She did not believe that her illegitimate children were real, since she could not support them and she did not have a husband to give the children a name.įather Terrier argues from his theological position, which might seem no less cruel, that infants are, even when baptized, not complete souls. Grenouille's mother even reflected that sometime, maybe, she would be married and have some "real children"(p. While this is the first time it is signaled that Grenouille has no personal smell, this passage also indicates a prevailing idea among the people of Paris at time of Grenouille's birth: that infants were not fully human beings. Can he talk already, perhaps? Does he twitch and jerk? Does he move things about in the room? Does some evil stench come from him?" Father Terrier to Jeanne Bussie, p.
Which is why it is of no interest to the devil. An infant is not yet a human being it is a prehuman being and does not yet possess a fully developed soul.
"Impossible! It is absolutely impossible for an infant to be possessed by the devil. This is one of the main reasons Perfume veers away from realism into the realm of fantasy. That is, the overriding reason that we might like or dislike another human being is odor-not shared interests, visual cues, or more intangible notions such as goodness or virtue. If the reader accepts this point of view, it means that, to a significant extent, we live in a chemical world that we only dimly perceive or understand. It is this scent that enables him to escape from execution, even though he has duly been convicted of the crimes. Grenouille distills, literally, the essence of very young womanhood in his final scent-at the cost of twenty-five young lives. It is necessary to believe this idea if the reader is to believe that it was the scent of the adolescent girls who Grenouille killed, and not their appearances, voices, attitudes, personalities, or social contexts, that made them lovable or desirable. This passage expresses a main idea of this novel: a person's odor (or, in Grenouille's case, his utter lack of it) affects others' opinions more than any other sensory perception. Baldini and Grenouille in Baldini's shop, p. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will.
And even as he spoke, the air around him was saturated with the odor of Amor and Psyche.
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