Grenouille wishes to invent the best smelling perfume in the world. Trying to accomplish this he commits a series of murders. His first is when he catches a faint scent that smells incredible to him. He follows it and eventually ends up in a garden. There, is a girl peeling plums. The girl has red hair and us wearing a grey, sleeveless dress. This girl is the source of the marvellous smell. At first, Grenouille can't believe she's what is emitting the smell. This is because to him, humans smell repulsive. He sneaks up behind the girl and strangles her. He strips off her clothing and smells her.

This again displays Grenouille's hatred for humans. He shows total disregard for their lives. To him they are just another scent. Only the scent of young, adolescent girls have an appealing scent. He shows no guilt or remorse for killing them and kills them without question. His only goal is to create the ultimate scent and he'll stop at nothing to achieve that goal.

Guiseppe Baldini

Guiseppe Baldini is an old perfumer who owns a perfume shop in Pont-au-Change, located on a bridge. He doesn’t have a gift for perfumery and he only knows the art. He takes Grenouille as his apprentice and becomes rich from the perfume he creates, taking the credit for them as well. He ends up giving Grenouille journeyman papers, which will help Grenouille in his future travels. After Grenouille leaves the bridge his house is on collapses and it plunges into the river. 

Grimal

 Grimal is a tanner. Madame sells Grenouille to him after the parish shtops paying for his board. He treats Grenouille at first like a work animal, then, because he is a good worker,  like a pet. He sells him to Baldini and spends the money on alcohol. His drunkenness causes him to fall into the river and he drowns. 

Madame Gaillard

Madame Grimal owns a boarding house and cares for Grenouille until he’s eight. She has no emotion towards anything due to a strike to the head. She plans to die a peaceful death alone but ends up in the Hotel Dieu where she dies sharing a bed with three other women in a room full of people. 

Jean Baptiste Grenouille

 
Grenouille becomes a perfumer's apprentice to learn the art of perfuming. He doesn't need help with creating scents, only with learning the methods.

Grenouille's Hatred

Madame Gaillard was entirely incapable of emotion because she was brain damaged as a child. Grenouille couldn't learn to feel regard for other people and didn't have normal emotional development because he was raised by her. She was his role model. He was never given any love and affection. He was never given any because of his birth, his looks, and his lack of scent. People were just disturbed by him. Madame Gaillard gave him away at once to Grimal, the tanner, after the parish stopped paying for him. He was always taken care of as if he were some sort of animal. In Grimal's care he slept on a hard, bare floor, locked in a closet where tools were kept and raw, salted hides were hung. Afterwords, he was kept as a useful house pet. Grenouille was never taught that he was valuable. He was always mistreated and because of this his psychotic tendencies were magnified.

All of this leads to Gaillard's hatred of humanity. He retreats to the farthest point so that he can escape the smell of humans. He lives alone for seven years on the top of a volcano in the Massif Centrale. His hatred is so deep that Grenouille tries to be the only person in his fantasy world. He creates the ultimate scent which inspires love from everyone, but he finds that he has no use for this love. It doesn't fulfill him and since he has created the greatest scent, he becomes ready to die. Nothing in the world other than smell held any attraction to him. No human offers love to him nor he does he to any human. This is his final rejection of humanity.