Napoleon loved his bath. Sometimes he lay in it for an hour or two, holding meetings or listening while an aide read him his correspondence. “One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep,” he said. Afterwards came the frictions, a cleansing ritual of his own devising. He stood naked and poured a whole bottle of eau de cologne over his head before scrubbing himself with a rough brush. For those areas he couldn’t reach, a valet took over. “Stronger, like an ass!” Napoleon shouted, if the valet’s efforts lacked vigour.
Napoleon’s belief in the therapeutic benefits of perfume was something he shared with the ancien régime. Not that Louis XIV troubled himself with baths. Instead he rubbed esprit de vin on his skin and changed his scented linen undershirts several times a day. He was nicknamed “the sweet flowery one”; his palace chambers were freshly perfumed with different scents each day using a steam diffuser. “Never had a man loved odours so much,” a courtier said.
This was more than mere excess. Medical thought held that most disease was transmitted through miasmas of infected air. Perfumes, which countered these toxins with the distilled spirits of flowers, woods and fruits, were the obvious antidote. In this light, Theresa Levitt writes in Elixir, her fascinating account of the birth pangs of organic chemistry in 19th-century Paris, “the vast resources poured into supplying the court with perfumes can be seen as an effort to hoard the essence of life itself”.
The boundaries between perfume and chemistry were porous; the art of distillation underpinned both. “Queen of Hungary” water was made from spirits distilled with rosemary; smelt, drunk or rubbed on the body, it treated everything from headaches to colics. “Eau d’Arquebusade” was designed to heal gangrene in wounds caused by the firearm from which it took its name, but it was often simply gargled to freshen the breath. Vinegars, too, were highly regarded: like perfumes, they might be smelt, drunk or applied to the skin, as well as added to food. One favourite was “Four Thieves”, reputedly concocted by four miscreants who used it to ward off the plague when they robbed the houses of its victims.
This world of confused categories owed much to an alchemical tradition that stretched back at least as far as 1st-century Egypt and an alchemist known as Maria the Jewess, history’s first-known distiller. But it is no coincidence, in Levitt’s telling, that the overthrow of this old thinking matched the political ferment of France between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and beyond. Chemists and radicals alike were “entranced by the prospect of an orderly, explicable world”.
The chemical revolution was begun by Antoine Lavoisier, who, together with a few colleagues, proposed a new nomenclature for the science in 1787. Out went alchemical terms such as oil of vitriol and spirit of Venus; in came, respectively, sulphuric acid and acetic acid.
At heart Elixir is about the obsessive quest to understand the chemistry of life. Foremost among its extensive cast are two chemists excluded from positions of authority — and often from professional laboratories too. One, Edouard Laugier, spent much of his career working in the family’s fashionable Parisian perfumery, Laugier Père et Fils, perfecting the art of distillation using an apparatus of his own design called a dephlegmator.
The other, Auguste Laurent, is in Levitt’s telling a more brilliant and tragic figure. A wine merchant’s son, he trained as a mineralogist but fell in love with chemistry instead. With Laugier’s help, he slaved away after hours in the perfumery’s workshop trying to divine the building blocks of organic matter. But the scientific establishment derided the young upstart’s radical insights into the nature of organic chemistry. One leading chemist, Justus Liebig dismissed Laurent’s work as “true sans-culottisme”. Laurent’s former patron, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, publicly humiliated him in an 1836 lecture. Liebig advised Dumas how to deal with such effrontery: “You must punch him in the stomach, such that he doesn’t even think about getting up.”
Elixir isn’t without flaws. It is repetitive in places and, while its fast-paced narrative is a miracle of concision, a more expansive treatment might have heightened both the intellectual and the human dramas. But Levitt, a specialist in the history of science and French culture, has caught well these dreaming, competitive, daring men in the act of living, each striving compulsively for the giddy, intoxicating bliss of insight into the making of the world. “Science is such a beautiful thing!” Laurent wrote shortly before his death, in penury, from consumption aged 45. “If I had a nice laboratory open on this beautiful garden I believe that, like the opium eaters, I would never want to lose my madness.”
This review first appeared in the 15 April 2023 issue of The Times.
Mathew Lyons 