Giuseppe Baldini

TL;DR: The aging Italian-trained perfumer with a fading shop on the Pont au Change who buys Grenouille from Grimal, watches the boy resurrect his business in a single season — and drowns the same night Grenouille walks south out of Paris with his journeyman's papers.

Spoilers through Chapter 22.

Snapshot

A heavy-set, theatrical, fluttering-handed perfumer in his late sixties with a powdered wig, a dusty-rose silk waistcoat, and a shop full of glass and brass that's about to be the most fashionable address in Paris for one extraordinary, terrible season.

Role in the story

When Perfume finds Baldini in chapter 11, he is already losing. The upstart perfumer Pélissier has eclipsed him with the celebrated Amor and Psyche; Baldini's shop on the Pont au Change is a museum-piece of his own former taste. He is preparing to sell. Grimal arrives two chapters later with a small dirty boy whose nose Baldini takes about ninety seconds to recognize as the find of the century.

For the next four years Baldini operates a small empire on the strength of Grenouille's nose. Perfumes pour out of the back room at supernatural speed; they are formally Baldini's; they are spectacularly fashionable. Grenouille, hidden behind the shop counter, is the only person in Paris who knows what his employer's success actually consists of.

Then Grenouille demands his journeyman's papers. Baldini gives them, in exchange for a final cache of formulas. Grenouille walks south the same evening. That night the bridge collapses. Baldini, his ledger, and his shop go into the Seine.

The book treats this as elegant book-keeping. Baldini did not deserve to die more than anyone else who used Grenouille; the universe of Perfume simply does not let people use him and then keep their lives.

Personality in plain English

Vain, anxious, theatrical. Self-pitying about his rivals. Genuinely loves the idea of perfume — the lineage, the artistry, the Italian apprenticeship he likes to mention — and is also a small-business shopkeeper to the bone. Greedy enough to use Grenouille; pious enough to be uneasy about it.

What he wants

To die rich, fashionable, and respected. The book grants him fashionable. It declines to grant him the rest.

What he fears (or hides)

He fears, correctly, that Grenouille is something he doesn't understand, and that the boy could leave at any moment and take the formulas with him. He hides almost none of this — his anxiety is theatrical, on the surface, fluttering with his hands.

Key relationships

• Grenouille — apprentice, then production engine, then the boy he buys his way out of by handing over journeyman's papers. The relationship destroys Baldini twice — once professionally, the second time literally.
• Chénier — his front-of-house apprentice. The competent ordinary perfumer Baldini once was.
• Grimal — his supplier of Grenouille; their bargain in chapter 14 is one of the book's coldest scenes.
• Pélissier — never on-page; the rival who haunts every chapter Baldini is in. The reason Baldini buys Grenouille at all.

Visual identity

Heavy-set, soft round belly, jowls. Round ruddy face with veined cheeks. Heavy brows. Cleanshaven. Fluttering long-fingered hands the narrator returns to obsessively. Powdered grey-white wig in tight bourgeois curls, queued behind. Embroidered dusty-rose silk waistcoat with gold thread; fine linen shirt with lace ruffles at cuffs and throat; matching silk knee breeches; cream stockings; polished black buckle shoes. In private, a long burgundy justaucorps coat with brass buttons. Pince-nez when reading. The defining gesture: lifting a glass vial toward his nose, eyes half-closed, mouth in a small O of professional appraisal — and the shop he stands in, with hundreds of glass flacons in graded ranks behind him, brass scales catching candlelight, the bay window opening onto the Pont au Change and the green-brown Seine.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Baldini (canonical — the most common form)
• Giuseppe Baldini
• Maître Baldini
• Master Baldini
• The Italian