himself.

The First Glimpse of a Normal Self

After the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse has bathed, shaved, powdered, and dressed Grenouille in a silk shirt, blue velvet frock coat, and buckled shoes, he commands him to stand before a mirror. It is the first time Grenouille has ever seen his own reflection. He sees a gentleman in a handsome blue outfit, with a white shirt and silk stockings. Instinctively, he ducks, as he has always ducked before such fine gentlemen—but the fine gentleman in the mirror ducks too. When Grenouille stands up straight again, the fine gentleman does the same, and they stare straight into each other's eyes. What dumbfounds Grenouille most is that he looks so unbelievably normal: nothing special, nothing handsome, but nothing especially ugly either. He is a little short of stature, his posture a little awkward, his face a little expressionless—in short, he looks like a thousand other people. If he were now to go walking down the street, not one person would turn around to look at him.

The Odorless Double

Yet even as the mirror shows him a passable human form, Grenouille's nose tells him a different truth. He inhales the air rising from his own body and smells the bad perfume, the velvet, the freshly glued leather of his shoes, the silk cloth, the powder, the make-up, the faint scent of the soap from Potosi. But he does not smell himself. He knows that unless he smells of violets, he has as little odour as the gentleman in the mirror—or himself, standing there in front of it. This is the same absence that has haunted him since infancy: the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie complained that the baby Grenouille did not smell at all, and Father Terrier, sniffing the infant's head, could detect nothing but the choucroute he had eaten at lunch. Now, decades later, the mirror confirms what his nose has always known: he is a man without a scent, a being who can be seen but not smelled, who exists in the world but leaves no olfactory trace.

The Birth of a Mask

Grenouille blinks as he opens his eyes and sees how the gentleman in the mirror blinks back at him, a little smile playing about his carmine lips, as if signalling that he does not find him totally unattractive. And Grenouille himself finds that the gentleman in the mirror—this odourless figure dressed and made up like a man—is not all that bad either. It seems to him as if the figure, once its costume has been perfected, might have an effect on the world outside that he, Grenouille, would never have expected of himself. He nods to the figure and sees that in nodding back it flares its nostrils surreptitiously. This moment marks the beginning of his conscious deception: he will use the mirror's illusion of normalcy, combined with his crafted perfumes, to pass among humans as one of them. The mirror does not give him an identity; it gives him a mask.

The Mirror as a Threshold

The mirror in Montpellier stands at a pivotal threshold in Grenouille's life. Before this moment, he has been a creature of pure olfactory perception, never seeing himself as others see him. After this moment, he understands that he can manipulate appearances—that a haircut, a clean shirt, and a few drops of perfume can transform a monster into a man. Yet the mirror also reveals the limit of his power: no matter how convincingly he looks like a human being, he cannot smell himself, and that inner void will never be filled by any external disguise. The mirror thus becomes the emblem of his permanent split between the normal-looking exterior he can project and the odorless, unknowable interior he can never escape.