Chénier

TL;DR: Baldini's longstanding shop assistant on the Pont au Change — competent, well-trained, polite, ordinary — and the foil against whom Grenouille's freakish gift, a few chapters later, registers as supernatural.

Spoilers through Chapter 17.

Snapshot

A young Parisian apprentice in his early twenties at the customer-facing counter of one of the most fashionable perfumeries on the bridge: powdered queue, plain shop livery, the patient deferential manner of a man who has spent years learning how to wrap a glass flacon in tissue paper.

Role in the story

Chénier is one of the book's quieter pieces of structural work. He runs Baldini's shop front while Baldini broods in the back, and his presence is what allows Süskind to show us what an ordinary perfumer's apprentice looks like — diligent, modest, tasteful, not gifted. By the time Grenouille arrives in chapter 12 and recreates Amor and Psyche by smell alone, Chénier's competence has been quietly established as the floor of the trade. Grenouille will spend the next ten chapters demonstrating that the floor and the ceiling do not belong on the same building.

He is at the counter through Baldini's brief boom, and is implicitly among the casualties when the Pont au Change collapses, though the book is interested in Baldini's death rather than his.

Personality in plain English

Polite, deferential, careful. Listens to Baldini's anxieties without contradicting them. Pleased to have a respectable trade. Not visibly threatened by Grenouille — he is too far below Grenouille's level to feel rivalry, and the narrator's restraint about him reflects his own restraint about himself.

What he wants

To finish his apprenticeship and become a master perfumer in his own right. We do not get to see whether he would have.

What he fears (or hides)

Süskind grants him almost no interior. Whatever he fears, he keeps in a private register the book does not enter.

Key relationships

• Baldini — his master, his employer, the man whose anxieties he absorbs at the counter. A standard apprentice-master bond.
• Grenouille — the strange new presence in the back room. They share the shop but the narrator gives them no scene of meaningful exchange.

Visual identity

Trim, modestly groomed, clean-shaven. Mid-brown hair pulled back into a small queue with a black silk ribbon, lightly powdered for the customer-facing role. Plain face with kind, careful eyes; deferential posture. Plain white linen shirt, dove-grey wool waistcoat, knee breeches, off-white stockings, plain leather buckle shoes, and a clean white linen apron over the waistcoat — the apprentice's livery. Holding a glass flacon, half-wrapped in tissue, in the pose of finishing a sale for a wealthy client.

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.

• Chénier (canonical — the most common form)
• The apprentice