Showing posts with label scent in literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scent in literature. Show all posts

Monday, December 13, 2021

Anne Rice's novel Exit to Eden and the author's favorite Chanel perfume

 Anne Rice, the author of the gothic novel Interview with the Vampire, among many many others in different genres, has died at the age of 80. You might have read the obituary, you might also have read her books, she was mighty popular; and for good reason.


The sad news of her passing prompted a memory to surface, one I don't believe I have talked about before. In one of her novels, Exit to Eden, a bdsm erotica novel from 1985 written under the nom de plume Anne Rampling, and later under her own name, there is an exquisite (her favorite word) excerpt that focuses on perfume perception.

The plot line goes like this: They call her the Perfectionist. A stunning, mysterious, and fearless sexual adventurer, Lisa is founder and supreme mistress of The Club—an exclusive island resort where forbidden fantasy meets willing flesh. A thrill-seeking photojournalist, Elliott risks his life daily in the most dangerous, war-torn regions on Earth. Now he has come to Paradise to explore his most savage and vulnerable sexual self, committed to the ultimate plunge into personal risk.

In the initial chapters, when Lisa and Elliot first play together, a mention of Chanel perfume is mentioned. 

"Tall but not as tall as all the men were here. And there was that sweet, intoxicating scent of Chanel. No doubt about it. She was there. The woman in my life."

and elsewhere

"The perfume was Chanel, and it came in little waves, like with her pulse."

 Chanel, but which Chanel perfume? At the time of printing, mid-1980s, the available feminine fragrances in circulation were predominantly Chanel No.5, Chanel No.19 and Cristalle. And out of the three, No.5 seemed more likely to be the candidate for the piercing, projecting, sweet fragrance mentioned. Or so I thought. I had forgotten that in the USA, where Anne Rice resided, the cult of an old Chanel perfume had never died and the scent was still available for purchase.

Anne Rice herself has shed light into her personal favorite perfume, stating " For over thirty years, I've been wearing Chanel No.22 and Chanel has stopped making my favorite perfume. [ed.n: she lamented it being discontinued in the 1990s before the re-issue in the Les Exclusifs line after 2005] I hope they make chanel no.22 again."  In 2014 she was also put into record in an interview on The Guardian as claiming No.22 by Chanel being her favorite smell. 

Which is odd in regards to being included in the novel, since its cultural image was as far removed from the whips and chains brigade as possible.  


This discrepancy however is very much helping to delineate the character of both Lisa and Elliott and to foreshadow their blossoming romance which turns them from bdsmers to vanilla lovers by the end of the book.

Many have wondered over the years whether Anne was part of the Scene herself; some of her descriptions sound true and really heart-felt, quite the opposite of 50 Shades of Grey. I guess we will never know for sure. One thing is for certain, ms. Rice put something of herself in one of her literary characters. And I find that quite touching. In the moment of her passing, I hope her dear ones remembered to sprinkle her belongings with a final spray of No.22

photo borrowed from poshmark

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: Chanel reviews & news, Aldehydic Floral Fragrances for Beginners, BDSM and scents.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Courtesans, Luxury & Bourgeoisie in Mid-19th Century Paris: Status in Honore de Balzac's 'Cousin Bette'

"Marneffe, destroyed by the debaucheries peculiar to great capital cities, described by the Roman poets but for which our modern sense of decency has no name, had become as hideous as a wax anatomical model. But this walking specimen of disease, dressed in fine cloth, was supported on spindle-sharks clad in elegant trousers. His shriveled chest was clothed in perfumed white linen, and musk smothered the fetid odors of human decay."

The sanitation of 19th century European cities meant that scent had lost its prophylactic symbolism rampant in centuries before, when it was supposed to chase away miasmata, according to social historian Alain Corbin, and yet the masking action of scent had not yet become obsolete, as revealed by the above passage from Cousin Bette (La cousine Bette).

The syphilis-stricken Monsieur Marneffe, rotting from the inside out, is presented as outwardly perfectly fitting his bourgeois respectability. His presentation also belies the moral rot that mangles his heart; he pimps his wife, Valérie Marneffe, to ascend socially from clerk in the War ministry to head floor manager, and to put his plan into motion, he pimps her (or encourages her dubious dalliances) not to one but to four men at the same time.

Honoré de Balzac, that most painter-like of all social surgeon novelists this side of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, delivers one of his most astonishing portraits of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of a novel world under the Louis Philippe reign, the July Monarchy, in Cousin Bette. It is indeed "one of the finest of my finest works" as the author wrote at the time in a letter addressed to his mistress Madame Henska.

His 1846 answer to Eugène Sue's tremendous cultural imprint (le roman feuilleton titled Les Mystères de Paris) reprises the themes of good & evil, poor & rich, as represented by characters like the morally flawed Marneffe pair, the poor and conniving seamstress that is the eponymous "cousin Bette" (i.e. Lisbeth Fischer), the courtesans Josépha, Jenny Cadine and Carabine, the exile artist Steinbock, the struggling Hulot family and the Crevel tradesman, the latter representative of the nouveaux riches. Balzac does so with such minutiae detail throughout, furnishing the contemporary setting of 1840s Paris, that he makes Cousin Bette a fascinating social and economical tapestry of the era.

It is enough to consider that Louis Philippe was addressed as "King of the French", rather than as "King of France", thus signaling a break with L'Ancien Régime and the embracing of the nascent bourgeoisie.

Perhaps of most interest to these pages is the accurate reflection of the emergence of this new stratification of society which relies on money earned in the reappearing trades of luxury after the hiatus following the 1789 Revolution; this time, not designed by minister Colbert to appeal to the aristocracy or by the Emperor Napoléon to gild his regime, but approachable to and originating from the middle classes.

Central to the plot, the Hulot family relies on previous capital acquired via Empire wages to Baron Hector Hulot, the tragic protagonist fighting with his sexual obsession, War Ministry positions won on the repute of his former glories, lawyer wages on behalf of his son Victorin, insurance policies as well as signed bills of exchange and loans. On the other hand, the equally central and plot-driving Monsieur Crevel, young Hulot's father-in-law and Hector's wife Adeline's suitor in the very opening of the novel, is a retired perfumer.

Easily the richest  man in the microcosmos of Cousin Bette, Crevel's bourgeois status is contrasted to the Hulot and even the Marneffe households, such is his relative crassness. To make a comparison, Hector Hulot makes 25,000 francs a year via his salary, and is in dire need of 200,000 francs to marry his daughter Hortense. "Respectability...begins at 50,000 francs of annual unearned income" Valerie Marneffe, an indirect nouveau riche, declares at some point. A Parisian student would survive with the bare minimum of 1,200 francs a year. The gap with the emerging class is huge. Retired perfumer Crevel starts with 2 million francs in capital in 1838 affording him an annual income of 80,000 francs. By 1843, when Crevel marries the freshly widowed Valérie Marneffe, his fortune must have risen still, as the property he buys alone costs 3 million francs, not to mention costs of living and the riches showered for years on Madame Marneffe. Not only has his trade earned him monetary advantages beyond everyone else, he has been a deputy mayor, captain in the National Guard and Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

It is not said what perfumes he composed and sold at La Reine des Roses, his shop situated on the Rue Saint-Honore, the newly fashionable district of the bourgeoisie-aimed "luxury" trades (and the footing of many luxury houses to this day catering to the wealthy). The Almanach-Bottin du Commerce cites 151 perfume houses in 1840, a mere 6 years before the writing and publication of Cousin Bette.

Seeing as Crevel has close contact (and in fact rivals over) the courtesans du jour, like the Jewess Opera singer Josépha, the tart with a heart of gold as it transpires later in the novel, the "number of pretty women reeking of patchouli" as Balzac puts it, gathered at her previous lodgings in the Rue Chauchet, could be wearing his products.


Josepha's new house, in the Rue de la Ville-d'-Eveque, given her by the powerful Duc d'Hérouville, merits a description worthy of the nouveaux riches in all their luxuria-showing fashion.

"Having asked for the number of the house, the Baron took a milord and alighted at one of those pretty modern houses with double doors where everything, even the gas lamps at the entrance, proclaims luxury."

But not only the courtesans profit from the aromatic and cosmetic preparations furnished by houses like that of the fictional Crevel, and the very real ones by the names of Guerlain, Houbigant , L.T. Piver, Charles Gallet, Pinaud, Raynaud and the like. Many of them had the modest beginnings of Crevel; Antonin Raynaud, the son of a butcher in Grasse, became a partner in the Legrand perfumery and took over a short 3 years later. Most gained similar advantages thanks to their social status afforded them by their trade. Alphonse-Honoré Piver was knighted in 1867 and became an officer in 1878, Aimé Guerlain was knighted in 1892. [1] These perfumers promoted their names as brands, enhancing the value of their wares, taking advantage of their enhanced social standing and thus placing a symbolic value on their products; the modern definition of luxury.


Lisbeth (Bette) Fischer is transformed from ugly and insignificant, bitter spinster by her ally in evil, madame Marneffe, via the synergy of what the luxury trades of mid-19th century Paris could afford her. In fact the broadening of perfume's and other luxurious products "social diffusion invites questions about perfume's identification at that time as a luxury product" [2].

"A revolutionary change had taken place in Cousin Bette. Valérie, who had insisted on choosing the old maid's clothes, had profited greatly from it.
This strange woman, her slender figure now properly corseted, used bandoline lotion for her well-smoothed hair, accepted her dresses as the dressmaker delivered them, and wore elegant little boots and grey silk stockings which were, moreover, included in the tradesmen's bills to Valerie and paid for by whoever was entitled to settle them."


The role of added wiles reprises erotic quota in the hands of the duplicitous Valérie Marneffe.

"Out of the corner of her eye and in the mirror, she had been watching the expression on Monte's face; she thought that in his pallor she saw signs of the weakness which makes such strong men captive to the fascination of women. She took him by the hand, going so close to him that he could smell those powerful, beloved perfumes that intoxicate men in love. And feeling his heart beat faster, she looked at him reproachfully."

Valérie Marneffe, the married woman who destroys the Hulot family with her "kept woman" ways, exchanging favors of a sexual nature for increasing sums of money, effectively bleeding Hector Hulot dry, has only ever been enticed sentimentally by the Brazilian Baron Montès who will ultimately prove her nemesis. And yet, when caught in an illicit and shameful tryst by him with another young man not her husband, she uses her courtesan wiles to gain footing into Montès's heart again. Such is her erotic power and the outward respectability of "the bourgeois married woman" that she seems to gain momentum for a while. Like the French author mentions elsewhere:
"Hortense was a lovely morsel of flesh, as Valerie said to Lisbeth, but Madame Marneffe had a spirited demeanor and the piquancy of vice. Devotion like Hortense's is a feeling that a husband thinks is his due. [...] A disdainful woman, above all a dangerous woman, stimulates curiosity, as spices enhance the flavor of good food."

The relative anonymity with which the perfumes and other luxury products are recycled in Cousin Bette are completely integrated into the budding shift happening in the market. The differentiation of products once sold as commodities and slowly turned into "brands" in the 1860s ~and more markedly in the 1880s and 1890s thanks to the mechanization and the introduction of synthetic compounds~ shifted the artisanal value of the raw materials into a symbolic value placed on a product whose production cost had significantly decreased.
Contrary to the art world, in which the destruction of all molds and models for the statuettes, figures and sculptures meant the uniqueness and originality of the purchased goods, "the last word in modern luxury" as Balzac mentions, the world of cosmetic preparations and perfumes has been irrevocably democratized. The next major step in this course will happen in the beginning of the 20th century with François Coty.


[1] [2] Business History Review 85 (summer 2011), Eugenie Briot. Harvard College ISSN 0007-6805; 2044-768X (web)

Monday, June 16, 2014

The Lover's Hair

James Jacques Tissot, Mme & M.Mauperin en Égypte

"She came to live only through him and for him, by his presence, by the thought of him, by his future, his portrait, which she carried when she last met him. When she parted from him, she ran her hands through his hair several times and then put on her gloves quickly. All the following day she breathed, sitting next to her husband, next to her daughter, in her house, the smell of her beloved and of his hair, which emanated from her hands, which she had not washed."

Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, Renée Mauperin (1864).

Monday, June 2, 2014

Decadent Perfume Rituals: The Earrings of Salammbo

In Gustave Flaubert's antiquity-woven novel Salammbô (1862), lesser known than his enduring classic Madame Bovary but equally masterful, set in Carthage after the First Punic War with Rome, the eponymous heroine indulges in a ritual which is sure to have the antennae of every perfume lover out there twitching with delight.

Salammbo by Gaston Bussiere via pinterest

Salammbô wore earrings made from two little sapphire scales supporting two perforated pearls filled with scented oils, which slowly dripped their perfume over her body throughout the day, entrancing Mathô, the Libyan leader of the mercenaries, in the scene when she wants into his tent: "A little drop would fall every moment through the holes in the pearl and moisten her naked shoulder. Mathô watched it fall. […] He opened his nostrils the better to breathe in the perfume which exhaled from her person". What did these scented oils consist of? How did they smell exactly? "It was a fresh, indefinable emanation, which nevertheless made him dizzy, like the smoke from a perfuming-pan. She smelt of honey, pepper, incense, roses, with another odour still." The writer leaves something to our fertile imagination…

Salammbo by Jules Toulot via pinterest

But contrary to the Salome-imbued images of western perception of the oriental femme fatale, Salammbô's garments are modest and concealing, leaving the thrill of the seduction to her ingenious earrings; Flaubert outlines the mystical thrill of the exotic women of the east in unconventional terms. Of course Flaubert has also delineated the demure exoticism of Madame Amoux in L'Education Sentimentale and was known for his sniffing (almost) fetish ~keeping his mistress's mittens in a drawer to smell when the mood stroke~ which he reproduced into his writing in such phrases as "Her comb, her gloves, her rings were to him things of great interest".

The scent of the desired woman becomes a detail which catches the fantasy quota of the reader like nothing else.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Valentine's Day Special: The Scent of Unrequited or Impossible Love (Valentine's Countdown part 5)

"And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen" [1]

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wirtherings, of tarnishings."[2]

via etsy
So often we focus on Valentine's Day as the occasion when one MUST be coupled to participate in the holiday or when one should at the very least have a romantic interest at the ready if they're single. Obviously some are happily married (such as The Non Blonde) or happily single (such as Chemist in a Bottle) with whom I organized a small joint project; they have their own anecdotes to share.
Poor me I reverted this year to that pool of endless discoveries: literature and specifically two cases of unrequited or impossible love.

One of them revolves around the impossibility of the love of the nymphet, of a "Lolita", in Vladimir Nabovok's famous and stylistically memorable novel of the same name. Indeed one can hardly call it a love story, tragic or otherwise. Although possibly everything must have been written around this lyrical tome and its "poetics of betrayal" ~and the issue of pedophilia is arising again in public consciousness due to the recent allegations (re)thrown at Woody Allen's face decades later~ one of the aspects that hasn't been quite explored yet is the insistence of the emigre writer on the scented aspect of Humbert's unrequited, obsessive (and yes, ultimately sickly) love. It is a sort of love, no doubt, because he expresses all the symptoms of eros. His male gaze is held by the thread of fascination: on the one hand of the unknowing pull that the nymphet, Dolores Haze, has upon him,;on the other hand his sophisticated European professorial veneer recognizes that the stuff arousing the little one's admiration is uniformly "trash" ~she lacks the necessary critical distance to judge it. (This includes celebrity and film magazines,  shops with knick knack souvenirs, comics etc.)

via pinterest
Humbert's own inherited profession is a perfume company, to which he pays little business attention throughout the novel, but which seems to have an indirect yet potent pull in the machinations of his love patterns. There is a specific reference to the unidentified "musky and powdery" scent of his formative love interest, the child Annabel, when he was of comparable age at the French Riviera, which he traces to her borrowing it from the Spanish maid (a reference that might indicate Maja by Myrurgia or even Habanita by Molinard, promoted with a Latin-sounding name and popular in France). But Humbert also references another unidentified perfume in the memorable poem he dedicates to his lost love towards the close of the novel.

"My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?"

Soleil Vert literally translates as "green sun" and isn't among the many historical fragrances which I am aware of. Supposedly this secret smell, this surreal sun which evokes the variations of light shone upon the two unlikely lovers constantly mentioned in the novel, is the one which has bonded the memory of her to him, a gift from him; one which he chose for her. Much like he chose one for her mother's sake, the landlady he had betrothed a little while before her tragic death in the hopes of keeping at the nymphet's side. But it is still interesting to contrast how mother Haze tricks Humbert into thinking he is going to be picking up perfume for a friend of hers, as an intended gift, when in fact the perfume is then held hostage to be used by the flirtatious woman herself in an equally sorrowful love tension tormenting the love-struck Charlotte in the hopes of catching her tenant's (unrequited) amorous interest.

via VioletHour/pinterest

Another memorable incident of scent marking the impossibility of love shared in literature comes from a part of the life-long diaries of Anais Nin, amassed in the tome titled Henry & June in which she recounts her rising desire for sexual and erotic exploration despite her genuine love for her banker husband, Hugo. Her adventuring desire positively detonates upon meeting the writer Henry Miller (famous for his own unabashed depictions of sexual exploration and erotic experiences in his work) and his beautiful, destitute, but "destructive"wife June Mansfield. The two women indulge in a bit of Sapphic intimacy marking the impossibility of a fully fledged relationship in the context of the mores of the times, or more importantly as the writer continually stresses her feelings of love and friendship for her husband whom she won't quit and June's detached state in life. But it is again perfume, this time in the form of Guerlain's Mitsouko, which creates the tension of memory for the star-crossed lovers.

June asks for Anais to gift her with her perfume as a memento. The perfume is again mentioned as being the thing she notices and keeps as a memory from Anais' house. It's referenced by monetary value too (it's expensive for poor Miller and his wife). It's implied as a mysterious veil that captures the essence of Anais too. In a way, the Guerlain perfume loses some of the respectability and bourgeois factor it enjoys as the scent of choice of a banker's wife and earns through this impossible love, this fated affair, the reputation of a scent that signals a capitulation to some erotic journey of the mind and of the soul.

Anais and another Guerlain perfume, L'Heure Bleue, are wonderfully, poignantly tied in a love poem which I had read a while ago and I hereby quote for you.

"The blue hour perfume hesitates
like a turquoise tear, before falling
cerulean through her hourglass night;
a mauve nocturne of
low saxophone notes
and amaretto sorrows,
echoing footfalls of younger years
departing her dark almond-forest hair;
so as not to awaken from a dream
about to come true, blossoming
within herself; an indigo rose,
unfolding lavender lovers
pressed violet against her lips."


found on Underground voices, Don Pesavento

[1] Vladimir Nabokov
[2] Anais Nin

Don't forget to check out the links for the posts of my friends:

Gaia on The Non Blonde
and Lucas on Chemist in a Bottle.

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