Laure Richis

TL;DR: The sixteen-year-old, copper-haired daughter of Antoine Richis — the wealthiest man in Grasse — whose extraordinary scent Grenouille catches across a garden wall in chapter 35 and spends the rest of Part 3 working through twenty-three other young women to claim.

Spoilers through Chapter 46. Includes Grenouille's final murder.

Snapshot

A modest, devout, serenely beautiful young French woman raised carefully behind walls — and the keystone scent Grenouille has been hunting since the night of the plum girl. The book lets her be a person for several chapters before it lets Grenouille take her.

Role in the story

Laure first appears as a scent — a luminous fragrance Grenouille picks up across the wall of the Richis townhouse garden in chapter 35 — and only later as a face. Once he has identified her, she becomes the central problem of his master perfume: she is the keystone, the heart-note, the missing center of the composition the plum girl began.

Twenty-three Grasse virgins die in the spring while Grenouille works through them like a sequence of preparatory studies. Antoine Richis, alone among the citizens of Grasse, deduces the pattern and grasps that his daughter is the intended final harvest; he flees with her in chapter 43 toward Grenoble, stops for the night at a coastal inn at La Napoule, and Grenouille, who has tracked them by scent, slips into Laure's room and kills her in chapter 45. The murder closes the assembly of the master perfume.

What the book gives her, before it takes her, is a few chapters of being seen — a daughter in a garden, a daughter being told to dress as a peasant for an escape, a daughter trusting her father in a coastal inn. Süskind insists on showing her alive long enough that the murder is felt as a loss, not as a milestone in Grenouille's project.

Personality in plain English

Bright, modest, devout in a girlhood-Catholic way. Closely bonded to her father after the death of her mother. Innocent in the literal sense — sheltered, unaware of the scale on which she is being hunted, until her father's flight forces her to know.

What she wants

To grow up. To do the things a young woman in Grasse in 1760 would do — marry, run a household, have children, attend Sunday mass at Notre-Dame du Puy. The book does not let her have any of these.

What she fears (or hides)

She fears very little until chapter 43, when her father suddenly bundles her into common clothes and takes her north. She does not understand what she is fleeing; she trusts him. The trust is correct and not enough.

Key relationships

• Antoine Richis — her father. The strongest paternal love in the book, and one of the strongest love-relationships full stop. The fact that it cannot save her is the wound Süskind chooses to inflict.
• Grenouille — predator, distant, invisible to her until the last seconds. Their actual on-page contact is brief.

Visual identity

Sixteen years old. Tall and slim, on the cusp of adulthood — the narrator stresses she has just crossed into womanhood, which is precisely what makes her the keystone. Long red-gold hair worn loose with a thin pale-blue silk ribbon, falling in a soft braid over one shoulder. Pale ivory skin with a faint warm flush, lightly freckled across the bridge of the nose. Light grey-green eyes. Delicate features: small straight nose, soft mouth, expressive light brows. Dressed throughout the book in modest pale-blue or dove-blue watered-silk summer day-dresses with high crossed white linen fichu at the bosom, fine lace at the cuffs, a small gold cross pendant on a thin chain at the throat. In the flight chapters: a heavier travelling cloak in muted blue wool or grey, hood up, riding boots. The defining image is Laure beneath a lemon tree in the Richis garden in late afternoon — sun in her hair, devotional book in her lap, completely unaware that the boy on the other side of the wall has just heard her.

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.

• Laure Richis (canonical — the most common form)
• Laure
• Mademoiselle Richis
• The girl behind the wall