Introduction

A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra--and lost for 2,000 years. 
 
Jac L'Etoile has always been haunted by the past, her memories infused with the exotic scents that she grew up surrounded by as the heir to a storied French perfume company. In order to flee the pain of those remembrances--and of her mother's suicide--she moved to America. Now, fourteen years later she and her brother have inherited the company along with it's financial problems. But when Robbie hints at an earth-shattering discovery in the family archives and then suddenly goes missing--leaving a dead body in his wake--Jac is plunged into a world she thought she'd left behind.
 
Back in Paris to investigate her brother's disappearance, Jac becomes haunted by the legend the House of L'Etoile has been espousing since 1799. Is there a scent that can unlock the mystery of reincarnation - or is it just another dream infused perfume?
 
The Book of Lost Fragrances fuses history, passion, and suspense, moving from Cleopatra's Egypt and the terrors of revolutionary France to Tibet's battle with China and the glamour of modern-day Paris. Jac's quest for the ancient perfume someone is willing to kill for becomes the key to understanding her own troubled past.

Editorial Review

Excerpt

Chapter 1.

Alexandria, Egypt, 1799

Giles L’Etoile was a master of scent, not a thief. He had never stolen anything but one woman’s heart, and she’d always said she’d given that willingly. But on this chilly Egyptian evening, as he descended the rickety ladder into the ancient tomb, each tentative footstep brought him closer to criminality.

Preceding L’Etoile had been an explorer, an engineer, an architect, an artist, a cartographer and, of course, the general himself—all the savants from Napoleon’s army of intellectuals and scientists now stealing into a sacred burial place that had remained untouched for thousands of years. The crypt had been discovered the day before by the explorer Emile Saurent and his team of Egyptian boys, who had stopped digging when they unearthed the sealed stone door. Now the twenty-nine-year-old Napoleon would have the privilege of being the first man to see what had lain lost and forgotten for millennia. It was no secret that he entertained dreams of conquering Egypt. But his grand ambitions went beyond military conquests. Under his aegis, Egypt’s history was being explored, studied and mapped.

At the bottom of the ladder, L’Etoile joined the assembled party in a dimly lit vestibule. He sniffed and identified limestone and plaster dust, stale air and the workers’ body odor, and a hint of another scent almost too faint to take in.

Four pink granite columns, their bases buried under piles of dirt and debris, held up a ceiling painted with a rich lapis lazuli and a silver astronomical star chart. Cut into the walls were several doors, one larger than the others. Here Saurent was already chiseling away at its plaster seal.

The walls of the antechamber were painted with delicate and detailed murals, beautifully rendered in earth-toned colors. The murals were so vibrant L’Etoile expected to smell the paint, but it was Napoleon’s cologne he breathed in. The stylized motif of water lilies that bordered the crypt and framed the paintings interested the perfumer. Egyptians called the flower the Blue Lotus and had been using its essence in perfumes for thousands of years. L’Etoile, who at thirty had already spent almost a decade studying the sophisticated and ancient Egyptian art of perfume making, knew this flower and its properties well. Its perfume was lovely, but what separated it from other flowers was its hallucinogenic properties. He’d experienced them firsthand and found them to be an excellent solution when his past rose up and pushed at his present.

The lotus wasn’t the only floral element in the paintings. Workers took seeds from sacks in storerooms in the first panel and planted beds in the next. In the following panel they tended the emerging shoots and blooms and trees and then in progression cut the flowers, boughs and herbs and picked the fruit. In the last they carried the bounty to the man L’Etoile assumed was the deceased, and laid it at his feet.

As more plaster fell and chips hit the alabaster floor, Abu, the guide Saurent had brought, lectured the men about what they were seeing. Abu’s recitation was interesting, but the odors of perspiration, burning wicks and chalky dust began to overwhelm L’Etoile, and he glanced over at the general. As much as the perfumer suffered, he knew it was worse for Napoleon. So great was the commander’s sensitivity to scent, he couldn’t tolerate being around certain servants, soldiers or women whose smell disagreed with him. There were stories of his extended baths and his excessive use of eau de cologne – his private blend made of lemon, citron, bergamot and rosemary. The general even had special candles (they lit this dark chamber now) sent over from France because they were made with a wax obtained by crystallizing sperm whale oil that burned with a less noxious odor.

Napoleon’s obsession was one of the reasons L’Etoile was still in Egypt. The general had asked him to stay on longer so he could have a perfumer at his disposal. L’Etoile hadn’t minded. Everything that had mattered to him in Paris had been lost six years before during the Reign of Terror. Nothing waited for him at home but memories.

As Saurent chipped away at the last of the plaster, the perfumer edged closer to study the deep carvings on the door. Here too was a border of blue lotus, these framing cartouches of the same indecipherable hieroglyphics that one saw all across Egypt. Perhaps the newly discovered stone in the port city of Rashid would yield clues as to how to translate these markings.

“All done,” Saurent said as he gave his tools to one of the Egyptian boys and dusted off his hands. “Général?”

Napoleon stepped up to the portal and tried to twist the still-bright brass ring. Coughed. Pulled harder. The general was lean, almost emaciated, and L’Etoile hoped he’d be able to make it budge. Finally, a loud creaking echoed in the cavern as the door swung open.

Saurent and L’Etoile joined the general on the threshold, all three of them thrusting their candles into the darkness to enliven the inner chamber, and in the flickering pale yellow light, a corridor filled with treasures revealed itself.

But it wasn’t the elaborate wall drawings in the passageway, the alabaster jars, the finely carved and decorated sculptures, or the treasure-filled wooden chests that L’Etoile would remember for the rest of his life. It was the warm, sweet air that rushed out to embrace him.

The perfumer smelled death and history. Faint whiffs of tired flowers, fruits, herbs and woods. Most of these he was familiar with – but he smelled other notes, too. Weaker. Less familiar. Only ideas of scents, really, but they mesmerized him and drew him forward, tantalizing and entreating like a lovely dream on the verge of being lost forever.

He ignored Saurent’s warning that he was entering uncharted territory— that there could be booby traps, serpents coiled and waiting—and Abu’s admonitions about lurking spirits more dangerous than the snakes. L’Etoile followed his nose into the darkness with just his single candle, pushing ahead of the general and everyone else, hungry for a more concentrated dose of the mysterious perfume.

He walked down the highly decorated corridor to an inner sanctuary and inhaled deeply, trying to learn more from the ancient air. Frustrated, he exhaled and inadvertently blew his candle out.

It must have been all the deep breaths, or perhaps the pervasive darkness. Maybe it was the stale air that made him so dizzy. It didn’t matter. As he battled the vertigo his awareness of the scent became more powerful, more intimate. Finally he began to identify specific ingredients. Frankincense and myrrh, blue lotus and almond oil. All popular in Egyptian fragrances and incenses. But there was something else, elusive and just beyond his reach.

Standing alone, in the dark, he was so deep in concentration he didn’t hear the footsteps of the rest of the party as they came closer.

“What’s that odor?”

The voice startled the perfumer. He turned to Napoleon, who’d just entered the inner chamber.

“A perfume that hasn’t been breathed for centuries,” L’Etoile whispered.

As the others entered, Abu set to explaining that they were now standing in the funeral chamber and pointed out the brightly colored murals. One showed the deceased dressing a large statue of a man with a jackal’s head, placing food at the man-beast’s feet. Slightly behind him, a lithe and lovely woman in a transparent gown held a tray of bottles. In the next scene, she was lighting a censer, the smoke becoming visible. In the next panel the jackal stood among jars, presses and alembics, objects that L’Etoile recognized from his father’s perfume shop back in Paris.

L’Etoile knew how important fragrance was to ancient Egyptians, but he’d never seen this much imagery relating to the making or using of scent before.

“Who is this man buried here?” Napoleon asked Abu. “Can you tell yet?”

“Not yet, Général,” Abu answered. “But we should find more clues there.”

Abu pointed toward the center of the room.

The stylized black granite sarcophagus was five times the size of an ordinary man. Its polished surface was carved with cartouches and inlaid with a turquoise and lapis portrait of a beautiful catlike man with blue water lilies around his head. L’Etoile recognized him. He was Nefertum, son of Iset. The god of perfume.

The scenes in the murals, the motif of lilies, the censers in all the corner of the room, suddenly made sense to L’Etoile. This was the tomb of an ancient Egyptian perfumer. And judging from its majesty, the priest had been revered.

Saurent barked out orders to his team of workers, and after a brief struggle the young men lifted the stone lid. Nestled inside was a wide wooden coffin painted with still more scenes of the two people represented in the murals. This cover they were able to pry off without much difficulty.

Inside was an oversize mummy, oddly shaped, the right length but too wide by half, blackened with asphalt from the Dead Sea. Instead of only one, it wore two elaborate gold masks. Both were crowned with headdresses of turquoise and lapis and wore carnelian, gold and amethyst breastplates. The only difference between them was that the one on the right was male and the one on the left, a female.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Abu uttered in hushed astonishment.

“What does it mean?” Napoleon asked.

“I don’t know Général. It’s most unusual.” Abu stammered.

“Unwrap him, Saurent,” Napoleon ordered.

Despite Abu’s protestations, Saurent insisted the young men cut through the linen and expose the actual mummy. The Frenchman was paying them, so they agreed. As L’Etoile knew, ancient embalming techniques using fragrant oils and unguents along with the dry air should have prevented the deceased’s soft muscles and tissue from decaying. Even the hair might have been preserved. He’d seen mummies before and had been fascinated by their sweet-smelling corpses.

It took only a few minutes to cut and peel back the blackened cloth.

“No. Like nothing I have ever seen,” Abu whispered.

The corpse on the left didn’t have his arms crossed on his chest, as was the custom. Instead his right hand was extended and holding the hand of a woman he’d been mummified with. Her left hand was knotted with his. The two lovers were so lifelike, their bodies so uncorrupted, it appeared they had been buried months ago, not centuries.

The assembled crowed murmured with amazement at the sight of this couple intertwined in death, but what affected L’Etoile was not what he saw. Here at last was the fountainhead of the odor that had begun to tease him as he’d climbed down the ladder.

He struggled to separate out the notes he recognized from the ones he didn’t, searching for the ingredients that gave the blend its promise of hope, of long nights and voluptuous dreams, of invitation and embrace. Of an everlasting covenant ripe with possibility. Of lost souls reunited.

Tears sprang to the perfumer’s eyes as he inhaled again. This was the kind of scent he’d always imagined capturing. He was smelling liquid emotion. Giles L’Etoile was smelling love. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. One shouldn't tear down the past to make way for the future. That's how lessons were lost. The art of keeping a civilization alive, like the art of making perfume, was in the blending. – From The Book of Lost Fragrances

Do you think as a society were are too quick to tear down the past?

2. How are the different ways the power of scent are used by the author as a catalyst and a weapon, a profession and an obsession, an object of love as well as greed.

3. Discuss the ways myth plays an important role in this novel.

4. A critic said that The Book of Lost Fragrances left him with powerful feelings of revelation, wonder, and the infinitude of human possibility. In what ways are those possiblities explored.
1. One shouldn't tear down the past to make way for the future. That's how lessons were lost. The art of keeping a civilization alive, like the art of making perfume, was in the blending. – From The Book of Lost Fragrances

Do you think as a society were are too quick to tear down the past?

2. How are the different ways the power of scent are used by the author as a catalyst and a weapon, a profession and an obsession, an object of love as well as greed.

3. Discuss the ways myth plays an important role in this novel.

4. A critic said that The Book of Lost Fragrances left him with powerful feelings of revelation, wonder, and the infinitude of human possibility. In what ways are those possiblities explored.

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Publisher's Book Info
»	M.J. Rose's Web Site

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book