two years

The two years Grenouille spends in Grasse before the murder of Laure Richis form the most concentrated period of technical apprenticeship and predatory preparation in his life. During this time he masters the advanced perfume-making techniques of maceration, hot enfleurage, and cold enfleurage, learns to extract and preserve scents from living and non-living matter, and systematically hunts and kills twenty-four young women to collect their individual auras. The period ends with his plan to harvest the scent of Laure Richis, the twenty-fifth and most precious victim, whose fragrance he first detected a year earlier.

Technical Apprenticeship in Grasse

Grenouille arrives in Grasse in the spring of 1764 and immediately finds work in the workshop of Madame Arnulfi, a widow whose business is managed with the help of the first journeyman Dominique Druot. The workshop is located in the rue de la Louve, and Grenouille is given a small cabin in an olive grove behind the Franciscan cloister. From the first day, he throws himself into the labor of perfume production. During jonquil season, he stirs blossoms into a cauldron of melted pork lard and beef tallow, watching with fascination as the flowers wither and their scent is absorbed by the oil. The process, called maceration, is repeated for days: the oil is heated, fed with new blossoms, sieved, and finally poured into stoneware crocks where it solidifies into fragrant pomade. Grenouille works without complaint, stirring from morning till night, and his nose soon surpasses Druot's in detecting when the oil is overheated, when the blossoms are exhausted, and when the broth is fully impregnated. He lets his observations be known in a submissive manner, and Druot gradually leaves more decisions to his discretion. By the time of the jasmine and tuberose season in late July and August, Grenouille has mastered cold enfleurage, the most refined method for capturing delicate scents. The blossoms are strewn on glass plates smeared with cool oil or wrapped in oil-soaked cloths, where they die slowly over three or four days, exhaling their scent into the adhering oil. The procedure is repeated ten or twenty times before the pomade is saturated. Grenouille surpasses Druot in this art as well, taking over the purchase and rendering of fats, the arrangement of oiled plates, and the timing of blossom rotation. He learns to produce essence absolue by washing the pomade with rectified spirits and distilling the alcohol over a minimum flame, yielding a tiny quantity of pale-hued liquid so concentrated that a single drop dissolved in a quart of alcohol can resurrect a whole field of flowers.

The Discovery of Laure Richis

In March of his first year in Grasse, about a year after his arrival, Grenouille sets out to check on the garden behind the wall at the other end of town. He had first detected the scent a year earlier, when he stood before a camouflaged palazzo at the beginning of the rue Droite and sensed a fragrance so exquisite that it brought tears to his eyes. Now, as he approaches the porte Neuve, his heart beats more loudly and the blood tingles in his veins. The scent has grown stronger without losing any of its delicacy. He walks along the wall to the spot behind which he knows the garden is located, and though the girl is not in the garden but in her room behind closed windows, her scent floats down to him like a steady, gentle breeze. He recognizes that the source is a red-haired girl with green eyes and freckles, still a child with only the rudimentary beginnings of breasts, but already emitting a scent more refined and richly nuanced than that of the girl he murdered in the rue des Marais. He knows that in a year or two this scent will ripen into a perfume that no one will be able to escape. He stands beside the city wall, filled with the happiness of a lover who has seen his darling from afar and knows he will bring her home within the year. He swears by his very life that he will possess this scent.

The Systematic Murders

During the following months, Grenouille devotes himself to perfecting his techniques for extracting scent from living subjects. He experiments with animals, killing a puppy with a quick blow to the back of the head and enfleuraging its body to capture its pure doggy scent. He then turns to human beings. Disguised by his faint perfume for inconspicuousness, he mingles with the evening guests at the Quatre Dauphins inn and sticks tiny scraps of cloth drenched in oil under benches and tables. He hangs impregnated swatches under the pews of the cathedral during Christmas masses. He pilfers sheets from the Hôpital de la Charité that had been wrapped around a journeyman sack-maker who died of consumption, and through lavage and distillation he resurrects the man's olfactory phantom. He pays a deaf-mute beggar woman to wear rags smeared with oils and fats against her naked skin, and determines the optimal ratio of lamb suet, pork lard, and beef tallow for absorbing human odour. By the end of the winter, he has mastered the techniques needed to rob a human of his or her scent. Over the course of the following year, he murders twenty-four young women in and around Grasse, each time using cold-oil enfleurage of their bodies, digestion of their hair and clothes, lavage, and distillation to produce tiny flacons of their congealed auras. The murders are carried out with such stealth that the victims are found naked and shorn, with no trace of the perpetrator. The town is thrown into panic, the bishop pronounces an anathema, and the murders cease in October and November, but Grenouille has already collected what he needs.

The Final Preparation

By the spring of 1766, Grenouille has twenty-four tiny flacons filled with drops of the congealed aura of twenty-four virgins. The twenty-fifth and most precious victim is Laure Richis, the daughter of the second consul Antoine Richis. Grenouille has studied the terrain down to the last detail. He knows that the mansion on the rue Droite is well protected, so he plans to sneak in under his cover of odourlessness and hide until everyone is asleep, then climb to her chamber and set to work with his oil-drenched cloths. He estimates it will take an additional night to complete the production of the pomade and to distil the concentrate. By the day after tomorrow, he will possess all the essences needed for the best perfume in the world. But on the day he plans to act, he discovers that Richis has fled with his daughter, ostensibly toward Grenoble. Grenouille's nose detects the true direction: south, toward La Napoule. He packs his linen, pomade pot, spatula, scissors, and a small, smooth club of olive wood into his knapsack and follows. He reaches La Napoule before the Richis party, feigns sleep in a stall, and when the inn is quiet, he climbs a ladder to Laure's window, kills her with a single blow, and enfleurages her body. By dawn, he has the scent. The two years of preparation have yielded their ultimate prize.