The Book of Lost Fragrances

Nineteen

PARIS, FRANCE, 1789

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with its gilded copper and gold mosaic basilica and marble columns, was the oldest church in Paris and the one place where Marie-Genevieve Moreau always felt at peace. But today she felt as restless as her little sister, who was playing with the hem of her dress even though their mother had twice pulled the child’s hands away.

The site of the church had been a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis hundreds of years earlier, and that was one of the reasons she looked forward to coming here. Not because she felt closer to God here, but to Giles. And when the priest swung the shining silver censer and she breathed in the dense smell of the incense, she felt her lover’s presence even more palpably.

Giles L’Etoile had left for Egypt a year ago. His father and brothers had been excited about the youngest son exploring ancient perfuming methods and materials perhaps unknown to them. Egypt’s history was full of perfume secrets: the timeless methods of extracting the essences of scent from flowers and woods; the processes of expression, enfleurage, maceration and stream distillation from the land that had invented many of them. If Egyptian processes and techniques were superior, then L’Etoile Parfums would have an edge over the competition. And there was much competition in Paris in the last decade of the century.

Only Marie-Genevieve had been afraid for Giles.

She didn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known him or loved him. Her father, a tanner, supplied the elder L’Etoile with the leather he needed to make the fine scented gloves he sold in his store. The two children had been inseparable since childhood-almost, Marie-Genevieve’s mother used to say, as if one was the right glove and one was the left.

There had never been any question they would marry. Marie-Genevieve had thought that would happen when she turned eighteen, but Giles had decided to take the trip to Egypt first. He wanted to see something of the world beyond the street that he’d been born on, he told her. The comment stung, though she knew he hadn’t meant to be cruel. She just couldn’t imagine that there was anything beyond this street-and particularly his arms and his warmth and the smell of his neck where his soft brown hair met his skin-worth leaving for.

“I’m scared,” she’d finally admitted in a whisper the night before he set off.

He laughed. “You think I’m going to meet some exotic Egyptian princess who will keep me there?”

“No…”

“Then what?”

She didn’t want to tell him about the terrible dream she’d been having over and over.

Giles down deep in a tomb when a sandstorm struck. In agonizing slow motion, she saw the grit whorl around him, getting in his eyes, his mouth, filling up his throat, and finally suffocating him.

“What is it, Marie?”

“I’m afraid you’re not going to come home.”

“But how can that be? What could make me stay there with you waiting for me here?” He kissed her in the secret way they had. They were careful. She was a smart girl and scared of having a baby too soon. Not for any of the religious reasons, not because it was a sin, but because she didn’t want to share Giles yet.

Now she knelt at the altar, pressed her hands together and lifted her face up to the crucifix of the savior Jesus Christ and waited patiently for the priest to give her the body and blood of He who had risen. She closed her eyes and imagined Giles there naked before her, not Jesus. Imagined that it was her lover’s body and blood that were going to be given to her. And then she felt the familiar hysteria rising in her.

Why did she imagine such blasphemous things? Yes, the incense always reminded her of Giles, but to imagine that the priest was holding wafers made of Giles’s flesh and offering a gold cup that held his blood?

She went to confession and tried to admit these travesties but never managed-she was always too embarrassed to speak of them. Instead she’d tell the priest about her other failings.

“I worry so much about Giles that I make a mess of my embroidery, and then Maman gets upset and yells at me because she can’t sell it if it’s not perfect.”

“You have to trust in the Virgin Mary,” the priest would intone through the iron grill. “And when you feel the fears coming upon you, you must pray, Marie-Genevieve. Pray with all your heart.”

And that’s what Marie-Genevieve was doing while she waited patiently for her portion of the holy host. Behind her, as the parishioners who had already received communion returned to their seats, she heard their feet scraping against the stone floor, the rustle of their dresses, the clinking of their rosaries, the soft murmur of their prayers all filling the church with a familiar sound: the sound of faith. Faith that she tried so hard to have.

“Mon Dieu, non, non, mon Dieu!” A woman’s cry that was rough and raw, that had escaped rather than been uttered. Extraordinary in the church during a service.

Marie-Genevieve looked to see what was wrong, turning her back on the priest as he approached.

Giles’s mother was standing in the aisle next to Jean-Louis L’Etoile, who was holding up his wife. Marie-Genevieve focused on his horrified face. His expression that said all the things his wife’s voice had suggested. It was as if he were suddenly one of the stone statues in the side chapels, not Giles’s father any longer.

Beside them was a bedraggled man, in dirty, worn clothes, who looked like he had not slept or washed for days. Had he brought this bad news? From far away? How far? From weeks at sea? From Egypt?

Marie-Genevieve tried to run toward them, but her mother held her back.

“No. You must wait until they come to us.”

But Marie-Genevieve didn’t care about convention. She pulled out of her mother’s grasp and ran toward Giles’s parents just as his brothers joined the group.

The priest had stopped the mass.

The church was silent.

Everyone was watching.

As if his wife were a rag doll, Jean-Louis L’Etoile handed her over to his eldest son and went to Marie-Genevieve. When he took her hands, his were freezing cold, and she pulled back. From his touch, she knew she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Maybe if she didn’t hear it, it wouldn’t be true. Maybe if she never heard the words, she could go on waiting for Giles to come home, go on being his betrothed, go on living on the memory of what he had looked like, and smelled like, and how gentle he had been with her and how the two of them were like the two hands of one pair of fine French gloves.

“It’s our Giles…” Jean-Louis began in a broken voice.

And she felt her legs give way beneath her.