Now and then the soup got too thick, and they had to pour it quickly through a sieve,

freeing it of macerated cadavers to make room for fresh blossoms. Then they dumped and mixed and sieved some more, all day long without pause, for the procedure allowed no delays, until, as evening approached, all the piles of blossoms had passed through the caldron of oil. Then-so that nothing might be wasted-the refuse was steeped in boiling water and wrung out to the last drop in a screw press, yielding still more mildly fragrant oil. The majority of the scent, however, the soul of the sea of blossoms, had remained in the caldron, trapped and preserved in an unsightly, slowly congealing grayish white grease. The following day, the maceration, as this procedure was called, continued-the caldron was heated once again, the oil melted and fed with new blossoms. This went on for several days, from morning till evening. It was tiring work. Grenouille had arms of lead, calluses on his hands, and pains in his back as he staggered back to his cabin in the evening. Although Druot was at least three times as strong as he, he did not once take a turn at stirring, but was quite content to pour in more feather-light blossoms, to tend the fire, and now and then, because of the heat, to go out for a drink. But Grenouille did not mutiny. He stirred the blossoms into the oil without complaint, from morning till night, and hardly noticed the exertion of stirring, for he was continually fascinated by the process taking place before his eyes and under his nose: the sudden withering of the blossoms and the absorption of their scent. After a while, Druot would decide that the oil was finally saturated and could absorb no more scent. He would extinguish the fire, sieve the viscous soup one last time, and pour it into stoneware crocks, where almost immediately it solidified to a wonderfully fragrant pomade. This was the moment for Madame Araulfi, who came to assay the precious product, to label it, and to record in her books the exact quality and quantity of the yield. After she had personally capped the crocks, had sealed them and borne them to the cool depths of her cellar, she donned her black dress, took out her widows veil, and made the rounds of the citys wholesalers and vendors of perfume. In touching phrases she described to these gentlemen her situation as a woman left all on her own, let them make their offers, compared the prices, sighed, and finally sold- or did not sell. Perfumed pomades, when stored in a cool place, keep for a long time. And when the price leaves something to be desired, who knows, perhaps it will climb again come winter or next spring. Also you had to consider whether instead of selling to these hucksters you ought not to join with other small producers and together ship a load of pomade to Genoa or share in a convoy to the autumn fair in Beaucaire-risky enterprises, to be sure, but extremely profitable when successful. Madame Arnulfi carefully weighed these various possibilities against one another, and sometimes she would indeed sign a contract, selling a portion of her treasure, but hold another portion of it in reserve, and risk negotiating for a third part all on her own. But if during her inquiries she had got the impression that there was a glut on the pomade market and that in the foreseeable future there would be no scarcity to her advantage, she would hurry back home, her veil wafting behind her, and give Druot instructions to subject the whole yield to a lavage and transform it into an essence absolue. And the pomade would be brought up again from the cellar, carefully warmed in tightly covered pots, diluted with rectified spirits, and thoroughly blended and washed with the help of a built-in stirring apparatus that Grenouille operated. Returned to the cellar, this mixture quickly cooled; the alcohol separated from the congealed oil of the pomade and could be drained off into a bottle. A kind of perfume had been produced, but one of enormous intensity, while the pomade that was left behind had lost most of its fragrance. Thus the fragrance of the blossoms had been transferred to yet another medium. But the operation was still not at an end. After carefully filtering the

perfumed alcohol through gauze that retained the least little clump of oil, Druot filled a small alembic and distilled it slowly over a minimum flame. What remained in the matrass was a tiny quantity of a pale-hued liquid that Grenouille knew quite well, but had never smelled in such quality and purity either at Baldinis or Runels: the finest oil of the blossom, its polished scent concentrated a hundred times over to a little puddle of essence absolue. This essence no longer had a sweet fragrance. Its smell was almost painfully intense, pungent, and acrid. And yet one single drop, when dissolved in a quart of alcohol, sufficed to revitalize it and resurrect a whole field of flowers. The yield was frightfully small. The liquid from the matrass filled three little flacons and no more. Nothing was left from the scent of hundreds of thousands of blossoms except those three flacons. But they were worth a fortune, even here in Grasse. And worth how much more once delivered to Paris or Lyon, to Grenoble, Genoa, or Marseille! Madame Arnulfis glance was suffused with beauty when she looked at the little bottles, she caressed them with her eyes; and when she picked them up and stoppered them with snugly fitting glass stoppers, she held her breath to prevent even the least bit of the precious contents from being blown away. And to make sure that after stoppering not the tiniest atom would evaporate and escape, she sealed them with wax and encapsulated them in a fish bladder tightly tied around the neck of the bottle. Then she placed them in a crate stuffed with wadded cotton and put them under lock and key in the cellar.