When the wet nurse refuses to keep Grenouille because he has no smell and therefore must be a 'child of the devil', Father Terrier takes him in. How would you relate the circumstances of his birth to the life he grows up to live?Ģ. He barely escapes death at his birth his mother would have let him die among the fish guts as she had her four other children. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in a food market that had been erected above the Cimetiere des Innocents, the 'most putrid spot in the whole kingdom'.

Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the 'ultimate perfume'-the scent of a beautiful young virgin. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood.

As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion-his sense of smell-leads to murder.

Patrick suskind novel perfume