Read Online Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer by Patrick Süskind - Free Book Online Page B

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!