Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

by Patrick Süskind

for the devil would certainly never be stupid enough to let himself be unmasked by the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie.

And with her nose no less! With the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses! As if hell smelled of sulfur and paradise of incense and myrrh! The worst sort of superstition, straight out of the darkest days of paganism, when people still lived like beasts, possessing no keenness of the eye, incapable of distinguishing colors, but presuming to be able to smell blood, to scent the difference between friend and foe, to be smelled out by cannibal giants and werewolves and the Furies, all the while offering their ghastly gods stinking, smoking burnt sacrifices. How repulsive! “The fool sees with his nose” rather than his eyes, they say, and apparently the light of God-given reason would have to shine yet another thousand years before the last remnants of such primitive beliefs were banished.

The odor of humans is always a fleshly odor—that is, a sinful odor. How could an infant, which does not yet know sin even in its dreams, have an odor? How could it smell? Poohpeedooh—not a chance of it!

All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt if language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.

—he had to abandon his experiments because of the enormous cost of spewing bull semen by the hundreds of quarts across his fields.

God stank. God was a poor little stinker. He had been swindled, this God had, or was Himself a swindler, no different from Grenouille—only a considerably worse one!

He had an odor, he had money, he had self-confidence, and he had no time to lose.