Twenty HE CAME DOWN with a high fever, which for the first few days was accompanied by heavy
sweats, but which later, as if the pores of his skin were no longer enough, produced countless pustules. Grenouille’s body was strewn with reddish blisters. Many of them popped open, releasing their watery contents, only to fill up again. Others grew into true boils, swelling up thick and red and then erupting like craters, spewing viscous pus and blood streaked with yellow. In time, with his hundreds of ulcerous wounds, Grenouille looked like some martyr stoned from the inside out. Naturally, Baldini was worried. It would have been very unpleasant for him to lose his precious apprentice just at the moment when he was planning to expand his business beyond the borders of the capital and out across the whole country. For increasingly, orders for those innovative scents that Paris was so crazy about were indeed coming not only from the provinces but also from foreign courts. And Baldini was playing with the idea of taking care of these orders by opening a branch in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, virtually a small factory, where the fastest-moving scents could be mixed in quantity and bottled in quantity in smart little flacons, packed by smart little girls, and sent off to Holland, England, and Greater Germany. Such an enterprise was not exactly legal for a master perfumer residing in Paris, but Baldini had recently gained the protection of people in high places; his exquisite scents had done that for him-not just with the commissary, but also with such important personages as the gentleman holding the franchise for the Paris customs office or with a member of the Conseii Royal des Finances and promoter of flourishing commercial undertakings like Monsieur Feydeau de Brou. The latter had even held out the prospect of a royal patent, truly the best thing that one could hope for, a kind of carte blanche for circumventing all civil and professional restrictions; it meant the end of all business worries and the guarantee of secure, permanent, unassailable prosperity. And Baldini was carrying yet another plan under his heart, his favorite plan, a sort of counterplan to the factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where his wares, though not mass produced, would be made available to anyone. But for a selected number of well-placed, highly placed clients, he wanted to create -or rather, have created-personal perfumes that would fit only their wearer, like tailored clothes, would be used only by the wearer, and would bear his or her illustrious name. He could imagine a Parfum de la Marquise de Cernay, a Parfum de la Marechale de Villar, a Parfum du Due d’Aiguillon, and so on. He dreamed of a Parfum de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, even of a Parfum de Sa Majeste le Roi, in a flacon of costliest cut agate with a holder of chased gold and, hidden on the inside of the base, the engraved words: “Giuseppe Baldini, Parfumeur.” The king’s name and his own, both on the same object. To such glorious heights had Baldini’s ideas risen! And now Grenouille had fallen ill. Even though Grimal, might he rest in peace, had sworn there had never been anything wrong with him, that he could stand up to anything, had even put the black plague behind him. And here he had gone and fallen ill, mortally ill. What if he