The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  Though I created many scents for Day over the years, this one, the newest one, will take me years to get right. I’m thinking I smell sweetbriar in it, and forget-me-nots, which are always most fragrant in the evening.

  Do people recover from guilt like this? From regret? I did everything wrong. I should have spent all my time, my every minute, with Day. I should have begged her to stay out of trouble. I should have nagged. I should’ve wept and threatened. And I should have kept out of trouble myself, locked up in my own rooms, rattling my bottles and soaking my roses.

  Blue tries to comfort me, to tell me that Day knew what she was doing. She wasn’t innocent. We should be proud of the risks she took, he says. We should be pleased she was so hated by our enemy. Our little Day, so dangerous.

  “They’ll write songs about her someday,” he says.

  We find salvation in our work. We find each other.

  Voss, so far, has kept his promise, and we’ve not been bothered, we’ve not been watched. Someday he’ll discover that the blueprint is fake, if he hasn’t already. Maybe he knew all along. He seemed skeptical of it. He perhaps knew better than to pass it along, to risk the ridicule of it all. The real blueprint, I’ve sent on along a line of Resistance fighters. They’ll know where to take it.

  I’ve seen nothing of Lutz either. I like to think they refuse to punish me because they refuse to admit any kind of defeat I’ve delivered. I’m a little old lady who peddles perfume. And I’d been doing my damage for weeks, as they watched. How humiliating.

  So now we’ve been sneaky, Blue and my ladies and me.

  We’ve been using our perfumes to serve the Resistance. It’s a quiet way of asserting our presence. Of providing our identities. Of sending messages. We’ll stroll into a café, or along a street corner, and whichever perfume wafts in our path answers questions without a word, without a gesture. We don’t even have to be in the room to whisper our clues—we just linger beforehand, reeking of our secret message.

  Our perfumes are codes, like Day’s musical notes. The messages we interpret come from the networks Blue has established, or from backstage at his theater. Or they come from the nuns who traffic in refugees. Or we serve the queer lot who haunt the cocktail clubs. We’re interwoven with the city’s malcontents.

  We might put an electrical fan in a window and spray our perfumes at the blades, sending the scent out. We might flutter paper fans at our perfumed throats.

  We drip our messages into snuff bottles, and little glass vials, and we drop these signals into coat pockets, into purses gaping open, or tuck them into a trouser cuff as a gentleman crosses his legs while sitting at a café table preoccupied with his meager splash of wine. We’ve slipped them into hatbands, into bouquets of flowers, into the backs of collars, up sleeves like an extra ace in a poker game. We leave them on doorsteps and drop them through mail slots. We put them in the baskets of parked bicycles.

  We know how to step lightly, to silence our footfalls. We anticipate corners to slip around and doorways to hide us, while our scent sends its message. We’re simply the spirit of the city, as light as ether.

  We leave our bottles under the loose floorboards of our own house, and in the backs of our cabinets. We make holes in the walls to slip the bottles through. Someday someone will find them, and they’ll lift the stoppers, and they’ll know our story just by breathing it in.

  A Note from the Author

  While entirely a work of fiction, my portrait of Paris of 1941, and Manhattan of the late 1890s and 1920s, is drawn largely from the historical record; even some of the more fantastical elements, such as the lepidopterist’s hunt for butterfly scent, and Fanny’s mention of the subcutaneous perfume craze of Paris, and even Fanny herself (a ballerina/Civil War veteran) arose from the many margins of the research.

  To flesh out Clementine’s professional, criminal, and romantic pursuits, I had to learn my way around the art and business of perfume, how her sexuality would have influenced her life, and the living conditions (and daily risks) of the occupation.

  For the hinges of all Clem’s plots I relied heavily on science—specifically chemists’ reports in journals and newsletters on perfume-making, poison, invisible ink (and other tools of the amateur and professional spy), and chemical warfare. Reading about one topic often led me to another that was parallel, until all the various threads seemed to stitch themselves together. It was research into perfume and poison that led me to the unfounded but widely recorded rumors of Gabrielle d’Estrées’s murder by poisoned gloves, which led me to explore the queer interpretations of the painting of her and her sister, which led to my invention of a lesbian perfume to puzzle and thwart Oscar Voss.

  While Clem’s engagement with a queer resistance does have some foundation in fact, much of that history has been lost; a secret within a secret can be tough to trace. And what history there is has been corrupted by the homophobic interpretation of queers as giddy, oversexed collaborators, happy to canoodle with the manly men in uniform or, at the very least, sing and dance for them—many of the LGBTQ Parisians living openly were in the arts, determined to maintain their careers and avoid arrest. Though there are certainly convincing instances of gay collaboration with the Nazis, there are among these cases ambiguity and possibility; historians of lesbian cabaret singer and nightclub owner Suzy Solidor, for example, have made the case that her entertaining of the German troops might have allowed for work as a double agent, to gather information for delivery to the French Resistance. And any gay expression, such as Solidor’s explicitly lesbian lyrics, has been interpreted as resistance in an era of anti-gay laws and discrimination.

  One queer performer who did directly influence The Perfume Thief was Josephine Baker. To develop the character of Day, I followed Baker’s well-documented stage career. Day is far less famous than Baker was, and Day’s particular methods of musical cryptography and fact-gathering are distinctly her own, but Baker did famously smuggle secrets to the French Resistance shuffled in among sheets of music or written directly on the sheets in invisible ink. Baker’s methods, style, and legacy certainly inform the sensibility of all the characters in The Perfume Thief. Her life, including her espionage, is vibrantly portrayed in Josephine: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase.

  In the many months since I started writing the novel, some excellent LGBTQ histories of the Resistance have emerged; the Council of Europe released Queer in Europe During the Second World War (edited by Régis Schlagdenhauffen), which includes mention of Pascal Copeau’s work for the French Resistance and of resistance networks in Czechoslovakia composed entirely of LGBTQ members. Resistance: The LGBT Fight Against Fascism in WWII (Avery Cassell and Diane Kanzler) is a comprehensive collection of brief and enlightening biographies. I’m about to delve into the brand-new Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (by Jeffrey H. Jackson) about the anti-Nazi propaganda schemes of the lesbian avant-garde artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Other notable queer members of the French Resistance were Rose Valland (who saved thousands of works of art while documenting the German pillaging of museums and Jewish-owned collections), Édith Thomas (the subject of Édith Thomas: A Passion for Resistance by Dorothy Kaufmann), poet Jean Desbordes, and critic Roger Stéphane. Last year, author Charles Dantzig accomplished his years-long commitment to having a street in Paris named for gay novelist and Resistance fighter Pierre Herbart.

  And at the very moment I’m writing these words, I’ve learned of the death of art dealer Daniel Cordier, who, at the age of one hundred, was one of the last living Companions of the Liberation as decorated by Charles de Gaulle. Cordier wrote of his sexuality, and his work for the French Resistance, in his memoir, Alias Caracalla (2009).

  The New York Times archive reveals even more than one might expect when seeking stories of queer turn-of-the-century Manhattan—reading between the lines, and intuiting codes, one can learn a
little something about the stories its writers didn’t dare tell. And the paper’s reporting on Paris during the war offered many intimate and fascinating glimpses of the modes of survival in the city.

  It was in the Times archive that I found a few hints about French perfumers’ engagement with war chemicals, including a brief and provocative article from 1933: “Deadlier Gas Discovered in Research on Perfume.” And I gained insights into the politics of perfume from an article in the Business History Review: “Marketing for Socialism: Soviet Cosmetics in the 1930s” by Olga Kravets and Özlem Sandıkçı (2013).

  I reached even further back to gather notes on perfume, chemicals, and tea-tasting from a number of newsletters and trade/professional journals, from as early as the 1830s (A Treatise on Poisons: In Relation to Medical Jurisprudence, Physiology, and the Practice of Physic by Robert Christison and The Dispensatory of the United States of America). Other publications from the late 1800s and early 1900s that I consulted were: Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, Practical Druggist, Popular Engineer, Annual Report on Essential Oils, Synthetic Perfumes, Etc., American Soap Journal and Perfume Gazette, and American Perfumer and Essential Oil Review, as well as the popular cultural magazines Putnam’s, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Cosmopolitan. I relied also on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America digital newspaper project, and the New York Public Library archives. The gateway for much of my research was via Google Books and Love Library of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

  The Vogue archive provided tantalizing insights into the influences of the war on the fashion industry and the effect of its deprivations. I also looked past the feature articles in magazines and newspapers to the art, design, and fanciful descriptions in advertising, where so much of America’s proclivity for style, fashion, and beauty is given an oblique yet revealing language, most often intended for women.

  In many ways, The Perfume Thief is also a story of paper and ink, of love letters and their sentiments, so I learned about the sophisticated and highly efficient postal service of turn-of-the-century New York from the New York Times archive, and also from The Postal Record, the newsletter of the National Association of Letter Carriers. I learned about perfumed stationery, disappearing ink, and other romantic trends in correspondence from Paper Trade Journal and Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer.

  While I looked to well-known books on perfume, such as G. W. Septimus Piesse’s The Art of Perfumery and Eugène Rimmel’s The Book of Perfumes, I was most enamored of an oddball obscurity from 1892, by J. C. Sawer: Odorographia: A Natural History of Raw Materials and Drugs Used in the Perfume Industry, Including the Aromatics Used in Flavouring. In fact, I was so enamored of it, the book itself becomes a prop in the novel, a gift from M to Clem, which inspires Clem’s escape into the scents of the world.

  Butterfly-Hunting in Many Lands: Notes of a Field Naturalist (1912) by George Blundell Longstaff introduced me to the scent research, and its baroque olfactory schemata, gathered by Fritz Müller and Frederick A. Dixey.

  I’ve relied also on twenty-first-century historians and their scholarship, especially those books and articles on war and entertainment. Among them: And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation by Frederic Spotts, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom, and Wine and War by Donald Kladstrup and Petie Kladstrup.

  All these recent works were preceded by such excellent sources as Resistance: France, 1940–1945 by Blake Ehrlich (1965), Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry (1945), and Memory of Justice (1976), the documentary film by Marcel Ophüls. For a firsthand account of a Nazi-occupied Paris bordello, I read Palace of Sweet Sin, by Fabienne Jamet (1977).

  Some of my favorite portraits of Paris were My Blue Notebooks by the infamous courtesan Liane de Pougy and Shakespeare and Company by bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach. I was able to get a sense of war-era Illiers (the setting for Marcel Proust’s fiction) from a 1948 article in Vogue and one in a 1952 edition of Western Humanities Review, as well as a recent portrait of the town by William Friedkin in The New York Times Style Magazine.

  Perhaps the most sublime component of building Clementine’s world was exploring the Paris she fell in love with. To stroll the avenues of Paris before the war, I sought out tour guides from the 1920s and ’30s that told the city’s story by way of its shops, cafés, jazz clubs, confectioners, galleries, flea markets, and vendors. Among these books: The Spirit of Paris by Paul Cohen-Portheim (1937); The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books by Basil Woon (1931); From a Paris Garret by Richard Le Gallienne (1936); Paris on Parade by Robert Forrest Wilson (1925); The Lantern Show of Paris by F. G. Hurrell (1930); and Paris with the Lid Lifted by Bruce Reynolds (1927), which dips us into the underbelly to acquaint us with the male vamp, the habitués of brothels, and the hostesses of cafés.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of people have contributed significantly to the development and publication of The Perfume Thief. Margo Shickmanter, my editor, had an extraordinary vision for this book and a profound commitment to its story and characters, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with her. Alice Tasman, my agent, is always an inspiration, a marvel, and a blessing. I’d like to thank the fine people of Doubleday for all they do for their books. Cara Reilly offered keen editorial insights. And many thanks to Jennifer Weltz and all at the Jean Naggar Literary Agency.

  In the English Department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, I’ve received a great deal of support from Marco Abel, as well as from Jonis Agee, Joy Castro, and Kwame Dawes. I’ve benefited also from discussions of process and research with my graduate student advisees: Scott Guild, Rachel Cochran, David Henson, Ilana Masad, Kathrine Schwartman, Avee Chaudhuri, Jonathan Wlodarski, and Adrienne Christian.

  In 1970, the English Department offered the first interdisciplinary LGBTQ course in the nation, so I’m grateful to such pioneers as Louis Crompton, who created the course and devoted his career to LGBTQ scholarship. And I was personally inspired by Barbara DiBernard, our own local resistance fighter, who introduced me to new writers and new ways of reading.

  I’m fortunate to have creative friendships that inform my writing and research; many thanks to: Janet Lura, Byron Chavez, Maud Casey, Jim Baker, Orenda Fink, and Jami Attenberg, and my goddaughter Miranda Andersen. I’ve explored some of the research for this novel in columns for Enchanted Living magazine, edited by my great enabler, Carolyn Turgeon. I’m grateful for Amy Mather’s insights into perfume, and for all the conversations about art with Matthew Clouse, José Villarrubia, and Wendy Bantam, and conversations about language with Frank Bramlett, and any number of conversations about books and movies with emily danforth. Thanks also to Shellee Dill for sharing a trove of letters written by her grandfather, who served in France during World War II.

  Always much love to Mary Mignon, and to Judy Slater, who helped me find my voice as a writer. I cherish my New York City cocktails with Rhonda Sherman and Laura Mitchell, and my various escapades with Lauren Cerand. David Ebershoff helped me to discover the title for this book. And I thank Greg Michalson for the care and attention he gave the publication of my earliest novels.

  And I’d like to salute our booksellers, so hard hit by the pandemic. I’m forever in their debt. Many thanks to the Bookworm, and to Beth Black, Andrea Gunther, and Janet Grojean, and to Stephanie Budell.

  Much love to my parents, Larry and Donita, who set me on the right path. And love to my husband, Rodney Rahl, my coconspirator in all my plots.

  about the author

  Timothy Schaffert is the author of five previous novels: The Swan Gondola, The Coffins of Little Hope, Devils in the Sugar Shop, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, and The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters. He is a professor of English and director of Creative Writing at t
he University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and he writes the column The Eccentricities of Gentlemen for the popular lifestyle magazine Enchanted Living.

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