Rue Saint-Honoré

Rue Saint-Honoré is a major Parisian street that appears in Patrick Süskind's Perfume as a site of social contrast and olfactory memory. It is where the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie once smelled caramel being made in a grand mansion, and where Grenouille later expands his scent-hunting expeditions into the wealthy faubourg Saint-Honoré, encountering perfumes and garden odours that mark the boundary between the common stench of the city and the refined world of the aristocracy.

A Street of Social Contrast

Rue Saint-Honoré is one of the streets in eighteenth-century Paris that, like all others, stank of manure, urine, rotting wood, and spoiled food, as the narrator describes the pervasive stench of the era. Yet it also leads into the faubourg Saint-Honoré, a wealthy district where Grenouille, during his olfactory explorations of the city, first smells perfume in the literal sense: simple lavender or rose water used on gala occasions, and more complex, costly scents of musk, neroli, tuberose, jonquil, jasmine, and cinnamon that float behind carriages on the evening breeze. The street thus marks a threshold between the universal filth of Paris and the refined, artificial fragrances of the rich.

A Memory of Caramel

The wet nurse Jeanne Bussie, when pressed by Father Terrier to describe how a baby should smell, recalls that she once was in a grand mansion in the Rue Saint-Honoré and watched how caramel was made out of melted sugar and cream. The smell was so good that she never forgot it, and she uses it as the standard for the sweet, wonderful scent that babies ought to have at the back of their heads. This memory, drawn from a brief visit to a wealthy home on the street, becomes the benchmark by which she judges Grenouille's lack of odour as unnatural and sinister.

Grenouille's Hunting Ground

During his years as a tanner's apprentice, Grenouille systematically explores the olfactory geography of Paris. He expands his hunting grounds westwards to the faubourg Saint-Honoré, where through wrought-iron gates he smells coach leather and the powder in pages' wigs, and over high walls he catches garden odours of broom, roses, and freshly trimmed hedges. It is here that he first encounters the complex, costly perfumes that will later inform his own creations, registering them with curiosity but without particular admiration, judging them rather coarse and slapdashed compared to what he knows he could produce.