Free Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer by Patrick Süskind

Comparable really only to the greatest accomplishments of humankind, like the invention of writing by the Assyrians, Euclidean geometry, the ideas of Plato or the metamorphosis of grapes into wine by the Greeks. A truly Promethean act!
    And yet, just as all great accomplishments of the spirit cast both shadow and light, offering humankind vexation and misery along with their benefits, so, too, Frangipani’s marvellous invention had its unfortunate results. For now that people knew how to bind the essence of flowers and herbs, woods, resins and animal secretions within tinctures and fill them into bottles, the art of perfumery was slipping bit by bit from the hands of the masters of the craft and becoming accessible to mountebanks, at least a mountebank with a passably discerning nose, like this skunk Pélissier. Without ever bothering to learn how the marvellous 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 much was certain: at the age of thirty-five, this bastard Pélissier already possessed a larger fortune than he, Baldini, had finally accumulated after three generations 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 craftsman and established commerçant should have to struggle 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 rodomontado 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? Whom did it profit? Or crossing the Atlantic, racing to America in a month—as if people hadn’t got along without that continent for thousands of years. What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes? People even travelled 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 might be. And why all this insanity? Because the others were doing the same, the Spaniards, the damned English, the impertinent Dutch, whom you then had to go out and fight, which you couldn’t in the least afford. One of those battleships cost a good 300,000 livres, and a single cannon shot would sink it in five minutes, for good 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 room where he belongs. Pascal said that. And Pascal was a great man, a Frangipani of the intellect, a real craftsman, so to speak, and no one wants one of those any more. People read incendiary books now by Huguenots or Englishmen. Or they write tracts or so-called scientific masterpieces that put anything and everything in question. Nothing is supposed to be right any more, suddenly everything ought to be different. The latest is that little animals never before seen are swimming about in a glass of water; they say syphilis is a completely normal disease and no longer the punishment of God. God didn’t make the world in seven days, it’s said, but over millions of years, if it was He at all. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrongly; and the earth is no longer round like it was, but flat on the top and bottom like a melon—as if it made a damn bit of difference! In every