AT THE SAME time that Laure Richis and her father were leaving Grasse, Grenouille was at the other end of town in the Arnulfi workshop macerating jonquils. He was alone and he was in good spirits. His days in Grasse were coming to an end. His day of triumph was imminent. Out in his cabin was a crate padded with cotton, in it were twenty-four tiny flacons filled with drops of the congealed aura of twenty-four virgins-precious essences that Grenouille had produced over the last year by cold-oil enfleurage of their bodies, digestion of their hair and clothes, lavage, and distillation. And the twenty-fifth, the most precious and important of all, he planned to fetch today. For his final fishing expedition, he had at the ready a small pot of oils purified several times over, a cloth of finest linen, and a demijohn of high-proof alcohol. The terrain had been studied down to the last detail. The moon was new.

He knew that any attempt to break into the well-protected mansion on the rue Droite was pointless. Which was why he planned, just as dusk fell and before the doors were closed, to sneak in under his cover of odorlessness, which like a magic cape deprived man and beast of their perceptive faculties, and there to hide in some nook of the house. Then later, when everyone was asleep, he would follow the compass of his nose through the darkness and climb up to the chamber that held his treasure. He would set to work on it with his oil-drenched cloths right then and there. All that he would take with him would be, as usual, the hair and clothes, since these could be washed directly in rectified spirit, which could be done more conveniently in the workshop. He estimated it would take an additional night to complete the production of the pomade and to distill the concentrate. And if everything went well-and he had no reason to doubt that everything would go well- then by the day after tomorrow he would possess all of the essences needed for the best perfume in the world, and he would leave Grasse as the world’s most fragrant human being.

Around noon he was finished with his jonquils. He doused the fire, covered the pot of oil, and stepped outside the workshop to cool off. The wind was from the west.

With his very first breath, he knew something was wrong. The atmosphere was not as it should be. In the town’s aromatic garb, that veil of many thousands of woven threads, the golden thread was missing. During the last few weeks the fragrance of that thread had grown so strong that Grenouilie had clearly discerned it from his cabin on the far side of the town. Now it was gone, vanished, untraceable despite the most intensive sniffing. Grenouilie was almost paralyzed with fright.

She is dead, he thought. Then, more terrifying still: Someone else has got to her before me. Someone else has plucked my flower and taken its odor for himself! He could not so much as scream, the shock was too great for that, but he could produce tears that welled up in the corners of his eyes and suddenly streamed down both sides of his nose.

Then Druot, returning home from the Quatre Dauphins for lunch, remarked in passing that early this morning the second consul had left for Grenoble together with twelve mules and his daughter. Gre-nouille forced back the tears and ran off, straight through town to the Porte du Cours. He stopped to sniff in the square before the gate. And in the pure west wind, unsullied by the odors of the town, he did indeed find his golden thread again, thin and fragile, but absolutely unmistakable. The precious scent, however, was not blowing from the northwest, where the road leads toward Grenoble, but more from the direction of Cabris-if not directly out of the southwest.

Grenouille asked the watch which road the second consul had taken. The guard pointed north. Not the road to Cabris? Or the other one, that went south toward Auribeau and La Napoule? Definitely not, said the guard, he had watched with his own eyes.

Grenouille ran back through town to his cabin, packed linen, pomade pot, spatula, scissors, and a small, smooth club of olivewood into his knapsack and promptly took to the road-not the road to Grenoble, but the one to which his nose directed him: to the south.

This road, the direct road to La Napoule, led along the foothills of the Tanneron, through the river valleys o............