In the eighteenth century, there lived in France a man who belonged to the most brilliant and odious beings of that era. An era that could not have lacked such beings. The story of this man is what we shall recount here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. If his name has been forgotten today, in contrast to the names of other geniuses and scoundrels, such as de Sade, Saint-Just, Fouché, Bonaparte, and others, it is certainly not because, compared with these more famous men of education, Grenouille was less arrogant, less contemptuous of humanity, less immoral, less blasphemous; but rather because his genius and ambition were confined to a field that leaves no trace in history, that is, to the kingdom of fleeting smells. In the age of which we are speaking, a stench dominated the cities, the full extent of which no modern man could imagine. The streets smelled of excrement, the backyards of urine, the stairwells of decaying wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of rotting cabbage and sheep fat, the unventilated rooms of damp dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets and damp feather quilts, and the pungent odor of urinals. The fireplaces smelled of sulfur, the tanneries of acrid laundry alkali, and the slaughterhouses of rotting blood. The people smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes; their mouths of rotting teeth, their bellies of onions; and though they were a little advanced in age, their bodies smelled of old cheese, sour milk, and tumorous diseases.