Sillage

The following links have stayed open in my browser for a week.  Their persistence must be noted:

One Thing They Aren't: Maternal

"Some mother hawks and owls are practical optimists, not only halving their brood when necessary but also eating them."

Animalic

Dog nightingale woodpecker forty!

Le Sillage de La Reine

M.A. Sillage de La Reine perhaps like no other fragrances seems to contain and exhibit the perfumery paradox of life contained in death, that of the flowers used to make a perfume. I have never felt so genuinely this impresssion of wearing on my skin the last breath of a flower, its very soul. There is also an inkling of putridity or carnal decomposition in the beautiful aromas that slowly leave their cage and slowly expire on your skin. M.A. Sillage de La Reine can be borderline foul at times evoking the bears' pit at a zoo but from this sublime foulness are also born splendid flowers and complexity.

The Scented Salamander had the opportunity to try M.A. Sillage de La Reine (The Queen's Wake), a very limited recreation of a perfume worn by Marie-Antoinette.  The recipe was uncovered by historian Elisabeth de Freydeau, in her research for a biography of Jean Louis Fargeon, one of the queen's perfumers.  Created by Francis Kurkdjian, and unveiled in 2005, the fragrance contains notes of rose, jasmine, tuberose, iris, lavender, musk, cedar, vanilla, ambergris and sandalwood. For a time, visitors to Versailles could get a whiff of it in one of the queen's rooms.  

Before Marie-Antoinette moved in, life at Versailles was apparently malodorous:

Versailles, still more than the streets of Paris, was notorious for its stench, born of unwashed bodies, rotting food and festering human and animal excrement. An inveterate bather when the custom continued to arouse mistrust, Marie Antoinette maintained the Austrian standards of hygiene she had been brought up with; her entourage was known by the epithet “the perfumed court”. Years later, ailing, imprisoned, and awaiting judgment, a simple posy would cause her to recall her “real passion” for flowers (a luxury that was immediately withdrawn). At her prime, not least in the gardens of her pastoral retreat, the Petit Trianon, the queen indulged her love of fragrant blooms. “Flowers reigned everywhere,” as de Feydeau remarks. ("Secrets of the Boudoir")

On July 21, 1791, as the Revolution closed around them, the royal family left Paris undercover but was promptly captured in Varennes.  One story, which Feydeau considers, claims that the queen's sillage gave them away.