Jean- Baptiste Grenoille is born in 1738 as an illegitimate son of a fish sales woman. He survives the tried children’s murder
of his mother and the life full of privation as a food child as well as an assistant of a tanner where he must do highly dangerous works. However, fitted out with an absolute sence of smell, he himself is without smell. People could not smell him. They had fear of him. When Grenoille condemns without smell to an outsider, he revealed the world of smells which he soaks up formally in himself. So Grenoille follows the smell of a young beautiful girl about several Paris districts. Finally he kills her to take her smell in all refinements in himself. Grenoille recognizes his talent and decides to become the
biggest perfumer of all times. In an apprenticeship with the perfumer Baldini he acquires the ability to win smells and make them durable. Only at the age of 25 his own absence of smell realizes to him and so he develops different human smells which he applies to live unidentified and to get closer to his aim being the biggest perfumer. In the French
perfume centre of Grasse Grenoille kills 25 young beautiful women to conserve their smell. Their smell retains the transferred murderer from the death penalty. During the day of execution he does not appear to the people in his mask of perfume more than the ugly monster, but as an extremely endearing person. He had created to himself an aura, more radiant and more effectively than it possessed one person before him. And he owned it to nobody … only as himself. The biggest triumph of his life, to win power about others and to be loved by them, however, Grenoilles means nothing. He returns to Paris where he can be murdered by thieves, murderers and whores around the Cimetière des Innocents, his birthplace. The desire, participating in his overwhelming smell, is so largely that they devour him.