Scent, the Body, and the Cosmopolitan Flaireur
This chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan flaireur, the sophisticated citizen of the world who relishes the fragrance of travel, represented by the historian and classicist John Addington Symonds and the journalist and critic Lafcadio Hearn, his junior by ten years. The smell of the human body is something that speaks intimately to the very nature of perfume, which references and alludes to corporeal odours as much as it camouflages them. Appreciators respectively of male and female body scents, both Symonds and Hearn write enthusiastically about the perfumes of the places they visit and the bodies they encounter there, but they are also keen consumers of the literature of other lands, both past and present, savoured by them for its release of distinctive male and female fragrances. This chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan flaireur, the sophisticated citizen of the world who relishes the fragrance of travel, represented by the historian and classicist John Addington Symonds and the journalist and critic Lafcadio Hearn, his junior by ten years. The smell of the human body is something that speaks intimately to the very nature of perfume, which references and alludes to corporeal odours as much as it camouflages them. Appreciators respectively of male and female body scents, both Symonds and Hearn write enthusiastically about the perfumes of the places they visit and the bodies they encounter there, but they are also keen consumers of the literature of other lands, both past and present, savoured by them for its release of distinctive male and female fragrances.