Find Perfumes and Colognes: Aroma and Literature


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Aroma and Literature - by T.C.

Great perfumes have important stories attached to them. Writers present themselves as slaves to aromas; to their sensuality, and so helpless in front of the scents. Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”: musk "troubled the brain" and violets "woke the memory of dead romances". Proust would write that “a perfume is the last and best reserve of the past… the one which when all our tears have run dry, can make us cry again".

French writers between the XVI and XIX centuries, often evoked the perfumes and the odors in their books.

“Cossette was for him a perfume and not a woman. He breathed her”. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862.

“Emma felt, entering, surrounded by a lukewarm air, a mixture of flowers’ perfume and a good combination of scents of meat and truffles”. Gustave Flauvert, Madame Bovary, 1857.

“Pâté, perfumes, scents of Arabia that make the skin sweet, fresh and refined, were extended lavishly”. Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, 1755.

In spite of this dependency toward the material and sensuality, the perfume is stored in the imagination of each of these writers, but the ideas created transcend their source, and the proof of this are the masterpieces that they produced.