Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Perfume

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

What did Napoleon smell like? How many pairs of scented gloves did Marie Antoinette get through a month? And how did the study of perfume become the study of life itself in the 19th century?Kate is joined by Theresa Levitt for this episode to find out about the world of the Parisian perfumiers Laugier and Laurent. Theresa is the author of Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life.Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Super Twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once again to warn you to stay away from this podcast if you are of a sensitive disposition. I have no idea what you're doing here if you're of a sensitive disposition, but here comes your fair do's warning. And then if you continue to listen to this,

and if you get upset with us, you will just have to say it yourself, well, I can't be mad because fair do's, they did warn us. Here we go. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult as well. Have we all got that? I don't actually think that we're super rude today.

But to be honest, I've become so desensitized to what is rude anymore. My bar for shocking is so high? I don't even know. Is perfume a scandalous subject? Because that's what we're talking about today. It's a fascinating subject. Absolutely. It's not particularly rude.

Or we will be talking about. about some pretty minging stuff in the city of Paris, you know, like just rotting, horrible, stinky stuff that might make you gip a bit. I'll definitely be swearing, but I think you can handle this one for Twixters, definitely. And I am ready if you are. Are you like me? Are you a bit of a sucker for perfume? I just loved them. And it's not just the smells of them. It's all the nonsense that they sell with it, the perfume adverts. Because how do you sell a smell, for goodness say. So you head to the local department store or maybe, I don't know, maybe you're in duty-free. And there are just thousands of perfume bottles available now. What do you go for? Something

floral, maybe a bit fruity. Are you somebody you like something woody? Like me, I like a gourmand sweet smell. Perhaps a little bit of all of them. And then maybe you do what I'll do, which is that you try on so many of them that you can't smell any of them anyway. And you've given anyone who's within a 10 metre radius of you, a headache as well. But, never mind my perfume fascination, what was the world like before the perfume industry boomed? What was the start of perfume? What did our ancestors smell like?

What was a sexy smell in the 19th century? What did the celebrity smell like? What did the royalty smell like? What did you want to smell like? And how would you get those perfumes? Hmm, all good questions. And today, betwixt the person. perfume sheets, we are going to find out.

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades, the History of Sex Scandal and Society. With me, Kate Lister. Today, lovely fragrant betwixters, we are off to the 18th and 19th century, Paris in particular,

and we are going to give it a good old sniffing. Oh yes, we are. What would 18th century Paris have smelt like? Well, by most accounts, absolutely fucking rank. Rank! We think of it as a sophisticated romantic city, a fragrant city, no doubt. But in the 18th, 19th, century, like most mass cities across Europe. It stank. Fish markets, butchers, upturned chamber pots, sewage flowing freely in the city's waterways, overfilled cemeteries, food rotting in the streets, dead animal carcasset. I mean, it's just minging. This was a long time before you put out the wheelie bins every week. Rubbish and filth just rotted in the streets. And then there were the perfumiers. and you would need some damp perfume, wouldn't you?

And if you are walking through this olifactory assault course, you are going to be in search of something that smells nice, anything that smells nice. Enter the art of the perfumier, with their many boxes and jars and herbal this and that and essential oils and amber grease, and their whole thing is about attempting to counteract the utter pong that exists around every single.

person. But what were the perfumiers, Eduard Logier and Auguste Laurent looking for? Apart from a northern woman in 21st century who could pronounce their names correctly. I'm very sorry. But what else were they looking for? They weren't just looking for nice nifs, you know. Oh no, they were looking to answer a deeper question. They were trying to work out the secret to life itself. I'm smelling pretty damn good at the same time. Today I am joined by Teresa Levet, author of Elyxia, to dive deeper into this world.

Nostles at the ready. Let's do this. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Teresa Levitt. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I can't wait to talk to you about this subject because I'm a proper perfume fan. Wonderful. I've gone into a very strange phase of buying perfumes online, which is really strange. It doesn't matter how many times I do it. I sit there and I read through all the description of like sandalwood and Jasmine and I'm like, ooh. Oh, the descriptions. Oh, yes. And then I think

I know what it smells like and then it turns up and then I've squirted it and used it and now I can't send it back. Well, this is part of what fascinates me is that scent is something which is almost impossible to put into language, but that means that these perfume advertisements have this incredibly evocative poetry to them that's really very appealing. It must be so difficult if you are advertising a perfume. Like, how are you going to do this? Because you can't just have somebody there on screen sniffing it and going, I'm getting, it's, we're Woody. That's rubbish. Yes, exactly. There are only like so many categories you can have. It's all about evoking a feeling. It is. And I've been suckered by that. And I consider myself a reasonably clever person. And I'm still hopelessly

suckered by advertisements, beauty, perfume. Like I'm sat there watching Charlize Theron emerge from that golden leg. I'm just going, oh my God. I don't know what she smells like, but I need to smell like that as well. Yes. And of course, part of the thing. trick is that what it's actually going to smell like is some amalgam of the perfume and your own scent and skin. So, you know, it's all a bit of alchemy in the end. It's a fascinating history because as long as there have been humans, there've been nasty niffs around. Yes. We've always been concerned about smelling good and smelling attractive, haven't we? Oh, absolutely. In fact, part of my claim here is that the practice of chemistry, if you have its roots down to alchemy, like the first

things that people were trying to really isolate and distill were the sense of plants and perfumes. I mean, it's really sort of very deeply rooted in our effort to try to interact with the natural world and try to understand it and control it. Are you one of those super-smellers, people that can really intensely smell smells? No, I've always sort of enjoyed smelling things. And, you know, to a certain extent you can train yourself a little bit, but there are lots of people that put me to shame. One of the things I love about your research is that you are looking at the science behind this. Before we get into the history, you said about smell being so evocative and that you can't really put it into words. And that's so true because everyone who's listening, I mean, if you

can smell, sorry to the anosmix amongst us, but everyone's had that thing. You smell a smell and then it fires up a memory in the brain and you don't really know what the memory is, but it's something. It is. It's such an underrated, powerful sense, smell. Yeah, it's so crucial to how we experience the world, and yet it gets lost in the historical record, precisely because it's so hard to describe, it's so hard to put into words, it's so hard to get on the documents that historians can deal with. It is, isn't it? It can't really write it down, and yet, I don't think we often recognize quite how integral to our experience smell is. Smells is a thing that might stop you going into a room if it's a really overpowering smell, or if you're walking through a woods and it's fresh and

it's flowers, that makes you feel happy. And it's like an early warning sense as well, like smells of death, smells of decay. They're there to stop you going near things. Absolutely. And particularly in the 17th and 18th century when I work, it was part of the rainy medical theories of the day. Smell was the crucial indicator of what was healthy and what was unhealthy. So the fact that people are pouring their life savings into trying to get perfumes, it was not just about vanity or wanting to smell pleasant to other people, it was really absolutely central to this idea of preserving your life, preserving your health, trying to hang on to some kind of youth in vitality. And we can laugh at them now and say, well, diseases aren't carried

in smells. But for the time, that really was the best indicator that they had of things they should avoid and things that they shouldn't. Yeah. I think you can laugh at it and be like, oh, it's so silly. But there is method in the madness because they believed in something called miasmas, which was that a bad smell carried a disease. But if you think about things that produce bad smells, quite often they do carry diseases, right? Yes. And our noses are extraordinarily good detectors of these things. I mean, we couldn't hope for a better way to try to pick up on something that's decaying or something that's decomposing. And I want to extend a bit because the idea that disease is carried in miasmus was definitely part of it. But in a way, it was actually even

deeper than that because smell had actually been associated with the process of life for centuries. And part of the chemical theories was that you can ask the question of how are living things different from non-living things? One of the answers is, well, they have this complexity to them. How do they get this complexity? So the idea is you start with something undifferentiated, like maybe a seed, and then this can grow into something enormously complex, like an orchid. How does this happen? Well, they say, it was governed by something called the spiritist rector, which is known as a governing spirit or the guiding spirit. And this essentially was equated with the smell of a thing. Because as a

plant grows and develops, its smell is going to mature and sweeten. And so tied back to the idea that alchemy is about trying to capture these essences. The idea is that smell is the most ethereal and volatile component. And it was the most living and vital component that was responsible for why living things are so complex in ways that non-living things are. So the idea that you're trying to capture these smells is also an effort to try to capture the living essence and preserve it. And so these things were genuinely thought of as a way to preserve vitality and life. In the opposite direction, the idea that bad smells, they were not only associated with decay,

but they actually attacked this organization. When something dies, it loses all of this wonderful living. in complexity. And that was what the bad smells were, as they were undoing of complex living nature. Is this 18th, 19th century? Does this go back even earlier than that? It goes back earlier. So it's a central part of chemical theories of 16th, 17th century. It's still the reigning theory of smell throughout the 18th century. Where I start to get really interested is in the 19th century, where you have this sort of advent of what's called modern chemistry after the chemical revolution of Loisier in 1889. And all of these chemists, they rushed to reject it. It's an outdated

mumbo-jumbo. The idea that living things and dead things smell different because they're made differently. Yes, that there's a fundamental distinction between living and non-living and that smell is at the center of it. So this is completely rejected and thought of as backwards. However, it turns out that they're actually right. It turns out that there is, in fact, a distinction between living and non-living things. And smell is crucially at the heart of it. Can you break that down even more for twits like me? To me, a living thing and a dead thing, they would smell different. They would. In fact, that's, as we were saying, quite a crucial, oh, that doesn't smell too great. What does that mean that living things and dead things are made differently? So one of the great triumphs of the 19th century

is that they begin to be able to synthesize chemicals. They begin to be able to make chemicals in their lab. So they're able to make these molecules, which in their minds are completely identical to the natural ones growing in plants. So they're able to replicate these senses. This is the whole basis of the synthetic perfume industry. Synthetic chemicals come very important. And you're able to mimic these sense. And so the assumption is, well, if we can make them in a laboratory, then clearly everything's just made up of the same kind of matter. It's the same atoms. They're put together in the same kind of way. Clearly, there's nothing fundamentally distinct about whatever's going on in a flower to make that molecule. The trick is that they're wrong, and they don't figure that out until

late in the 19th century, but the trick has to do with the three-dimensional shape of these molecules. So in a way, it goes back to this idea of organization that they had, that it's not just atoms in a row. They also have a three-dimensional shape, and sometimes molecules can come in both a right-handed variety and a left-handed variety. And if you're making them in a lab, these both show up 50% of one, 50% of the other. It seems all kind of random. But if they're actually growing in nature, you only get one kinds of these varieties. So this is something scientists still don't know why. It's still a mystery. And it's still the case that if you go to try to make stuff in a lab, it's not going to be the same as something that they're in nature. You can never properly replicate what's in nature, even though all the

atoms look like they should work. Yes, exactly. So it's chemically identical, but because it has this different shape, and the thing is, is that in all the chemical experiments they would do, you wouldn't really notice it. You only notice it when it starts to interact with another molecule, which also has this kind of shape. But that means because our human bodies have this kind of asymmetry to them, that means that it's enormously important in our interaction with these, which is why they can smell different, why these things which are chemically identical, can smell different to us just because of the shape of the molecule. Wow.

That sounds so advanced to me, but that was 19th century that they started making these discoveries? Yeah. So what I found fascinating, in the 19th century, all of the most powerful chemists who had all the academic positions, all of them were utterly convinced that there was no distinction between living and non-living things and that the organization aspect wasn't important. However, the inspiration for this book for me was that I found these dissenting voices.

And interestingly, they were working in these perfume shops. You first start to notice this unusual action in these essential oils of plants, the really fragrant plants. And so they're the ones who are noticing it first. And they're really absolutely bullied by the academic chemists. Nobody wants to believe them. Sounds about right. Yeah. And it takes a very long time for people to figure out exactly what's going on.

And it was perfumiers or perfumers, I'm not sure which one it is, that started to argue that you can't replicate perfectly a scent found in nature. Yeah, so they were working together with these physicists. And again, the smell aspect, this idea that often smell gets sort of written out of a historical record was, I think, kind of crucial in all of this, that the papers that are being submitted to the Academy of Sciences don't necessarily go on and on about the smell. But that was one of the guiding principles in a lot of what they were doing.

Do we have a good understanding of what smell is and why smell works now? Or is it one of those areas that's still a lot of like, oh, we don't really know where that does that. Yes, it's absolutely still a giant mystery. I feel like there's several intertwined mysteries in this. One is we don't fully understand how our nose is able to distinguish. It can distinguish what people think maybe like a trillion different smells. It's extraordinary. And people aren't really sure how. And again, this idea of the three-dimensional shape of the molecule seems like a crucial. part of the story. Also, another mystery bound up in all of this is how did life originate on earth in the first place? It's thought that if you can figure out why all of these living molecules have this particular asymmetry, that can help explain how living things came in the first place. I think a lot of people are surprised that there are still some really huge mysteries left for science to explain. Have you read perfume by Patrick Suskind? That's one of my favorite books. Oh, yes. It is. It's just such.

an extraordinary ability to make you feel like you're right there. It's so visceral. And it was reading his book for the first time made me think, maybe smell is much more important in just human experience than we think it is. For those of you that haven't read it and do, because it's brilliant. It's about a very young, strange little man called Jean-Baptiste, I think. And he is a super-smeller like there's been no super-smeller before. And he works out that it's smell that makes people like one another or not like one another

or treat each other differently or want to be around. someone and it's so fascinating. Is there any basis for that in science? Has there been any research on that done that smell can really impact mood and human interaction? Oh, absolutely. The idea that you actually sort of suss out who you're attracted to through smell without knowing it. In German, the way you say that you're into someone or that you like them is, which is, I smell you. Oh, I love that. That's amazing. And everybody does have their own unique smells. I think I smell very strongly and smell people very strongly. I like that, Germany. Well done. Let's talk about the history of smells a little bit. So you predominantly researched the 18th and the

19th century. And if you were to be transported back into a city in the 18th century, let's say Paris, because they were big on perfume. What would that smell like? I've left this absolutely convinced that at the dawn of the 18th century, Paris was the single worst smelling place in like the history of humankind because you hadn't really had this experience of people living in such close proximity, really just sort of piled on top of one another. So there's absolutely no way to avoid smelling each other, smelling each other's bodies, smelling all the stuff that comes out of each other's bodies. I mean, this is a period of time when nobody took baths. It was considered unhealthy, in fact, to take baths to apply hot water to your skin because it would open up the

pores and let in the bad air. So nobody bathed. There was no plumbing. There was all of the chamber pots, which you either threw out in the street or you left it in the corner for the night soil men to come. There's no refrigeration. So again, in these large cities, they'd be dominated by these open-air fish markets, open-air cheese markets. I mean, I think it really was a moment when you could not escape smelling people in a way that was much more intense than it had been if people we're living in smaller communities. So it's both the worst smelling moment of history, but it's also this moment when people tried very hard to escape all of this. The creation of Versailles, for example, I mean, there are lots of reasons that go into it. But one of them,

I'm utterly convinced, is that the royal family wanted to escape the stench of Paris. And indeed, they put an enormous amount of effort into making sure that every room, every space that they enter is sweetly perfumed. But no toilets in the original Versailles. Is that right? That seems like a massive oversight. And also no bathing. Louis the 14th never bathed. But they had these elaborate regimes meant to combat that. For example, Louis the 14th, you never took a bath, but he would change his shirt several times a day. And he would wipe himself with these perfumed claws. And every shirt that he wore had been soaked and steeped in these perfume tinctures as well. So he would put on a perfume shirt several times a day just to keep himself smelling nice.

Did he smell nice? Have we got any reports? You don't give the king a good sniffing? Did it work? His nickname was the sweet flowery one. I'll be back with Teresa after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this month on not just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was Amy Dudley pushed down a flight of stay? to her death. Was it a quarrel, or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe actually murdered? And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman who allegedly killed hundreds of young women?

Join me for not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the not bathing. You said they didn't want to let the bad air in. Where did that come from? Yes, exactly. It had to do with the heat opening the pores of the skin, I think, was the medical reasoning behind it. Versailles was famously filthy, wasn't it? Even if they tried to build it to get away from the smell, it stank. Absolutely. Well, parts of it stank. All of the courtiers as well.

Sometimes perfume could be the single highest household expense for them. So they too, you know, we have this sort of visual image. They have this thick pancake makeup and they have all this powder in their hair. What we don't realize is that those were all perfumed. So the powder and the paste were really seen as carriers of scent in some way. So each person would be walking around in their own little cloud of scents, their scented handkerchiefs, they had little vials of perfume that they'd carry around their neck to smell. So there were, of course, moments of it's impossible to skate the piles of human waste around the corner.

But people did have the protective cloud that they would walk around in. What would they smell like? Like if you were walking around 18th century Vassai and you're like, I need to smell good and you've got the scent woven into lots of different things, what were the sense that they were using and who was making them? Who was like a big perfumier? Well, you get a transition from the 17th to the 18th century. A lot of the earlier perfumes were what we were called these animalics with a lot of musk and civet.

Because these had a lot of staining power and would really stick around for a long time. But as you're moving into the 18th century, they become much more lighter and floral and citrusy. And again, the impetus for a lot of this is this idea of health and vitality and these are thought to be healthier. And what you see is the entire

country of France is essentially transformed to grow flowers for Versailles, particularly in the south of France, Provence, around Grasse, you get hillsides become devoted to growing flowers. You've got the native lavender from Provence. You know, this is the era of the East India trading companies. They're bringing Jasmine from India. They bring in Tuberos from Mexico. They're bringing in all of these flowers. And so you get dozens of different kinds, hyacinth and jankwels. And there's an entire industry given over to denuding an entire hillside of its flower petals and then distilling that down and shipping it up to Versailles. It's actually quite sophisticated then. I don't know why I thought that like 18th to the 19th century perfume would be like me when I was a kid with rose petals and mushing it up in some water.

But it sounds like it's actually quite densely layered perfumes and quite complex perfumes. Yes, absolutely. Well, you get it. There are a couple of different avenues coming together. One of them is this alchemical drive of trying to distill. the essence of things. And here, already by the 17th century, you're getting really very complicated recipes, recipes that call for 170 different ingredients that are really viewed primarily as medicinal elixirs in some way. Queen of Hungary's Water, for example, also things like chartreuse, the liqueur is part of this thing. So you get these recipes, which are not only very complex, but they're also kept secret. A lot of times the alchemists are like writing them down in a secret code

so that other people won't be able to know them. And then you're also getting the massive escalation of an industrial scale going on in Provence, in France, where you get these enormous teams. Everybody in a village would go out. You know, you have about a window of like one hour in the morning to pick the Jasmine, for example. So everyone in the village, they'd go out and pick the Jasmine. And then they'd lay it down on thousands and thousands of these sheets that have fat smeared on them. So they would lay it down.

And then there'd be a process of changing out the rose petals every three days or so. That's how they do it. They smear it on fat. So each flower needs its own technique. So in some cases, like lavender, for example, you can just put it in boiling water and get sort of a steam distillation of it. But really very delicate ones like Jasmine. The only way that you can do it is, yeah, try to have some kind of fat which will soak up the scent.

And so, yeah, the process becomes highly regimented where you place the flower petals on and then after a few days they would be denuded of their scent. You pluck them off. you put a new batch on. You would do this several times over, and they're different ratings for how many batches it's gone through. Wow. Do they still do it like, no, they wouldn't still do it like that, would they? Or do they?

Yes, for Jasmine flowers, yeah. Wow. Some very delicate flowers. It's hard to come up with other ways. Do we have any of these secret perfume recipes written down? Like, do we know what Louis the 14th smelled like? Like, what was his perfume made of, or Marie Antoinette or any of them? Like, what would they smell like?

We do. There's actually an institute in France that is dedicated to preserving these historical scents. Oh, my God, I didn't know that. The Osmotech. It's not necessarily easy to go over there and smell all the stuff that they have in their archives, but they'll occasionally allow people. Oh, I'm definitely going to do that. Is that open to the public then that you can go and just smell things?

Not exactly. I mean, I think that you can make arrangements. I think that they have various horses that you can take. They let you smell some of the stuff. So what did someone like Marie Antoinette smile like? Do we know that? Like what was in her perfume? She started this whole trend of these light floral scents.

So things like rose, for example, citrusy smells. She would go through 18 scented gloves a week. Wow. The scented gloves, what you'd do is you would lay flower petals on them. Again, it was this excruciating process where you're going layer after layer of flower petals that you're laying on them to pick up the scent. So she would wear a pair of gloves once and then toss it out. She had this little play farm that she would.

go for fun. What she'd like to do is put perfumes over all of the livestock on her farm so that they wouldn't smell bad. It took an extraordinary amount of effort to get these perfumes and then they were just being sort of splashed everywhere in the Royal Court. Artifist true, but I read that she would bathe in strawberries. I mean, that's extra, isn't it? There's people out there starving and she's just having a strawberry bath. But again, the idea of the freshness of the fruits. It's an effort to try to get at what's living and vital in these plants and sort of suck it up. for yourself as a rejuvenating elixir. Do we have records of people having a personal perfumes made

and they're famous perfumers? But do we have any idea of what was the first blockbuster perfume? Like, what was the Chanel number five of the 18th century? Did it work like that? Were they like brands that people get really excited about? Well, there were recipes. It goes back even a little bit earlier, but Queen of Hungary's water is probably the first thing that people would really order.

It's a perfume. It actually has a lot of a rosemary in it. So for us, it would feel, it's not particularly, sweet. It would be very pungent and spicy in some ways. But again, the idea of it, the Queen of Hungary, which is ordering it, is as much to protect you from disease as anything else. So this was something that was often worn in a vial. If you're in the presence of something that smells bad, you could smell that. The big breakout is the Ode Cologne in the turn of the 18th, 19th century. It had actually been created much earlier. It had been created in the city of Cologne by an Italian importer. So he

He imported a bunch of fresh fruits from Italy, but this became a way for him to take these, mostly citrus fruits. He has like seven different kinds of citrus, and he's distilling it down into something that he's selling. He's calling it the miracle water, which is pretty common. That was a pretty common thing, which again was half medicinal, half cosmetic. But it really breaks out of this moment when during the French Revolution, the French army, you know, expands its way across the Rhine. The French soldiers are in Cologne, so they bring some of this back to Paris. and then there's a little craze in Paris for it. And that's when it starts to become the Ode-Cologne.

That's why it's in French, even though the makers were not French speakers. What's the difference between Ode-Cologne and perfume? Is there a difference? Well, now there's a designation in the percentage of scent in it. At the time, the word Cologne simply referred to the City of Cologne. All of this was, is this was the special miracle water that you got from the City of Cologne. And there was also, there was an Ode-Péry. It was one of several different kinds of restaurants.

but it becomes the sort of breakout one. Napoleon becomes a huge fan. He goes through pretty much a bottle a day. Wow. A bottle a day. Yes. And you can see for him, it really is not about vanity or being attractive. For him, it's all about harnessing its vital powers. He claims that it makes him think better. So for example, he'll pour a lot in a bath and then he'll like sit in this bath for an hour while he's reading his correspondence and talking to. the people that he works with. He said to keep a bottle in his boots so that when he needs a little brain boost, he can like sniff it and he thinks clearer. Okay, that's a powerful perfume. We don't have any idea what that smelled like, though, or do we?

Oh, absolutely, we do. There were 100 different makers back in Cologne. As soon as it became popular, everybody started making it and claiming that they were the original one. This one was not, in fact, the original one, but it has emerged as the standard that you would buy today. So you can easily buy it in a store, and it's pretty close to what Napoleon would have been smelling, yeah.

Except he would have really smelled like that, wouldn't he? And also the other thing, it was also fairly common at this time to drink perfumes. No, it wasn't. No. Oh. Well, not necessarily like down a whole bottle, but you would put a few drops in wine or you'd put a few drops in water. The early one, like the Queen of Hungary's water, you could put some in a spoonful and take it in your mouth. The reason we don't drink perfume now is because they put,

a denaturing agent in it, which makes it poison. But of course, they didn't start doing that until the late 19th century. So up until then, it was really just like a particularly strong liqueur is what it was. Wow. Okay. That makes a bit more sense about why Napoleon would be sat in a bath of it and why it would make him think. I love going by this and trying to think, what would they have smelled like? I mean, it would be such an integral part of who historical people were. What was their smell? What a Queen Victoria smell? like, what did Abraham Lincoln smell like? Yeah, well, you do get trends. In the early 19th century with Napoleon, it was all very, very citrusy and zesty. It was sort of very zingy and ephemeral. Then towards the middle of the century, you get these sweeter, floral, sort of rose hyacin

sense. And then as you're getting into this more synthetic era, it becomes this really interesting question of they start to produce smells that actually don't correspond to anything in nature. So the first big breakout synthetic was called Fugier Royale, which means the royal fern, which was precisely named after a fern which had no smell in nature. But they felt like it was not too sweet. It's what they imagined a fern would smell like, green and humid. Because I suppose that's true. When you actually think about the stuff that's going into perfumes, it smells more like what you imagine the thing to smell like than the actual object itself, doesn't it? Like cherry-flavored sweets. Do you not taste like cherries or smell like.

at all. I'm going to finish by bringing you back to where we started about who were the perfumers who were trying to argue that living molecules and dead molecules are different because they smell different and we can't replicate it. Who were they? So it's this perfume house called Maison Logier and they were founded actually in the middle of the 18th century right before the big names like Ubigand and Farchion. So they were a little earlier. So by the 1830s when I'm sort of paying attention to what they're doing there, the oldest. continuous running perfume house in Paris. And this is the grandson of the original founder, who has been learning a lot of chemistry. He wants to be a chemist. He brings in a friend of his.

Also, they're trying to be chemists. But again, the academic chemists are really being very difficult about letting them into the profession. So instead, they're just working in these backrooms of the perfume house, which are a great place to work. I mean, they've got all of this distillation equipment. They're doing some of the most advanced forms of the, distillation anywhere in Paris. Did they write it in a paper? Did they put forward the argument that it was dispelled? Well, it takes a long time.

So one of them writes up this massive treaties where he's like, you know, we can't just think about what atoms are present in a molecule. We also have to think about the arrangement and the organization of this molecule. So he writes that up and he's utterly crucified by the academic chemist. There's one moment where like the whole place erupts in laughter at his ideas. So it's a long, in many ways, tragic story for the two of them. The end of his life, he's completely impoverished. He doesn't have any sort of position.

This is August Laurent, is this guy. So he managed to sort of like beg from a friend, a corner in this friend's laboratory that he can work in. So he's working there. He has to work with the absolute cheapest ingredients because he can't afford anything else. But while he's working there, there's this teenage lab assistant that sort of notices what he's doing.

And he comes over and asks him to show like what's, what's going on. And so this teenage lab assistant actually turns out to be Louis Pasteur, who goes on to make these insights the cornerstone of really all of his work over the next several decades. And so Pasteur is sort of the one who is pointing out that there's actually something very real about this distinction between living and non-living things that they're pointing to. And we owe that to the history of perfume. Wow, that is amazing. And my final question to you, Teresa, is what is your favorite perfume? What do you go to? This is a tough one because I'm not a huge perfume wearer.

I enjoy being sort of surrounded by scents, but you know, I have to do it. I'm kind of a sucker for these lemony, zesty. Napoleon-type smells. You could conquer Europe with that one. They get my brain thinking. You've been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So you can look for the book on Amazon.

It's called Elixir, a story of perfume, science, and the search for the secret of life. That is amazing. Thank you so much. I've absolutely loved talking to you about this. Well, I've had a wonderful time. Thank you so much for having me. My absolute pleasure. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Teresa for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again between the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds.