Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

One of the central themes of the novel deals with the power of smell to evoke memories and emotions. Smell acts, in this way, like a time machine, even in cases where scent is not something consciously acknowledged. At a very young age, Grenouille’s sense of smell evokes his memories involuntarily. His earliest experiences with chopped wood, for example, trigger his memory into helping him form some of the first words he speaks: “whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, ‘wood, wood’” (26).

When Grenouille recreates Amor and Psyche, the perfume of Baldini’s competitor that perplexes Baldini, Baldini is astonished at the speed and ease with which he brings it into existence. Once he does, however, Grenouille boasts that he is capable of creating a perfume of exponentially greater quality and effect than Amor and Psyche, and when he presents his new perfume, Baldini is immediately transported through time and space to the days of his youth “as the most sublime memories were awakened within him” (89). With just a single smell, an explicit scene is conjured:

He saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss” (90).