Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (5 page)

There was a baker’s dozen of perfumers in Paris in those days. Six of them resided on the right bank, six on the left, and one exactly in the middle, that is, on the Pont au Change, which connected the right bank with the Île de la Cite. This bridge was so crammed with four-storey buildings that you could not glimpse the river when crossing it and instead imagined yourself on solid ground on a perfectly normal street—and a very elegant one at that. Indeed, the Pont au Change was considered one of the finest business addresses in the city. The most renowned shops were to be found here; here were the goldsmiths, the cabinet-makers, the best wigmakers and purse-makers, the manufacturers of the finest lingerie and stockings, the picture framers, the riding-boot merchants, the embroiderers of epaulettes, the moulders of gold buttons, and the bankers. And here as well stood the business and residence of the perfumer and glover Giuseppe Baldini. Above his display window was stretched a sumptuous green-lacquered baldachin, next to which hung Baldini’s coat of arms, all in gold: a golden flacon, from which grew a bouquet of golden flowers. And before the door lay a red carpet, also bearing the Baldini coat of arms embroidered in gold. When you opened the door, Persian chimes rang out, and two silver herons began spewing violet-scented toilet water from their beaks into a gold-plated vessel, which in turn was shaped like the flacon in the Baldini coat of arms.

Behind the counter of light boxwood, however, stood Baldini himself, old and stiff as a pillar, in a silver-powdered wig and a blue coat adorned with gold frogs. A cloud of the frangipani with which he sprayed himself every morning enveloped him almost visibly, removing him to a hazy distance. So immobile was he, he looked like part of his own inventory. Only if the chimes rang and the herons spewed—both of which occurred rather seldom—did he suddenly come to life, his body folding up into a small, scrambling figure that scurried out from behind the counter with numerous bows and scrapes, so quickly that the cloud of frangipani could hardly keep up with him, and bid his customer take a seat while he exhibited the most exquisite perfumes and cosmetics.

Baldini had thousands of them. His stock ranged from
essences absolues
—floral oils, tinctures, extracts, secretions, balms, resins and other drugs in dry, liquid or waxy form—through diverse pomades, pastes, powders, soaps, creams, sachets, bandolines, brilliantines, moustache waxes, wart removers and beauty spots, all the way to bath oils, lotions, smelling salts, toilet vinegars and countless genuine perfumes. But Baldini was not content with these products of classic beauty care. It was his ambition to assemble in his shop everything that had a scent or in some fashion contributed to the production of scent. And so in addition to incense pastilles, incense candles and incense cords, there were also sundry spices, from anise seeds to cinnamon bark, syrups, cordials and fruit brandies, wines from Cyprus, Malaga and Corinth, honeys, coffees, teas, candied and dried fruits, figs, bonbons, chocolates, chestnuts, and even pickled capers, cucumbers and onions, and marinated tuna. Plus perfumed sealing waxes, stationery, lover’s ink scented with attar of roses, writing kits of Spanish leather, pen-holders of white sandelwood, caskets and chests of cedar-wood, pot-pourris and bowls of flower petals, brass incense holders, crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber, scented gloves, handkerchiefs, sewing cushions filled with mace, and musk-sprinkled wallpaper that could fill a room with scent for more than a century.

Naturally there was not room for all these wares in the splendid but small shop that opened on to the street (or to the bridge), and so for lack of a cellar, storage rooms occupied not just the attic, but the whole second and third floors, as well as almost every room facing the river on the ground floor. The result was that an indescribable chaos of odours reigned in the House of Baldini. However exquisite the quality of individual items—for Baldini bought wares of only highest quality—the blend of odours was almost unbearable, as if each musician in a thousand-member orchestra were playing a different melody at fortissimo. Baldini and his assistants were themselves inured to this chaos, like ageing orchestra conductors (all of whom are hard of hearing, of course); and even his wife, who lived on the fourth floor, bitterly defending it against further encroachments by the storage area, hardly noticed the many odours herself any more. Not so the customer entering Baldini’s shop for the first time. The prevailing mishmash hit him like a punch in the face. Depending on his constitution, it might exalt or daze him, but in any case caused such a confusion of senses that he often no longer knew what he had come for. Errand boys forgot their orders. Belligerent gentlemen grew queasy. And many ladies took a spell, half-hysteric, half-claustrophobic, fainted away, and could be revived only with the most pungent smelling salts of clove oil, ammonia and camphor.

Under such conditions, it was really not at all astonishing that the Persian chimes at the door of Giuseppe Baldini’s shop rang and the silver herons spewed less and less frequently.

‘Chénier!’ Baldini cried from behind the counter where for hours he had stood rigid as a pillar, staring at the door. ‘Put on your wig!’ And out from among the kegs of olive oil and dangling Bayonne hams appeared Chénier—Baldini’s assistant, somewhat younger than the latter, but already an old man himself—and moved towards the elegant front of the shop. He pulled his wig from his coat pocket and shoved it on his head. ‘Are you going out, Monsieur Baldini?’

‘No,’ said Baldini, ‘I shall retire to my study for a few hours, and I do not wish to be disturbed under any circumstances.’

‘Ah, I see! You are creating a new perfume.’

BALDINI: Correct. With which to impregnate a Spanish hide for Count Verhamont. He wants something completely new. He has asked for something like… like… I think he said it was called ‘Amor and Psyche’, and comes he says from that… that bungler in the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, that… that…

CHÉNIER: Pélissier.

BALDINI: Yes. Indeed. That’s the bungler’s name. ‘Amor and Psyche’, by Pélissier.—Do you know it?

CHÉNIER: Yes, yes. I do indeed. You can smell it everywhere these days. Smell it on every street corner. But if you ask me—nothing special! It most certainly can’t be compared in any way with what you will create, Monsieur Baldini.

BALDINI: Naturally not.

CHÉNIER: It’s a terribly common scent, this ‘Amor and Psyche’.

BALDINI: Vulgar?

CHÉNIER: Totally vulgar, like everything from Pélissier. I believe it contains lime oil.

BALDINI: Really? What else?

CHÉNIER: Essence of orange blossom perhaps. And maybe tincture of rosemary. But I can’t say for sure.

BALDINI: It’s of no consequence at all to me in any case.

CHÉNIER: Naturally not.

BALDINI: I could not care less what that bungler Pélissier slops into his perfumes. I certainly would not take my inspiration from him, I assure you.

CHÉNIER: You’re absolutely right, monsieur.

BALDINI: As you know, I take my inspiration from no one. As you know, I create my own perfumes.

CHÉNIER: I do know, monsieur.

BALDINI: I alone give birth to them.

CHÉNIER: I know.

BALDINI: And I am thinking of creating something for Count Verhamont that will cause a veritable furore.

CHÉNIER: I am sure it will, Monsieur Baldini.

BALDINI: Take charge of the shop. I need peace and quiet. Don’t let anyone near me, Chénier.

And with that, he shuffled away—not at all like a statue, but as befitted his age, bent over, but so far that he looked almost as if he had been beaten—and slowly climbed the stairs to his study on the second floor.

Chénier took his place behind the counter, positioning himself exactly as his master had stood before, and stared fixedly at the door. He knew what would happen in the next few hours: absolutely nothing in the shop, and up in Baldini’s study, the usual catastrophe. Baldini would take off his blue coat drenched in frangipani, sit down at his desk and wait for inspiration. The inspiration would not come. He would then hurry over to the cupboard with its hundreds of vials and start mixing them haphazardly. The mixture would be a failure. He would curse, fling open the window and pour the stuff into the river. He would try something else, that too would be a failure, he would then rave and rant and throw a howling fit there in the stifling, odour-filled room. At about seven o’clock he would come back down, miserable, trembling and whining, and say: ‘Chénier, I’ve lost my nose, I cannot give birth to this perfume, I cannot deliver the Spanish hide to the count, all is lost, I am dead inside, I want to die, Chénier, please help me die!’ And Chénier would suggest that someone be sent to Pélissier’s for a bottle of ‘Amor and Psyche’, and Baldini would acquiesce, but only on condition that not a soul should learn of his shame. Chénier would swear himself to silence, and tonight they would perfume Count Verhamont’s leather with the other man’s product. That was how it would be, no doubt of it, and Chénier only wished that the whole circus were already over. Baldini was no longer a great perfumer. At one time, to be sure, in his youth, thirty, forty years ago, he had composed ‘Rose of the South’ and ‘Baldini’s Gallant Bouquet’, the two truly great perfumes to which he owed his fortune. But now he was old and exhausted and did not know current fashions and modern tastes, and whenever he did manage to concoct a new perfume of his own, it was some totally old-fashioned, unmarketable stuff that within a year they had to dilute ten to one and peddle as an additive for fountains. What a shame, Chénier thought as he checked the sit of his wig in the mirror—a shame about old Baldini; a shame about his beautiful shop, because he’s sure to ruin it; and a shame about me, because by the time he has ruined it, I’ll be too old to take it over…

Giuseppe Baldini had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit. The odour of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his ability to smell; he had carried it about with him for decades now and no longer noticed it at all. And although he had closed the doors to his study and asked for peace and quiet, he had not sat down at his desk to ponder and wait for inspiration, for he knew far better than Chénier that inspiration would not strike—after all, it never had before. He was old and exhausted, that much was true, and was no longer a great perfumer; but he knew that he had never in his life been one. He had inherited ‘Rose of the South’ from his father, and the formula for ‘Baldini’s Gallant Bouquet’ had been bought from a travelling Genoese spice salesman. The rest of his perfumes were old familiar blends. He had never invented anything. He was not an inventor. He was a careful producer of traditional scents; he was like a cook who runs a great kitchen with a routine and good recipes, but has never created a dish of his own. He staged this whole hocus-pocus with a study and experiments and inspiration and hush-hush secrecy only because that was part of the professional image of a perfumer and glover. A perfumer was fifty per cent alchemist who created miracles—that’s what people wanted. Fine! That his art was a craft like any other, only he knew, and was proud of the fact. He didn’t want to be an inventor. He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken. And he had no intention of inventing some new perfume for Count Verhamont. Nor was he about to let Chénier talk him into obtaining ‘Amor and Psyche’ from Pélissier this evening. He already had some. There it stood on his desk by the window, in a little glass flacon with a cut-glass stopper. He had bought it a couple of days before. Naturally not in person. He couldn’t go to Pélissier and buy perfume in person! But through a go-between, who had used yet another go-between… Caution was necessary. Because Baldini did not simply want to use the perfume to scent the Spanish hide—the small quantity he had bought was not sufficient for that in any case. He had something much nastier in mind: he wanted to copy it.

This was, moreover, not forbidden. It was merely highly improper. To create a clandestine imitation of a competitor’s perfume and sell it under one’s own name was terribly improper. But, more improper still, was to get caught at it, and that was why Chénier must know nothing about it, for Chénier was a gossip.

How awful that an honest man should feel compelled to travel such crooked paths! How awful that the most precious thing a man possesses, his own honour, should be sullied by such shabby dealings! But what was he to do? Count Verhamont was, after all, a customer he dared not lose. He had hardly a single customer left now. He would soon have to start chasing after customers as he had in his twenties at the start of his career, when he had wandered the streets with a boxful of wares dangling at his belly. God knew, he, Giuseppe Baldini—owner of the largest perfume establishment in Paris, with the best possible address—only managed to stay out of the red by making house calls, valise in hand. And that did not suit him at all, for he was well over sixty and hated waiting in cold antechambers and parading
eau des millefleurs
and four thieves’ vinegar before old marquises or foisting a migraine salve off on them. Besides which, there was such disgusting competition in those antechambers. There was that upstart Brouet from the rue Dauphine, who claimed to have the greatest line of pomades in Europe; or Calteau from the rue Mauconseil, who had managed to become purveyor to the household of the duchess d’Artois; or this totally unpredictable Antoine Pélissier from the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, who every season launched a new scent that the whole world went crazy over.

Perfumes like Pélissier’s could make a shambles of the whole market. If the rage one year was Hungary water and Baldini accordingly stocked up on lavender, bergamot and rosemary to cover the demand—here came Pélissier with his ‘Air de Musc’, an ultra-heavy musk scent. Suddenly everyone had to reek like an animal, and Baldini had to rework his rosemary into hair oil and sew the lavender into sachets. If, however, he then bought adequate supplies of musk, civet and castor for the next year, Pélissier would take a notion to create a perfume called ‘Forest Blossom’, which would be an immediate success. And when, after long nights of experiment or costly bribes, Baldini had finally found out the ingredients in ‘Forest Blossom’—Pélissier would trump him again with ‘Turkish Nights’ or ‘Lisbon Spice’ or ‘Bouquet de la Cour’ or some such damn thing. The man was indeed a danger to the whole trade with his reckless creativity. It made you wish for a return to the old rigid guild laws. Made you wish for draconian measures against this nonconformist, against this inflationist of scent. His licence ought to be revoked and a juicy injunction issued against further exercise of his profession… and, just on principle, the fellow ought to be taught a lesson! Because this Pélissier wasn’t even a trained perfumer and glover. His father had been nothing but a vinegar maker, and Pélissier was a vinegar maker too, nothing else. But as vinegar maker he was entitled to handle spirits, and only because of that had the skunk been able to crash the gates and wreak havoc in the preserve of the true perfumers. What did people need with a new perfume every season? Was that necessary? The public had been very content before with violet cologne and simple floral bouquets that you changed a smidgen every ten years or so. For thousands of years people had made do with incense and myrrh, a few balms, oils and dried aromatic herbs. And even once they had learned to use retorts and alembics for distilling herbs, flowers and woods and stealing the aromatic base of their vapours in the form of volatile oils, to crush seeds and pits and fruit rinds in oak presses, and to extract the scent from petals with carefully filtered oils—even then, the number of perfumes had been modest. In those days a figure like Pélissier would have been an impossibility, for back then just for the production of a simple pomade you needed abilities of which this vinegar mixer could not even dream. You had to be able not merely to distil, but also to act as maker of salves, apothecary, alchemist and craftsman, merchant, humanist and gardener all in one. You had to be able to distinguish sheep suet from calves’ suet, a victoria violet from a Parma violet. You had to be fluent in Latin. You had to know when heliotrope is harvested and when pelargonium blooms, and that the jasmine blossom loses its scent at sunrise. Obviously Pélissier had not the vaguest notion of such matters. He had probably never left Paris, never in all his life seen jasmine in bloom. Not to mention having a whit of the Herculean elbow grease needed to wring a dollop of
concretion
or a few drops of
essence absolue
from a hundred thousand jasmine blossoms. Probably he knew such things—knew jasmine—only as a bottle of dark brown liquid concentrate that stood in his locked cabinet alongside the many other bottles from which he mixed his fashionable perfumes. No, in the good old days of true craftsmen, a man like this coxcomb Pélissier would never have got his foot in the door. He lacked everything: character, education, serenity and a sense for the hierarchy within a guild. He owed his few successes at perfumery solely to the discovery made some two hundred years before by that genius Mauritius Frangipani—an Italian, let it be noted!—that odours are soluble in rectified spirit. By mixing his aromatic powder with alcohol and so transferring its odour to a volatile liquid, Frangipani had liberated scent from matter, had etherealized scent, had discovered scent as pure scent; in short, he had created perfume. What a feat! What an epoch-making achievement! Comparable really only to the greatest accomplishments of humankind, like the invention of writing by the Assyrians, Euclidean geometry, the ideas of Plato or the metamorphosis of grapes into wine by the Greeks. A truly Promethean act!

And yet, just as all great accomplishments of the spirit cast both shadow and light, offering humankind vexation and misery along with their benefits, so, too, Frangipani’s marvellous invention had its unfortunate results. For now that people knew how to bind the essence of flowers and herbs, woods, resins and animal secretions within tinctures and fill them into bottles, the art of perfumery was slipping bit by bit from the hands of the masters of the craft and becoming accessible to mountebanks, at least a mountebank with a passably discerning nose, like this skunk Pélissier. Without ever bothering to learn how the marvellous contents of these bottles had come to be, they could simply follow their olfactory whims and concoct whatever popped into their heads or struck the public’s momentary fancy.

So much was certain: at the age of thirty-five, this bastard Pélissier already possessed a larger fortune than he, Baldini, had finally accumulated after three generations of constant hard work. And Pélissier’s grew daily, while his, Baldini’s, daily shrank. That sort of thing would not have been even remotely possible before! That a reputable craftsman and established
commerçant
should have to struggle to exist—that had begun to happen only in the last few decades! And only since this hectic mania for novelty had broken out in every quarter, this desperate desire for action, this craze of experimentation, this
rodomontado
in commerce, in trade and in the sciences!

Or this insanity about speed. What was the need for all these new roads being dug up everywhere, and these new bridges? What purpose did they serve? What was the advantage of being in Lyon within a week? Who set any store by that? Whom did it profit? Or crossing the Atlantic, racing to America in a month—as if people hadn’t got along without that continent for thousands of years. What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes? People even travelled to Lapland, up there in the North, with its eternal ice and savages who gorged themselves on raw fish. And now they hoped to discover yet another continent that was said to lie in the South Pacific, wherever that might be. And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the same, the Spaniards, the damned English, the impertinent Dutch, whom you then had to go out and fight, which you couldn’t in the least afford. One of those battleships cost a good 300,000 livres, and a single cannon shot would sink it in five minutes, for good and all, paid for with our taxes. The minister of finance had recently demanded one-tenth of all income, and that was simply ruinous, even if you didn’t pay monsieur his tithe. The very attitude was perverse.

Man’s misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs. Pascal said that. And Pascal was a great man, a Frangipani of the intellect, a real craftsman, so to speak, and no one wants one of those any more. People read incendiary books now by Huguenots or Englishmen. Or they write tracts or so-called scientific masterpieces that put anything and everything in question. Nothing is supposed to be right any more, suddenly everything ought to be different. The latest is that little animals never before seen are swimming about in a glass of water; they say syphilis is a completely normal disease and no longer the punishment of God. God didn’t make the world in seven days, it’s said, but over millions of years, if it was He at all. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrongly; and the earth is no longer round like it was, but flat on the top and bottom like a melon—as if it made a damn bit of difference! In every field, people question and bore and scrutinize and pry and dabble with experiments. It’s no longer enough for a man to say that something is so or how it is so—everything now has to be proven besides, preferably with witnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments. These Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have—there are even clerics among them and gentlemen of noble birth!—they’ve finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!

Wherever you looked, hectic excitement. People reading books, even women. Priests dawdling in coffee houses. And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison, publishers howled and submitted petitions, ladies and gentlemen of the highest rank used their influence, and within a couple of weeks he was set free or allowed out of the country, from where he went right on with his unconscionable pamphleteering. In the salons people chattered about nothing but the orbits of comets and expeditions, about leverage and Newton, about building canals, the circulation of the blood, and the diameter of the earth.

The King himself had had them demonstrate some sort of new-fangled nonsense, a kind of artificial thunderstorm they called electricity. With the whole court looking on, some fellow rubbed a bottle, and it gave off a spark, and His Majesty, so it was said, appeared deeply impressed. Unthinkable! that his grandfather, the truly great Louis, under whose beneficent reign Baldini had been lucky enough to have lived for many years, would have allowed such a ridiculous demonstration in his presence. But that was the temper of the times, and it would all come to a bad end.

When, without the least embarrassment, people could brazenly call into question the authority of God’s Church; when they could speak of the monarchy—equally a creature of God’s grace—and the sacred person of the King himself as if they were both simply interchangeable items in a catalogue of various forms of government to be selected on a whim; when they had the ultimate audacity and have it they did—to describe God Himself, the Almighty, Very God of Very God, as dispensable and to maintain in all earnestness that order, morals and happiness on this earth could be conceived of without Him, purely as matters of man’s inherent morality and reason… God, good God!—then you needn’t wonder that everything was turned upside down, that morals had degenerated, and that humankind had brought down upon itself the judgement of Him whom it denied. It would come to a bad end. The great comet of 1681—they had mocked it, calling it a mere clump of stars, while in truth it was an omen sent by God in warning, for it had portended, as was clear by now, a century of decline and disintegration, ending in the spiritual, political and religious quagmire that man had created for himself, into which he would one day sink and where only glossy, stinking swamp flowers flourished, like Pélissier himself!