Runel

Runel, the most prestigious perfumer and glover in Montpellier, maintained a long-standing trade relationship with the household of the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, supplying soaps, oils and scents. When Grenouille, conveyed to Runel's establishment in a sedan chair by the marquis's orders, demanded the unusual privilege of using the studio alone for an hour, Runel agreed and withdrew to a tavern with the marquis's major-domo, where he learned why his violet cologne was no longer considered a scent worth smelling.

Laboratory and Workshop

Runel's laboratory and shop, though less grandly equipped than Giuseppe Baldini's Paris perfume house had been in its day, contained a sufficient range of floral oils, colognes and spices for Grenouille's purposes. An average perfumer would have made no great progress with the ingredients on hand, but Grenouille recognized with his first inhaled sniff that they would be quite adequate. The workshop included a worktable, bottles, mortars, funnels and spoons, as well as a copper distilling vessel with a Moor's head alembic that Runel, like Baldini, used for distilling lavender and other plants. The process required a brick-lined hearth, a copper kettle, and a clever cooling mechanism involving hoses for water circulation, producing a distillate that separated into floral fluid and pure essential oil in a Florentine flask.

Grenouille's Use of the Laboratory

Locking himself in the laboratory for a good hour, Grenouille refused all instructions and did not even want to know where things were, claiming he knew his way around and would manage well enough. He gathered ingredients from Runel's stock, including cat-shit from behind the threshold of the door leading to the courtyard, a thumbnail-sized piece of old, decomposing cheese from under the worktable, and rancid fishy residue from a sardine tub. To these he added rotten egg, castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings, singed pork rind, and a relatively large amount of civet, mixing these ghastly components with alcohol, letting the mixture digest, and filtering it into a second bottle. The resulting bilge smelled putrid, like a sewer, but after layering fresh, oily scents—peppermint, lavender, turpentine, lime, eucalyptus—and disguising them with floral oils of geranium, rose, orange blossom and jasmine, followed by a second dilution with alcohol and a splash of vinegar, the disgusting base became undetectable. The perfume seemed to exhale the robust, vivacious scent of life. Grenouille filled two flacons with this human-scent perfume, then carefully washed all utensils with water and rubbed them down with bitter-almond oil to remove all traces of odour before composing a second, conventional perfume as a cover.

Significance

Runel's laboratory provided the setting for Grenouille's most crucial technical breakthrough: the creation of an artificial human odour that could deceive others into accepting him as a normal person. Without Runel's acquiescence and the resources of his workshop, Grenouille would have lacked the ingredients and equipment needed to produce the perfume that allowed him to walk among people for the first time without being shunned or ignored. The episode demonstrates how Grenouille's genius could exploit even modest facilities to achieve effects far beyond the capabilities of established perfumers like Runel, who remained unaware of the true nature of the work conducted in his own studio.