Town Council of Grasse
The Town Council of Grasse was the supreme secular authority in the city during the crisis of the serial murders of young women, a committee of the thirty richest and most influential commoners and nobles. Its members were predominantly enlightened and anti-clerical, paying no attention to the bishop and preferring to turn cloisters into warehouses or factories. Yet when their own powers proved helpless against the unseen murderer, they were forced into an abject petition, begging the bishop to curse the monster who killed young girls and whom temporal powers could not capture, just as his predecessor had done against locusts in 1708. The bishop obliged, excommunicating the slayer of twenty-four virgins both in writing and from all the pulpits of the city, including a ban spoken from the pulpit of Notre-Dame-du-Puy. When the murders ceased from one day to the next, the council organized a torchlight procession in honour of the bishop and celebrated a mass of thanksgiving on 24 December. On 1 January 1766, the tighter security measures were relaxed and the night-time curfew for women was lifted, allowing normality to return with incredible speed.
Response to the Arrest and Trial
After the arrest of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the council ensured that the trial moved at an extraordinarily rapid pace. The only delay was a legal squabble with the magistrate of Draguignan and the parliament in Aix, both of whom wanted to take over the trial themselves. But the judges of Grasse would not let the matter be wrested from them: they were the ones who had arrested the culprit, the overwhelming majority of the murders had been committed in their jurisdiction, and if they handed the murderer over to another court, there was the threat of the pent-up anger of the citizenry. His blood would have to flow in Grasse. On 15 April 1766, a verdict was rendered: Grenouille was to be bound to a wooden cross, his joints broken by twelve blows with an iron rod, and left to hang until death, with the customary act of mercy—strangulation—expressly forbidden. The body was to be buried by night in an unmarked grave in the knacker's yard.
The Erasure of the Execution
After the mass orgy that erupted at the execution scene, when Grenouille's perfume caused ten thousand people to fall into a frenzy of love and lust, the council met in secret session that same afternoon. Without so much as mentioning the events themselves or even the name Grenouille, they unanimously resolved to immediately have the scaffold and grandstand on the parade grounds dismantled and to have the trampled fields restored to their former orderly state, appropriating 160 livres for the purpose. At the same time, the judges met at the provost court and agreed without debate to regard the case of G. as settled, to close the files, to place them in the archives without registry, and to open new proceedings against the thus-far unidentified murderer of twenty-five maidens in the region around Grasse. The police lieutenant was ordered to begin his investigation immediately. By the next day, he had arrested Dominique Druot, the master perfumer in whose cabin the clothes and hair of all the victims had been found. After fourteen hours of torture, Druot confessed everything and was executed by hanging at dawn, without any fuss, without scaffold or grandstand, with only the hangman, a magistrate, a doctor, and a priest in attendance. The town had forgotten the affair in any event, forgotten it so totally that travellers who passed through in the days that followed and casually inquired about Grasse's infamous murderer of young maidens found not a single sane person who could give them any information.
