Folk Tale
Far, far away in France, very long ago, there lived a man named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. They say he was a simple man but with an extraordinary talent, the talent of smell. They say he has the sense of smell of a bloodhound or maybe even a bear. They say he can find a scent of any person, that he can tract them and follow them, just by finding their sense of smell. They say he can dissect smells into hundreds of smaller smells and then into thousands of even smaller smells until he is at the base ingredients that the smell are composed of. They say he is a freak, a myth, a legend, but I can say from firsthand experience that he is the realest man alive.
He is a man that traveled a long distance to arrive here at Grasse. Before he moved to Grasse, it was rumored that he was captured and sent to a cave. They say he was captured an kept as an slave in a cave for upwards of seven years maybe even eight years. One day he escaped and ended up in a little town called Pierrefort, where people though he was a escaped galley slave. Some believed that he was "not really a human being, but some mixture of man and bear, some kind of forest creature. One fellow, who had been to sea, claimed that he looked like a member of a wild Indian tribe in Cayenne, which lay on the other side of the great ocean." It was here that they fixed him up and turned him back into the human being that he is today.
When he lived here, he worked for Madame Gaillard. He was her apprentice and it was here that he learned to master to art of perfumery. They say he was a quick learner and that within the first year, he had learned all their was to learn from Madame Arnulfi and started to experiment on his own. They say it was here that he created a smell, a smell so great, a smell so strong and majestic that even Kings and Queens would fall for it. However it was rumored that the way he created this smell was that of wrongfulness and that it was in ways of unspeakable acts, however I do not believe it.
They say that in order for him to create that smell, he had to kill 24 virgins including a girl named Laure Richis. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen with gorgeous red hair and she had just bloomed into a woman. All of these girls were virgins and it was said that Grenouille murdered them all, however it was not him. It was that sick of a man, Dominique Druot. He was the murderer of those little girls and I hope he rots in hell for eternity. And to think Grenouille was about to be hang for the crimes of that lowlife.
Grenouille was captured one day and he was believed to be the murderer. They kept him in jail for days and he was convicted for the murder of all those girls. However thankfully, on the day of his hanging, he had some of magical perfume. It was a smell unlike any other. Sweet smelling, yet it had this soft touch to it. Smelled like flowers combined with vanilla and chocolate and strawberry and everything else that is good smelling in life. It's so difficult to explain. That night something took over our souls and made us do undispicable acts of human affection. It was an endless night of power and mind numbing affection that spread throughout the town from the young to the old, from the rich to the poor. It was a night that I will never forget and it was all due to that wonderful perfume. However that was the last time that I ever had a whiff of that perfume or even saw Grenouille because it was that night that Grenouille disappeared.
After that night was over and the sun rose, Grenouille was nowhere in sight. Some say he was just a fragment of our imagination and others say that the whole event was just a dream. Some say that no person can create a smell so powerful and others say that it was just the smell of the wildflower growing outside our town and the wind bringing it in. But I say, that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a real person that created the ultimate perfume and that he is still out there, sharing his perfume with everyone.
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