Perfume Study Guide & Notes

Perfume Plot Summary

Preview of Perfume Summary:

Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born into eighteenth-century France with a superhuman sense of smell, but with no personal odor of his own. He is orphaned at birth, and grows up without love to become a cold and calculating murderer. He is motivated in his crime by a desire to possess the scent of a young woman named Laure Richis, which he intends to steal using the extraction methods he has learned as a journeyman perfumer. From this girl's scent, he creates the most powerful perfume in the world, which has the effect of making anyone who smells it fall in love with the wearer. Grenouille uses the perfume to escape punishment for the murders he has committed, even gaining forgiveness from Laure Richis' father. He is not satisfied, however, for he still has no genuine scent of his own. In a bizarre suicidal ending to...
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