Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

by Patrick Süskind

He was delighted only by moonlight.

me

Gradually he managed to gain control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille’s soul was beginning.

He already could feel the thrust of the dagger or sword tickling so wonderfully at his breast, and the blade passing through his armor of scent and the suffocating fog, right to the middle of his cold heart—finally, finally, something in his heart, something other than himself!

For many of them the experience was so ghastly, so completely inexplicable and incompatible with their genuine moral precepts that they had literally erased it from their memories the moment it happened and as a result truly could not recall any of it later.

Meeeee