4 ideas
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a scentless orphan with a superhuman nose, apprentices with the Paris perfumer Baldini and then learns enfleurage in Grasse. There he murders twenty-five virgin girls to extract their scents, culminating in Laure Richis, and blends them into one perfume. On the day of his execution he wears it, and the crowd turns from a lynch mob into an orgy of adoration that frees him.
Scent enters the body through breath, which cannot be refused, and acts directly on feeling without passing through judgment. Whoever controls what people smell can therefore produce love, disgust, trust, or submission in them, whatever they would conclude by thinking. Grenouille's perfume makes a crowd adore the man it has come to see die.
Grenouille has no body odour, so other people unconsciously fail to register him as a person: wet nurses reject him, and others overlook him or recoil without knowing why. He builds a self by wearing constructed scents that make people perceive him as humble, pitiable, or lovable. Identity becomes something engineered for other people's perception rather than something he possesses.
When Grenouille gains the power to make everyone love him, he feels only contempt and disgust. The love was produced by his perfume and not given to him, so it cannot satisfy him, and he can never make himself loved for what he is. Complete control over how others respond empties those responses of meaning, which leads him to walk into a Paris crowd with the perfume and let it devour him.