Perfume. THE STORY OF A MURDERER

When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.

maybe what I felt that day is like what the people on the parade grounds felt when I flooded them with my perfume…? But then he cast the thought aside: no, it was something else. Because I knew that I desired the scent, not the girl. But those people believed that they desired me, and what they really desired remained a mystery to them.

was already in Burgundy: when I was standing there at the wall below the garden where the red-headed girl was playing

They loved him.

She is dead, he thought. Then, more terrifying still: someone else has got to her before me. Someone else has plucked my flower and taken its odour for himself!

Because he was in the position to put himself inside the mind of the would-be murderer of his daughter,

he had renounced things all his life. But never once had he possessed and lost.

True, he did not love another human being, certainly not the girl who lived in the house beyond the wall. He loved her scent — that alone, nothing else, and only inasmuch as it would one day be his alone. He would bring it home within the year, he swore it by his very life.

Grenouille, the solitary tick, the abomination, Grenouille the Monster, who had never felt love and would never be able to inspire it, stood there beside the city wall of Grasse on that day in March and loved and was profoundly happy in his love.

People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.