Alobar consoles a young girl, Kudra, who was horrified at the sight of the woman attempting to escape the flames of the funeral pyre. In Ancient India, a heinous widow commits suttee, a ritual of self-immolation. It is revealed that Luc has placed Marcel’s lover V’lu as a secret agent to send them information about Perfumerie Devalier. 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 its 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 in the story. Madame D’s protégé V'lu urges her to 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 begins an affair with an eccentric Irish philosopher, Wiggs Dannyboy, who runs a clinic for immortality research called the Last Laugh Foundation. She rejects the sexual advances of her co-worker Ricki. Meanwhile, in the 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 stamping 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.

Plot summaryĪ powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, from a custom of killing the leader at the first sign of aging. The book was first published in 1984 by Bantam Books and later published by Random House. Orchestrated by a mysterious Irish philosopher, the past and the present collide when the characters come together and discover the unexpected path to life-everlasting. The story connects dueling perfumers in Seattle, Paris and New Orleans to a bottle of incomparable perfume created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality. The book follows two interweaving storylines, one in Ancient Eurasia and one in the present day. Jitterbug Perfume is Tom Robbins' fourth novel and was listed on the New York Times Best Seller list in 1985.

The jitterbug perfume