25 June 1766

On 25 June 1766, the hottest day of the year, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille entered Paris via the rue Saint-Jacques at six in the morning, carrying the ultimate perfume that could command the love of all mankind. This day, mirroring the one on which he was born, marked the end of his journey and the final, paradoxical act of his existence: his own annihilation by a crowd that, under the influence of his scent, devoured him out of love.

The Return to the City of Stench

The day was a furnace, the hottest of the year, and the thousands of odours and stenches of Paris oozed out as if from thousands of festering boils. Not a breeze stirred. Vegetables in the market stalls shrivelled, meat and fish rotted, and tainted air hung in the narrow streets. Even the river seemed to have stagnated. It was a day like the one on which Grenouille was born, a day of overwhelming, oppressive stench. He walked across the Pont-Neuf to the right bank, then down to Les Halles and the Cimetière des Innocents, the very spot where his mother had given birth to him on a fish stall. He sat down in the arcades of the charnel house bordering the rue aux Fers. Before him lay the cemetery grounds like a cratered battlefield, burrowed and ditched and trenched with graves, sown with skulls and bones, a garbage dump of death. The stench of corpses was so heavy that even the grave-diggers had retreated, only to return after sunset to scoop out holes for the dead by torchlight.

The Final Feast

After midnight, the place came alive with thieves, murderers, cut-throats, whores, deserters, and young desperadoes, who lit a small campfire to cook and to mask the stench. When Grenouille came out of the arcades and mixed in with these people, they at first took no notice of him. He walked up to the fire unchallenged, as if he were one of them. Then he unstoppered a little bottle and sprinkled himself all over with its contents. Instantly, he was bathed in beauty like blazing fire. The crowd fell back in awe, but their awe turned to desire, their amazement to rapture. They felt themselves drawn to this angel of a man by a frenzied, alluring force, a rip-tide no human could resist. They formed a circle around him, twenty or thirty people, and the circle grew smaller and smaller. Then the last inhibition collapsed within them. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, to have a piece of him. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked him like hyenas. Knives flashed, thrusting and slicing, and then axes and cleavers hacked and crushed the bones. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself and, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it.

The Aftermath: Love and Oblivion

A half-hour later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly from the earth. When the cannibals found their way back together after disposing of their meal, no one said a word. Someone belched, or spat out a fragment of bone, or softly smacked with his tongue, or kicked a leftover shred of blue frock coat into the flames. They were all a little embarrassed and afraid to look at one another. They had all committed a murder or some other despicable crime at one time or another, but to eat a human being? They would never, so they thought, have been capable of anything that horrible. And they were amazed that it had been so very easy for them and that, embarrassed as they were, they did not feel the tiniest twinge of conscience. On the contrary! Though the meal lay rather heavy on their stomachs, their hearts were definitely light. All of a sudden there were delightful, bright flutterings in their dark souls. And on their faces was a delicate, virginal glow of happiness. When they finally dared to look at one another, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.