The Smell of War: The Senses on Alert (part 2)

It was Shakespeare who wrote, ""Cry havoc!, and let loose the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial."
In part 1 of my article on The Smell of War (HERE) I extrapolated the scents that plagued the combat fields of WWI and the fragrances which were created in that fateful era as solace and as memory.

Since chemical weaponry had been so notoriously used during WWI to great impact, as we have elaborated before, by the time WWII soldiers were fully engaged there were posters warning them about the smells they should avoid to protect themselves from terrible pulmonary harm and skin burning, an olfactory compass that directed them away from musty hay or green corn (for phosgene), geraniums (for lewisite), flypaper smell (for chlorpicrine), and garlic-horseradish-mustard (rather predictably for mustard gas).

Amidst the newer weapons of smelly compounds for WWII, one catches our attention by its intricate psychological concept behind it. Who Me? was a top secret sulfurous stench weapon developed by the American Office of Strategic Services in the 1940s to be used by the French Resistance against German officers. This stinky bomb smelled strongly of fecal matter, and was issued in pocket atomizers, sort of like modern pepper spray, intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer, humiliating him and, by extension, demoralizing the occupying German forces. Needless to say that the fact that the fecal smelling compounds were largely based on sulfur, a light molecule that easily leaked into the clothes and skin of the assailant, a fact which confirmed the swift failure of such putrid, but essentially harmless, weaponry as Who Me?.

Perfumery rose to the challenge of bypassing the foul and the fragrant, of vicious and frightening smells, to bring a respite after the war that would celebrate the return to normalcy. Boys raised on farms, coming to pee themselves out of terror for garlic or geraniums that would signal risk of death, would come home to find themselves greeted by fragrances that needed to soothe, but also to heal, which is not quite the same thing. Feeding the longing for serenity was a mission. Naming the new fragrances gave half the game away sometimes.

Air Nouveau by Houbigant was ushering the new era, full of optimism and willing to put to rest the angst that plagued Europe and the world for more than a decade with repercussions lasting beyond that time frame.

This is a small part of a longer article which I published on Fragrantica. You can read it in its entirety here.

Carmelite Water: The Melissa Tonic that Threatened to Assassinate the Cardinal Richelieu

One day in 1635, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, commonly referred to as Le Cardinal Richelieu, sniffed his talisman of Eau de Melissa, and discovered a discrepancy to its scent. A refined nose, or a well familiar smell gone awry, it quickly alerted him to foul play. Apparently Le Duc d'Orleans had had the contents tampered with, as an analysis of the contents of the bottle later proved. It seems like replacing the gemstones on the queen's necklace, featured so prominently as a Richelieu plot device in the Dumas novel of The Three Musketeers, is not without its peer in real life!

The story of this evil plot of assassination through poisoned aromatic cordial is not without precedent, but it definitely prompted one of the first commercial uses of a seal of authenticity. The Carmelite nuns who had been producing Eau de Melissa under their own aegis, marketed as Carmelite Water, proceeded into sealing their products with a red wax bearing the seal of their convent.

All this story of intrigue revolved around a humble plant, the melissa, or lemongrass or citronella. Melissa officinalis, a vivacious plant in the Lamiaceae family, is also called lemon balm or piment des abeilles. Its essence can be used in a variety of ways.

You can read my entire article on Fragrantica on this link (it even includes a recipe for making your own Melissa Water)

The Medieval Cyprus Birdies (Oiselets de Chypre): Tracking Historical Scents & Fragrance Use

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"Since she had exchanged one of the most luxurious Courts of the Middle Ages for that of Aragon, chiefly concerned with the ceaseless tumult and turmoil of war. In the fortress-palaces of her husband's kingdom how often she must have pined for the garden-isle of her birth, for its groves of orange, pomegranate, citron, mulberry, acacia, olive, and palm, for the vision of the happy valley of Makaria, across whose far-famed loveliness she was to gaze no more from the casements of her brother's palace at Nicosia! How she would pine to hear once more the merry laughter and the jingling bells of the huntingtrain " sport made ideal in that land of " the richest and most generous lords in Christendom " of their day, one of whom, the Count of Jaffa, alone, kept no less than five hundred hunting dogs. Memories of scented waters " rose, jasmine, and many another of which the secret has long been lost to the distiller " would be wafted to her with the lifting of every lid of her cypress-wood coffers, with their metal inlaying, with every breath of her perfumed " oiselets de Chypre " " that favourite toy of the mediaeval boudoir which she was probably the first to introduce into Aragon. These pomanders of scented paste, generally moulded into the shape of a bird " hence their name " were hung in the apartments of great ladies, in cages or similar receptacles, to serve the double purpose of purifying as well as of perfuming the room. A heavy and disappointed heart beat, we may be sure, beneath the royal robes, thick with " ors de Chypre, o Ma o Aragon ; heavy, because of its homesickness, disappointed, because of her childlessness. Her sumptuous wardrobe itself would grow to be a weariness, since she might not wear it in that Cypriote setting which alone might have fitly framed it."  

[source, Miron E.L The Queens of Aragon: Their Lives and Times. Reprint. London: Forgotten Books, 2013. 152-3. Print.]

I wrote a concrete piece on Oiselets de Chypre, the Cyprus scented birdies of the Middle Ages on Fragrantica. Please check it out on this link.

Pong de Paris & Medieval London

A documentary series by the BBC Two called "Filthy Cities" tackles two of the most infamously "stinky" of European cities from the past (today they're not so fragrant either): Paris and London. A history lesson and some olfactory adventurous research as well, guided by historian Dan Snow with some impressive CGI scenes. The London episode is presented in its entirety below.





And if you think you could brave it, watch a poor human specimen test on camera the scratch & sniff cards for the show, available in any library in the UK courtesy of the BBC.
In many ways reminiscent of the atmosphere of "Perfume, Story of a Murderer", only this is no fiction....