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Giuseppe Baldini had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit The odor of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his ability to smell; he had carried it about with hih 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 reat 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 forht fro Genoese spice salesman The rest of his perfu 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 ilover A perfumer was fifty percent 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 Verha A He already had solass 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 perfuo-between, who had used yet another go-between… Caution was necessary Because Baldini did not simply want to use the perfuht was not sufficient for that in any case He had so much nastier in mind: he wanted to copy it

That was, hly improper To create a clandestine imitation of a competitor’s perfume and sell it under one’s own naet caught at it, and that hy Chénier ossip

Hoful, that an honest man should feel compelled to travel such crooked paths! Hoful, that thea man possesses, his own honor, should be sullied by such shabby dealings! But as he to do? Count Verhamont was, after all, a custole custo 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 established to stay out of the red byhouse calls, valise in hand And that did not suit hi in cold antechaar before old raine salve off on the competition in those antechambers There was that upstart Brouet froreatest line of pomades in Europe; or Calteau froed to become purveyor to the household of the duchesse 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 e one year was Hungary water and Baldini had 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 Blosso nights of experiredients in Forest Blossohts or Lisbon Spice or Bouquet de la Cour or soer to the whole trade with his reckless creativity It uild laws Made you wish for draconian ainst this inflationist of scent His license 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 perfuarelse But as a 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 park 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 sied a soupçon 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 ale the aromatic base of their vapors 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 nuure like Pélissier would have been an impossibility, for back then just for the production of a siar mixer could not even dream You had to be able not merely to distill, but also to act as maker of salves, apothecary, alcheardener 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 knohen 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 jas a whit of the Herculean elbow grease needed to wring a dollop of concrétion or a few drops of essence absolue from a hundred thousand jass—knew jasmine—only as a bottle of dark brown liquid concentrate that stood in his locked cabinet alongside the many other bottles froood old days of true craftsot 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 enius Mauritius Frangipani—an Italian, let it be noted!—that odors are soluble in rectified spirit Byits odor to a volatile liquid, Frangipani had liberated scent from matter, had etherialized scent, had discovered scent as pure scent; in short, he had created perfu achievereatest acco by the Assyrians, Euclidean georapes into wine by the Greeks A truly Promethean act!

And yet, just as all great acco hu with their benefits, so, too, Frangipani’s marvelous invention had its unfortunate results For now that people kne to bind the essence of flowers and herbs, woods, resins, and animal secretions within tinctures and fill the bit by bit fro a

ccessible tonose, like this skunk Pélissier Without ever bothering to learn how the marvelous 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 e thirty-five, this bastard Pélissier already possessed a larger fortune than he, Baldini, had finally accuenerations 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 craftsle 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 rodomontade 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? Who to A without that continent for thousands of years What had civilized les inhabited by Indians or Negroes People even traveled 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 ht be And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the salish, the iht, which you couldn’t in the least afford One of those battleships easily cost a good 300,000 livres, and a single cannon shot would sink it in five ood 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 rooreat ipani of the intellect, a real craftsman, so to speak, and no one wants one of those anylishmen Or they write tracts or so-called scientificin question Nothing is supposed to be right anyht to be different The latest is that little anilass of water; they say syphilis is a coer the punishment of God God didn’t make the world in seven days, it’s said, but over es are hu; and the earth is no longer round like it was, but flat on the top and bottom like a melon—as if that made a damn bit of difference! In every field, people question and bore and scrutinize and pry and dabble with experi is so or how it is so—everything now has to be proven besides, preferably itnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments These Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever na theed 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 excite in coffeehouses And if the police intervened and stuck one of the chief scoundrels in prison, publishers howled and subhest rank used their influence, and within a couple of weeks he was set free or allowed out of the country, froht on with his unconscionable pa but the orbits of coe and Newton, about building canals, the circulation of the blood, and the diameter of the earth

The king hiled nonsense, a kind of artificial thunderstor on, soave off a spark, and His Majesty, so it was said, appeared deeply ireat 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 race—and the sacred person of the king hieable iteovernment to be selected on a whim; when they had the ultimate audacity—and have it they did—to describe God Hihty, 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 ood God!—then you needn’t wonder that everything was turned upside down, that ht down upon itself the judgreat co it a mere clump of stars, while in truth it was an o, 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 hilossy, stinking swamp flowers flourished, like Pélissier himself!

Baldini stood at the , an old led above the river Barges eed beneath him and slid slowly to the west, toward the Pont-Neuf and the quay below the galleries of the Louvre No one poled barges against the current here, for that they used the channel on the other side of the island Here everything floay from you—the empty and the heavily laden ships, the rowboats, and the flat-bottoolden-curled water—everything floay, slowly, broadly, and inevitably And if Baldini looked directly below hi water were sucking the foundations of the bridge with it, and he grew dizzy

He had e, and a second when he selected one on the western side Because constantly before his eyes noas a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accu away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current Sometimes when he had business on the left bank, in the quarter of the Sorbonne or around Saint-Sulpice, he would not walk across the island and the Pont-Saint-Michel, but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf, for it was a bridge without buildings And then he would stand at the eastern parapet and gaze up the river, just for once to see everything flowing toward him; and for a few moments he basked in the notion that his life had been turned around, that his business was prospering, his fa, that women threw the aas growing and growing

But then, if he lifted his gaze the least bit, he could see his own house, tall and spindly and fragile, several hundred yards away on the Pont-au-Change, and he saw theof his study on the second floor and saw hi out at the river and watching the water floay, just as now And then the beautiful dream would vanish, and Baldini would turn away from where he had stood on the Pont-Neuf, more despondent than before—as despondent as he was now, turning away from thean

d taking his seat at his desk

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Before hiolden brown in the sunlight, the liquid was clear, not clouded in the least It looked totally innocent, like a light tea—and yet contained, in addition to four-fifths alcohol, one-fifth of awith exciteht consist of three or thirty different ingredients, prepared fro countless possibilities in very precise proportions to one another It was the soul of the perfume—if one could speak of a perfu a soul—and the task noas to discover its composition

Baldini blew his nose carefully and pulled down the blind at the , since direct sunlight was harmful to every artificial scent or refined concentration of odors He pulled a fresh white lace handkerchief out of a desk drawer and unfolded it Then, holding his head far back and pinching his nostrils together, he opened the flacon with a gentle turn of the stopper He did not want, for God’s sake, to get a premature olfactory sensation directly froaseous state, never as a concentrate He sprinkled a few drops onto the handkerchief, waved it in the air to drive off the alcohol, and then held it to his nose In three short, jerky tugs, he snatched up the scent as if it were a powder, iain, fanned himself, took another sniff in waltz ti, deep breath, which he then exhaled sloith several pauses, as if letting it slide down a long, gently sloping stair-case He tossed the handkerchief onto his desk and fell back into his armchair