Part One
A boy is born in Paris, France in the year 1738, and subsequently abandoned. His mother is tried almost immediately for previous infanticide and subsequently executed, leaving him an orphan. He is named "Jean-Baptiste Grenouille" (French for "frog") and is fostered but is a difficult, solitary child and is eventually apprenticed to a local tanner. Unknown to other people, Grenouille has a remarkable sense of smell, giving him an extraordinary ability to discern subtlest odors from complex mixtures of scent and across great distances.
One day, long after having memorized nearly all the smells of the city, Grenouille is surprised by a unique smell. He finds the source of the scent: a young virgin girl. Entranced by her scent and believing that he alone must possess it, he strangles her and stays with her body until the scent has left it. In his quest to learn more about the art of perfume-making, he becomes apprenticed to one of the city's finest perfumers, Giuseppe Baldini, an aging, unskilled perfumer who has managed a successful business from two perfumes: one given to him by a relative and one that he bought from a traveling agent. Baldini eventually finds himself increasingly outperformed by rival perfumers and considers moving back to Italy with his wife.
However, Grenouille proves himself a prodigy by copying and improving a rival's perfume in Baldini's laboratory, after which Baldini offers him an apprenticeship. Baldini teaches Grenouille the basic techniques of perfumery while selling Grenouille's masterful new formulas as his own, restoring his flagging reputation. Baldini eventually reveals to Grenouille that there are techniques other than distillation that can be used to preserve a wider range of odours, which can only be learned in the heartland of the perfumer's craft, in the region of Grasse in the French Riviera. Shortly after, Grenouille elects to leave Paris, and Baldini dies when his shop collapses into the river Seine.
Part Two
On his way to Grasse, Grenouille travels the countryside and is increasingly disgusted by the scent of humanity. Avoiding civilization, he comes instead to live in a cave inside the Plomb du Cantal, surviving off the mountain's sparse vegetation and wildlife. However, his peace is ended when he realizes after seven years that he himself does not possess any scent: he cannot smell himself and neither, he finally understands, can other people. Traveling to Montpellier with a fabricated story about being kidnapped and kept in a cave for seven years to account for his haggard appearance, he creates a body odour for himself from everyday materials and finds that his new "disguise" tricks people into thinking that it is the scent of a human; he is now accepted by society instead of shunned. In Montpellier, he gains the patronage of the Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, who uses Grenouille to publicize his pseudoscientific theory about the influence of "fluidal" energies on human vitality. Grenouille manufactures perfumes which successfully distort the public perception of him from a wretched "caveman" into a clean and cultivated patrician, helping to win enormous popularity for the Marquis' theory. Seeing how easily humanity can be fooled by a simple scent, Grenouille's hatred becomes contempt. He realizes that it is within his ability to develop scents described as "superhuman" and "angelic" that will affect in unprecedented ways how other people perceive him.
Part Three
In Grasse, Grenouille discovers a young woman named Laure whose scent has the same captivating quality of the girl he killed before. Determined to preserve it, Grenouille starts working as an apprentice at a workshop and starts learning how to preserve scents by enfleurage, determined to kill Laure and extract her scent in a year's time. Meanwhile, he kills 24 other young women, to practice how to preserve human scents and to use them as a base for the perfume that he will make with Laure's scent. Laure's father deduces that Laure will eventually be killed and tries to flee to save his daughter, but Grenouille tracks them and kills Laure as well. Despite his careful attention to detail, the police trace Laure's murder to him, and the hair and clothing of his previous victims are all discovered at his cabin near Grasse. He is caught soon afterwards and sentenced to death. However, on the way to his execution in the town square, Grenouille wears the new perfume he has created from his victims, and the scent immediately causes the crowd of spectators to fawn in awe and adoration of him, and although the evidence of his guilt is absolute, the townspeople become so fond of him, so convinced of the innocence he now exudes, that the magistrate reverses the court's verdict and he is freed; even Laure's father is enthralled by the new scent and asks if he would consider being adopted as his son. Soon the crowd is so overcome with lust and emotion that the entire town participates in a mass orgy of which no one speaks afterwards and which few can clearly remember. The magistrate reopens the investigation into the murders and they are eventually attributed to Grenouille's employer Dominique Druot, who is tortured into making a false confession and later hanged without ceremony. Afterwards life returns to normal in Grasse.
Part Four
The effect his scent has had now confirms to Grenouille how much he hates people, especially as he realizes that they worship him now and that even this degree of control does not give him satisfaction. He decides to return to Paris, intending to die there, and after a long journey ends up at the fish market where he was born. He pours the bottle of perfume he created on himself, and the people are so drawn to him that they are compelled to obtain parts of his body, eventually tearing him to pieces and eating him. The story ends with the crowd, now embarrassed by their actions, agreeing that they did it out of "love".
