Preface and Acknowledgments

Every perfume tells a story.What initially motivated my research for this book was the desire to better understand the stories of fragrance, suggested or elaborated, that waft from the pages of nineteenth-century books, to observe how these aromas mingle with plots and poetics, and to understand how readers of the era would have sensed and interpreted them.The perfumes of now classic works like Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's "Correspondances" reveal facets of form and meaning that were always there, though I had passed them by, again and again, before I began following literary scent trails.I first encountered Baudelaire's influential "Correspondances," a sonnet built on the lush notes of musk, amber, benzoin, and incense, in an undergraduate French literature course.As we analysed the poem line by line, a classmate asked what benzoin (benjoin) smelled like.The query seemed unusual in the critical context of a linguistic turn that shaped our discussions at the time, an approach that did not readily invite sensorial connections to the words we read.The reply, offered by a diligent student who had taken the time to investigate, was that it smells like tar.No one expressed surprise.I hardly gave it a thought.After all, Baudelaire mentions goudron alongside musc and huile de coco in the verse poem "La Chevelure" and its prose cousin, "Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure."But what if benzoin does not smell like tar? How would knowing the smell of benzoin influence the experience of reading Baudelaire's poem, or the direction of scholarly inquiry?As I learned much later in my olfactory fieldwork for this book, benzoin smells to me nothing like tar.I suspect the earlier misidentification was caused by a dictionary consultation that led to an inadvertent correspondance: a confusion of benzene (a hydrocarbon found in coal tar) and the sticky styrax benzoin, a tree ooze recommended in nineteenthcentury perfume manuals (along with ambergris, tolu, storax, and other

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.