Laure Richis
Laure Richis is the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of Antoine Richis, the wealthiest merchant in Grasse, and the final victim of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's campaign to steal the scents of young virgins. Her murder, which occurs despite her father's elaborate efforts to protect her, provides the keystone for Grenouille's ultimate perfume and precipitates the novel's climactic scenes of justice, orgy, and transformation.
Identity and Background
Laure Richis is the only child of Antoine Richis, the second consul of Grasse and by far the wealthiest citizen anywhere around. He possesses latifundia not only in the area of Grasse, where he plants oranges, oil, wheat and hemp, but also near Vence and towards Antibes, where he leases out his farms. He owns houses in Aix and houses in the country, owns shares in ships that trade with India, has a permanent office in Genoa, and is the largest wholesaler for scents, spices, oils and leathers in France. Laure has auburn hair and green eyes, and a face so charming that visitors of all ages and both sexes stand stock-still at the sight of her, unable to pull their eyes away, practically licking that face with their eyes, the way tongues work at ice-cream. Even her father catches himself looking at her for indefinite periods of time, a quarter of an hour, a half-hour perhaps, forgetting the rest of the world, even his business. Of an evening, when he brings her to her bed or of a morning when he goes in to waken her and she still lies sleeping as if put to rest by God's own hand, he feels an awful cramping in his stomach and his throat seems too tight, and he curses himself for being this woman's father and not some stranger who could lie down next to her, on her, in her.
Grenouille's Discovery and Obsession
Grenouille first detects Laure's scent a year before he murders her, when he is wandering through Grasse and stops in front of a camouflaged palazzo at the beginning of the Rue Droite. From the street he discerns magnolia, hyacinth, daphne and rhododendron in the garden beyond the building, but also something else that gives off a fatally wonderful scent, a scent so exquisite that in all his life his nose has never before encountered one like it — or, indeed, only once before, the scent of the red-haired girl he murdered in the Rue des Marais in Paris in September 1753. He follows the scent along the town wall and finds that it comes from a girl who is still a child, with dazzlingly white skin, green eyes, freckles on her face, neck and breasts, and barely the rudimentary beginnings of breasts. Grenouille realizes that this child already has a scent so terrifyingly celestial that once it has unfolded its total glory, it will unleash a perfume such as the world has never smelled before. He decides that he must possess that scent, not in the clumsy fashion by which he had the scent of the girl in the Rue des Marais, but truly to possess it, to peel it from her like skin and make her scent his own. He gives himself two years to learn the techniques needed for the harvest.
The Father's Fear and Failed Rescue
During the year of the murders, Antoine Richis is one of the few people in the town immune to the fever of fear, but after the bishop's anathema seems to end the rampage, fear creeps into his heart like a foul poison. One day in March, he watches Laure walk out into the garden wearing a blue dress, her red hair falling down over it and blazing in the sunlight, and when she disappears behind a hedge for two heartbeats longer than expected, he is frightened to death. That same night he awakes from a terrifying dream and bursts into her room convinced that she is dead, murdered, violated and shorn, and finds her unharmed. He realizes that the murderer is a careful collector, that all the previous murders are adjuncts to the last, crowning murder, and that Laure is the keystone to the murderer's building. He decides to rescue her by a diversionary tactic: he stages a pompous departure for Grenoble with a caravan of twelve mules, but instead turns off with Laure and her maid towards Cabris, rides straight across the Tanneron mountains towards the south, and plans to ferry across to the well-fortified Monastery of Saint-Honorat on the Îles de Lérins. He also intends to marry Laure off within ten days to the son of the Baron de Bouyon, so that a married woman, deflowered and if possible already pregnant, would no longer fit into the murderer's exclusive gallery.
The Murder
Grenouille, detecting that Laure's scent is not on the road to Grenoble but heading south, follows her to the small village of La Napoule, where Richis has stopped for the night at an inn. Grenouille feigns sleep in a stall when Richis comes to inspect him, and Richis, perceiving him as a totally insignificant, almost touchingly harmless creature, leaves him undisturbed. Around the same time that Richis falls into deep, peaceful sleep for the first time in months, Grenouille prepares his impregnating cloth, brushing on fatty paste in thicker or thinner layers depending on what part of the body will end up lying on a particular patch, creating a scent diagram of the body to be treated. He climbs a ladder to Laure's window, slips into the room, and kills her with a single dull, grinding thud of his olive-wood club to the back of her head. He cuts open her nightgown, pulls it off, tosses the oiled linen over her naked body, rolls her up in it as a baker rolls strudel, tucking in the corners, enveloping her from toes up to brow. He cuts off her hair close to her scalp and packs it inside her nightgown. He then sits in the dark beside her for six hours, waiting, eating aniseed biscuits from her pocket, and thinking of his past with great satisfaction. At dawn he peels the cloth from her body, scrapes off the remaining streaks of pomade with his spatula, and wipes her down with her undershirt so thoroughly that even the oil in her own pores pearls from her skin, leaving her truly dead for him, withered away, pale and limp as a fallen petal. He does not cast a single glance at her body; she no longer exists for him as a body, but only as a disembodied scent.
Aftermath and Transformation
When Richis discovers Laure's naked, dead, shorn body in the morning sunlight, the sight is exactly like his nightmare. The news of her murder spreads through the region of Grasse as fast as if the message had been "The King is dead!" and triggers terror more paralysing than six months earlier, because if even the great Richis could not protect his child, there is no hope of escaping this murderer. Grenouille is arrested after a guard remembers seeing him limping, and the evidence — the shredded nightgown, the undershirt, the red hair, and the clothes and hair of the other twenty-four girls — is overwhelming. He is condemned to be broken on the wheel. But at the execution, Grenouille appears wearing the perfume made from the auras of twenty-five maidens, and the ten thousand people assembled are infused with the unshakeable belief that he cannot possibly be a murderer. They love him, and the scheduled execution degenerates into the largest orgy the world has seen since the second century before Christ. Richis, who had reserved a place in the front row to watch the murderer die, instead runs to Grenouille, throws his arms around him, and begs forgiveness, calling him "my son, my dear son." He takes Grenouille home, puts him in Laure's bed, and asks him to become his heir. Grenouille nods, and Richis kisses him on the mouth, saying "You have made me very, very happy." But Grenouille slips away at dawn, and the town, ashamed, arrests and executes Dominique Druot in his place, closing the case. Laure's scent, the keystone of Grenouille's perfume, has been absorbed into his ultimate creation, and her body has become a forgotten husk.
