The two fall in love,and as with most of Robbins' couples, their mutual libido is enormous, and their love quite like something out of a comedic fairy tale. Years later, the girl, now a young woman arrives at a lamasery where Alobar has taken residence for two decades. In Ancient India, upon seeing the heinous widow’s ritual of self-immolation, suttee, Alobar consoles a young girl, Kudra, horrified at the sight of the woman attempting to escape the flames of the funeral pyre. Though Marcel’s lover, V’lu has another agenda as a secret agent placed by Luc at Perfumerie Devalier to send information. Though the “creative nose” of the company, his latest ideas on evolution of a new consciousness have got his uncle, the owner, Luc Lefever, more than a bit unsettled. Claude has been charged with keeping an eye on Marcel’s stability. In Paris, Claude and Marcel LeFever of the LeFever Parfumarie are not concerned with the small perfume house in New Orleans, but rather their new scent and it’s synthetic base. The two have their hands on premium Jamaican jasmine supplied by a mysterious man with the helmet of swarming bees, Bingo Pajama, a symbolic figure inthe story.

At the urging of V’lu, Priscilla’s rival and Madame D’s protégé, they attempt to formulate a scent that will compete with their historic competition in Paris.

In New Orleans, Priscilla's stepmother, Madame Devalier, a once successful perfumer, is also working to recreate the same fragrance as Priscilla. She attempts to ignore the mysterious deliveries of beets she keeps receiving at her apartment. She juggles the unwanted sexual advances of her only friend and co-worker Ricki, has a brief affair with an eccentric Irish philosopher, Wiggs Dannyboy, who has a clinic for immortality research, called the Last Laugh Foundation. Meanwhile, in present-day, Priscilla, a part-time waitress and amateur perfumer, is stalled in re-creating the fragrance from the last remaining drops of a three-hundred-year-old perfume bottle in her possession. Pan encourages Alobar to continue East in search of the masters of immortality. Eventually he stumbles upon the stomping grounds of the pungent goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his godly powers as the world turns toward Christianity. After fleeing, no longer a king but only a man, he travels through Eurasia, on a newfound quest for the secret to longevity. A powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, a custom to kill of the leader at the first sign of aging.

Alobar jitterbug perfume