Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France

Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France’s nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman’s scent as something alluring, but also something to be controll