54 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick SüskindPerfume: The Story of a Murderer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapter 43-Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapters 43-45 Summary
Immediately, Antoine springs out of bed and rouses the entire household into action. He tells the servants to wake Laure and have her prepare for a journey while he sits down to write a number of letters. By eight o’clock, Antoine, Laure, and their caravan of attendants have set out from the house. As they travel through town to leave the city, word spreads that they are headed to Grenoble; this is merely a rumor, however, as Antoine has no intention of going to Grenoble at all. Once they travel more than a mile from town, Antoine and Laure break off from the main group, which continues toward Grenoble on their own. Antoine, however, heads south, away from the traveling party, with only his daughter and her serving maid.
Antoine planned to arrive in Venice to quickly arrange her marriage to the Baron’s son so that their marriage—and his plans for conquest—could be carried out and consummated as soon as possible. Antoine is unwilling to wait, and even though he knows it will be difficult and expensive, he is unwilling to wait and give the killer an opportunity to strike because “the marriage of Laure Richis to the son of the baron de Bouyon would have meant a devastating defeat for the murderer” (217).
Meanwhile, Grenouille has been hard at work in the workshop contemplating his final upcoming victim, for he has plans to collect Laure and her scent that very evening. Taking a break around noon from his work, he steps out of the workshop and immediately realizes that something is wrong: He can no longer smell Laure. In a panic, he races into town and catches a faint hint of her scent. Even though he is told by Druot that the Richis caravan is headed for Grenoble, Grenouille knows that Laure’s scent is coming from the south, in the direction of Cabris. Grenouille returns to his cabin, packs a bag, and sets out immediately for Cabris.
Catching up to them later that afternoon, Grenouille passes them by in secret and arrives at the town he believes them to be headed towards, la Napoule, and takes up lodging at the inn. He is given a place to stay in the stables, and so he sets his things down and waits. Antoine and Laure, along with their maid, arrive two hours later and request lodging. Antoine discovers what he believes to be a traveling journeyman tanner asleep in the stalls, thinks nothing of it, and returns to the inn. That evening, he locks Laure into her room and then falls asleep, completely convinced that he outsmarted the killer and is about to achieve his dreams.
Once night falls, Grenouille begins to prepare his materials for collecting Laure’s scent, carefully preparing the oil-soaked cloth in which he will wrap Laure’s body. Grenouille carries a ladder to the window of Laure’s room and climbs up and into the inn. Swiftly and quietly, Grenouille kills Laure with a single blow to the head and proceeds to wrap her up in the oily cloth and shave the hair from her scalp. He then sits down to wait for six hours as the cloth does its work.
Part 3, Chapters 46-48 Summary
Once Grenouille has waited six hours, he unwraps Laure’s body from the cloth, scrapes the remnants of the oil from her body, wraps everything up into a bundle, and climbs back down the ladder and away from the inn. An hour later, Antoine awakens and goes to see if Laure has woken up, but upon unlocking her door and peering into her room, he sees her naked body lying on top of the bed. The vision of his nightmare flashes before his eyes.
The news that Laure Richis had been killed spreads like wildfire, and the news comes as a sickening jolt for everyone: “The dread was more paralyzing, however, than six months earlier, for people felt helpless at the sudden return of a danger that they had thought well behind them” (230). Everyone in the town of Grasse is in a panic, and each seeks to do what is best to ward off the evil and ensure their own safety. This time, however, the police investigation finally gets a break, for now, they have new clues. They suspect the anonymous journeyman tanner that Antoine saw at the inn, and the innkeeper even remembers some details about the man.
The final clue lies with the city watchman, who encountered a man on the day of the murder who asked about the whereabouts of Richis’ company as they left the city. He had seen the exact same man the previous day in front of the workshop of Madame Arnulfi. Grenouille is arrested immediately, and in searching his property they find “the shredded nightgown, the undershirt, and the red hair of Laure Richis” (234). Displaying the evidence in the church square along with evidence from the other 24 victims, Grenouille’s guilt is readily apparent, and the crowd is whipped into a frenzy, demanding to see the murderer.
Grenouille is forced to come to the prison window, but when he does, the crowd is conflicted as Grenouille does not at all look like a murderer. Nevertheless, the proceedings against Grenouille move along quickly thanks to the preponderance of evidence against him and his confession of the murders. No one can discover his motive regardless of how many times he is interrogated: "His repeated reply was that he had needed the girls and that was why he had slain them” (236). On April 15, 1766, he is sentenced to death by torture and hanging. Finding the priest who comes to hear his last confession completely useless, Grenouille spends his entire time in prison alone and even refuses to eat the last two days. Meanwhile, his execution is prepared, and the townspeople wait anxiously to see Grenouille put to death. They prepare for the day as if it were a holiday.
Part 3, Chapters 49-50 Summary
With the execution scheduled for five o’clock, the town begins to gather in the square and reserve their places for the spectacle. When the moment finally arrives, Grenouille is brought to the square in chains in a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage stops and Grenouille steps out, but as he does so, a miracle occurs. Every single person in the crowd looks at Grenouille and becomes absolutely convinced that he is perfectly innocent and that he could not possibly be the murderer. Grenouille is looked upon as “innocence personified” (244), and there is not a single person who is not “overcome by a powerful sense of good-will, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love” (245).
The officers in charge of his execution begin to weep, and the nobles gesticulate wildly in their desire to free and protect Grenouille. As the minutes drag on, Grenouille’s power over the crowd grows even greater. The whole town is overcome with emotion and, almost at once, the whole crowd erupts into debauchery. As Grenouille looks upon this scene of sexual depravity and unhinged passion, he smirks as he takes in his complete victory: “He was in very truth his own God” (248).
And yet, even in the midst of his victory, there is nothing about the experience that he can enjoy. Walking away from the scaffold drenched in “the perfume on which he had worked for two years, the perfume that he had thirsted to possess his whole life long” (249), his disgust for humanity rises to its zenith. At this moment, the only thing Grenouille can think about is how he wishes with all his might that he could exterminate every single human on earth. Then he sees Antoine Richis run toward him out of the corner of his eye and is convinced that Antoine is about to kill him. To his great surprise, however, Antoine reaches out and embraces Grenouille. Antoine begs for Grenouille’s forgiveness, and Grenouille is overcome with his hatred and loses consciousness, falling to the ground.
Hours later, Grenouille discovers he has been brought to the house of Antoine Richis and is lying in Laure’s old bed. Antoine comes to speak with him and begs Grenouille to be his adopted son. Grenouille pretends to assent to the request and then pretends to fall asleep again. When Antoine leaves, Grenouille waits until the whole house is asleep and then sneaks out the window. The church courtyard is still strewn with the sleeping and dazed bodies of the previously orgiastic crowd. Grenouille vanishes into the neighboring fields.
The next day, the people of the town awake to the realization of what they have done, and they continue on with life in a state of willfully agreed-upon amnesia, refusing to acknowledge what happened. Since they now need a new suspect for the murders, master Druot is accused since the evidence was found on his property. After an entire day of torture, he confesses and is swiftly and unceremoniously executed. Life returns almost immediately to normal.
Part 4, Chapter 51 Summary
Traveling by night, Grenouille makes his way back to Paris with the conviction that “[h]e no longer wanted to live at all. He wanted to go to Paris and die. That was what he wanted” (259). He still possesses the entire bottle of the perfume crafted from Laure’s scent: “He had used only a drop of it for his performance in Grasse. There was enough left to enslave the whole world” (259). However, Grenouille has no desire to do so, hating himself for being unable to smell himself; Grenouille realizes that he finds life meaningless.
Eventually, Grenouille arrives in Paris and makes his way to his birthplace: the cemetery grounds. Night falls, the gravediggers leave, and the place begins to teem with life as it is home to all the undesirables and the riffraff of the city. Walking into the middle of the crowd, Grenouille uncorks the perfume and pours the entire bottle over himself. Overwhelmed immediately, the crowd closes in on him: “They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him” (262). They quickly dismember Grenouille, ripping him into hundreds of pieces and cannibalizing him on the spot. Almost as quickly, they walk away, never to discuss the event again.
Part 3, Chapter 43-Part 4 Analysis
The final portion of the novel also serves as the narrative climax, with a final resolution coming swiftly and fiercely. Antoine expects that abandoning Grasse for the nearby town and inn is a brilliant feint in the final stretch of his chess match with the murderer. Unfortunately, Grenouille doesn’t play fair; he very quickly finds the trail of Laure’s scent, discerning the true direction of their flight out of town. Grenouille, by this time a master strategist himself, overtakes them on the way and arrives at the inn several hours before Antoine and Laure. In detecting Laure’s scent like a hunting dog, Grenouille fully embodies his role as hunter now, an act that was foreshadowed when he sniffed at the priest as a baby. Expecting Antoine to take the necessary precautions, Grenouille feigns sleep in order to lull Antoine into a false sense of security. With this last encounter, Antoine sees Grenouille as everyone else has always seen him: nothing special and readily ignored. The irony is that this encounter is Grenouille’s penultimate move in their game, preparing for the checkmate he’ll make that evening once the family falls asleep.
Once Grenouille achieves his goal of murdering Laure and capturing her scent, he makes his way back to town and is almost immediately apprehended, tried, and sentenced to death. The town quickly begins to prepare for the day of execution, an event that would have been a not uncommon occurrence in the 18th century, and is met with the appropriate festivities. Executions in centuries past were regarded almost as public holidays; while the entire town may not have turned out as they do here for Grenouille, it was nevertheless considered a public spectacle for a number of reasons. The first is the natural curiosity of crowds when it comes to blood and death. History has demonstrated time and again that human beings—not just supposedly evil figures like Grenouille—are drawn to the spectacle of death. This can be observed in historical realities such as the Roman Coliseum and public excitement over hangings. The second is the sense of justice that a town would have regarding the murder of over two dozen women. Justice is an intrinsically public affair, and so witnessing a death sentence being carried out would have been seen as a public duty, much like jury duty in the modern world: Something unpleasant carried out for the sake of the common good.
Once Grenouille arrives, however, everything changes: Grenouille drops the atom bomb of Laure’s perfume. The perfume is ironically both his salvation and his eventual destruction. Stepping out of the carriage that shepherded him to his execution, the crowd immediately changes its tune; they go from a state of frenzied bloodlust to a state of ecstatic and erotically charged adoration of this man who now appears to them “as an angel” (246). The people are now putty in his hand: “pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous fluid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them” (245). Grenouille’s visions in the cave were premonitions, and he is able to control everyone around him as if he were a god. This completes Grenouille’s alienation from humanity, but rather than revel in his powers, he is disgusted. While Grenouille ostensibly achieves everything he aspired to, he is not fulfilled. The novel indicates that ironically, Grenouille felt most fulfilled when he was a face in the crowd, though this is not a conclusion that he reaches himself.
The crowd’s fervent reaction assures Grenouille that his hatred of humanity is justified, their adoration rising in harmony with his increasing hatred of them:
He would have loved right now to have exterminated these people from the earth, every stupid, stinking, eroticized one of them[…] he wanted them to realize how much he hated them and for them[…]to return that hate and exterminate him just as they had originally intended. (249-50).
Disgusted by their actions and their smells, he is determined to leave the world altogether. In the final chapter, everything comes full circle. He travels to Paris, to the site of his own birth, and exits the world in the same place he entered it, completing the Bildungsroman. He uses the same perfume that liberated him to ensure his demise; while his act is not a literal self-immolation, it is nevertheless a death that he brings by his own hand, aware of the effect that his perfume will have on those with whom he has surrounded himself. In the end, he is wholly consumed, a fitting end for Grenouille who sought all his life to consume the souls of everything around him.
