17

With the acquisition of Grenouille, the House of Giuseppe Baldini began its ascent to national, indeed European renown. The Persian chimes never stopped ringing, the herons never stopped spewing in the shop on the Pont au Change.

The very first evening, Grenouille had to prepare a large demijohn full of ‘Nuit Napolitaine’, of which over eighty flacons were sold in the course of the next day. The fame of the scent spread like wildfire. Chénier’s eyes grew glassy from the moneys paid and his back ached from all the deep bows he had to make, for only persons of high, indeed highest, rank – or at least the servants of persons of high and highest rank – appeared. One day the door was flung back so hard it rattled; in stepped the footman of Count d’Argenson and shouted, as only footmen can shout, that he wanted five bottles of this new scent. Chénier was still shaking with awe fifteen minutes later, for Count d’Argenson was commissary and war minister to His Majesty and the most powerful man in Paris.

While Chénier was subjected to the onslaught of customers in the shop, Baldini had shut himself up in his laboratory with his new apprentice. He justified this stage of affairs to Chénier with a fantastic theory that he called ‘division of labour and increased productivity’. For years, he explained, he had patiently watched while Pélissier and his ilk – despisers of the ancient craft, all – had enticed his customers away and made a shambles of his business. His forbearance was now at an end. He was accepting their challenge and striking back at these cheeky parvenus, and, what was more, with their own weapons. Every season, every month, if necessary every week, he would play trumps, a new perfume. And what perfumes they would be! He would draw fully upon his creative talents. And for that it was necessary that he – assisted only by an unskilled helper – would be solely and exclusively responsible for the production of scents, while Chénier would devote himself exclusively to their sale. By using such modern methods, they would open a new chapter in the history of perfumery, sweeping aside their competitors and growing incomparably rich – yes, he had consciously and explicitly said ‘they’, because he intended to allow his old and trusted journeyman to share a given percentage of these incomparable riches.

Only a few days before, Chénier would have regarded such talk as a sign of his master’s incipient senility: ‘Ready for the charité,’ he would have thought. ‘It won’t be long now before he lays down the pestle for good.’ But now he was not thinking at all. He didn’t get around to it, he simply had too much to do. He had so much to do that come evening he was so exhausted he could hardly empty out the cashbox and siphon off his cut. Not in his wildest dreams would he have doubted that things were not on the up and up, though Baldini emerged from his laboratory almost daily with some new scent.

And what scents they were! Not just perfumes of high, indeed highest, quality, but also creams and powders, soaps, hair tonics, toilet waters, oils … Everything meant to have a fragrance now smelled new and different and more wonderful than ever before. And as if bewitched, the public pounced upon everything, absolutely everything – even the new-fangled scented hair ribbons that Baldini created one day on a curious whim. And price was no object. Everything that Baldini produced was a success. And the successes were so overwhelming that Chénier accepted them as natural phenomena and did not seek out their cause. That perhaps the new apprentice, that awkward gnome, who was housed like a dog in the laboratory and whom one saw sometimes when the master stepped out, standing in the background wiping off glasses and cleaning mortars – that this cipher of a man might be implicated in the fabulous blossoming of their business, Chénier would not have believed had he been told it.

Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it. Everything Baldini brought into the shop and left for Chénier to sell was only a fraction of what Grenouille was mixing up behind closed doors. Baldini couldn’t smell fast enough to keep up with him. At times he was truly tormented by having to choose among the glories that Grenouille produced. This sorcerer’s apprentice could have provided recipes for all the perfumers of France without once repeating himself, without once producing something of inferior or even average quality. As a matter of fact, he could not have provided them with recipes, i.e. formulas, for at first Grenouille still composed his scents in the totally chaotic and unprofessional manner familiar to Baldini, mixing his ingredients impromptu and in apparent wild confusion. Unable to control the crazy business, but hoping at least to get some notion of it, Baldini demanded one day that Grenouille use scales, measuring glasses and the pipette when preparing his mixtures, even though he considered them unnecessary; further, he was to get used to regarding the alcohol not as another fragrance, but as a solvent to be added at the end; and, for God’s sake, he would simply have to go about things more slowly, at an easier and slower pace, as befitted a craftsman.

Grenouille did it. And for the first time Baldini was able to follow and document the individual manoeuvres of this wizard. Paper and pen in hand, constantly urging a slower pace, he sat next to Grenouille and jotted down how many drams of this, how many level measures of that, how many drops of some other ingredient wandered into the mixing bottles. This was a curious after-the-fact method for analysing a procedure; it employed principles whose very absence ought to have totally precluded the procedure to these sublime scents. And when he had once entered them in his little book and entrusted them to his safe and his bosom, he no longer doubted that they were now his and his alone.

But Grenouille, too, profited from the disciplined procedures Baldini had forced upon him. He was not dependent on them himself. He never had to look up an old formula to reconstruct a perfume weeks or months later, for he never forgot an odour. But by using the obligatory measuring glasses and scales, he learned the language of perfumery, and he sensed instinctively that the knowledge of this language could be of service to him. After a few weeks Grenouille had mastered not only the names of all the odours in Baldini’s laboratory, but he was also able to record the formulas for his perfumes on his own and, vice versa, to convert other people’s formulas and instructions into perfumes and other scented products. And not merely that! Once he had learned to express his fragrant ideas in drops and drams, he no longer even needed the intermediate step of experimentation. When Baldini assigned him a new scent, whether for a handkerchief cologne, a sachet or a face paint, Grenouille no longer reached for flacons and powders, but instead simply sat himself down at the table and wrote the formula straight out. He had learned to extend the journey from his mental notion of a scent to the finished perfume by way of writing down the formula. For him it was a detour. In the world’s eyes – that is, in Baldini’s – it was progress. Grenouille’s miracles remained the same. But the recipes he now supplied along with them removed the terror, and that was for the best. The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in the conventional language of perfumery – and the less his master feared and suspected him. While still regarding him as a person with exceptional olfactory gifts, Baldini no longer considered him a second Frangipani or, worse, some weird wizard – and that was fine with Grenouille. The regulations of the craft functioned as a welcome disguise. He virtually lulled Baldini to sleep with his exemplary procedures, weighing ingredients, swirling the mixing bottles, sprinkling the test handkerchief. He could shake it out almost as delicately, pass it beneath his nose almost as elegantly as his master. And from time to time, at well-spaced intervals, he would make mistakes that could not fail to capture Baldini’s notice: forgetting to filter, setting the scales wrong, fixing the percentage of ambergris tincture in the formula ridiculously high. And took his scoldings for the mistakes, correcting them then most conscientiously. Thus he managed to lull Baldini into the illusion that ultimately this was all perfectly normal. He was not out to cheat the old man after all. He truly wanted to learn from him. Not how to mix perfumes, not how to compose a scent correctly, not that of course! In that sphere, there was no one in the world who could have taught him anything, nor would the ingredients available in Baldini’s shop have even begun to suffice for his notions about how to realize a truly great perfume. The scents he could create at Baldini’s were playthings compared with those he carried within him and that he intended to create one day. But for that, he knew, two indispensable prerequisites must be met. The first was the cloak of middle-class respectability, the status of a journeyman at the least, under the protection of which he could indulge his true passions and follow his true goals unimpeded. The second was the knowledge of the craft itself, the way in which scents were produced, isolated, concentrated, preserved, and thus first made available for higher ends. For Grenouille did indeed possess the best nose in the world, both analytical and visionary, but he did not yet have the ability to make those scents realities.