The defence’s pleading in his final speech:

Your honour, learned counsel for the prosecution, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not my intention to embellish any of my client’s misdeeds. Of course, it is unforgivable to snatch someone out of the prime of life as Grenouille did. If we consider that he has deprived 26 beautiful young girls of the right to live then the culprit seems to be more cruel and worthy of contempt. Nevertheless there are some other factors which should be taken into consideration in this case.

Let us look at Grenouille’s childhood, which was anything but happy- after his mother’s attempt to kill him he grew up totally deprived of all human affection and surrounded- to his mind- by enemies, never having the chance to experience human love in any shape or form- a life devoid of any human relationship.

He never got to know humans as such, but as objects, to be sold or cast away when their usefulness was outlived. How, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, can we be surprised that he possesses neither moral nor ethic standards to hold him back from killing? Where should he have learned these virtues? Despised by all, accepted by none, respected by none, he saw his only foothold in his greatest gift- his incredible sense of smell. Grenouille possesses the ability to differentiate between fragrances and to absorb them within him. He can detect the scent of things which we do not consider as having scent. Indeed an incredible talent.

However, during the first phrase of his life he was unable to apply this talent. He was trained- against his will- as a tanner, a skill which scarcely had a positive influence on his attitude to living things, and then here, too, no value was attached to human life.
As we are all well aware, the early years in a person’s life are formative years and are of significant importance for future behaviour patterns. It is very difficult if not impossible to make up for things which have not been learned in early years. For this reason Grenouille’s attitude to humans must be regarded as a product of the lack of socialization in his early years. Furthermore we must understand the killings as an attempt to preserve fragrances, in the same way he attempted to capture the scents of glass and metal. Resultant from his aforementioned conception of man, there was no difference for him if the fragrance came from a human being or from objects. The only thing of importance for my client was the fragrance itself, the priceless commodity, the quest for which obsessed him and took over his whole personality. It was this precious gift, this highly-developed sense of smell that made Grenouille become a killer.