Giuseppe Baldini

Giuseppe Baldini is a secondary character in the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. He is a perfumer and owns the largest perfume shop in the city and, in addition to perfumes and cosmetics, also sells foodstuffs such as tea or candied fruit. He Due to the large number of different goods, numerous smells are mixed together in Baldini’s store, which he himself, his wife and his employee Chénier can hardly perceive. Potential customers, however, are overwhelmed by the intense smell in the store and no longer frequent his store.

 At the beginning of his career as a merchant, Giuseppe Baldini sold fragrances in the streets of Paris. He went directly to his customers with a vendor's tray. The economic rise from a vendor's tray to a large business of his own makes it clear that Baldini worked hard for his success and pursued his goals ambitiously. In the meantime, he has grown older. He is "old and stiff as a pillar, in a silver-powdered wig and a blue coat adorned with gold frogs" (Part 1, 38%). 

Other perfumers in town are now much more successful than he is. Thus, the fragrance "Amor and Psyche" by Pélissier is particularly in demand in Paris at the time. Baldini's sole attempts to discover the recipe for the fragrance failed. Only with the help of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille does he succeed.

Unlike Grenouille, who experiences...