A Whiff of the Gilded Age
The sense of smell, it is said, is the one most closely linked to memory. Anyone who has been instantly transported back in personal time by the scent of burning leaves, baking cookies, or a favorite flower will agree. As would Marcel Proust, whose famous madeleine became the sponge-cake that launched a million words.
This powerful conjuration all-too-often goes unnoticed. Why, only a few weeks ago National Perfume Day came and went without, so far as I could tell, so much as a single parade or pyrotechnic display.
A related idea appeals to me, too: That we humans may possess not only a personal remembrance of odors past, but also perhaps a kind of ancestral scent-memory encoded in our DNA. Maybe that seems farfetched or even nonsensical, but I’m a fiction writer and like to dream stuff up.
So this morning—to test my theory—I decided (however belatedly) to perform an experiment in olfactory time travel.
Years ago I purchased a vintage (circa 1904) bottle of the Larkin Soap Company’s Modjeska Rose Perfume, unopened and still in its original box. It’s been sitting on a shelf in my writing room (or lonely garret chamber, if you prefer) as a kind of totem. But I’ve never actually smelled it.
Modjeska Perfume was named after Helena Modjeska, a Polish-born actress of the Gilded Age, who took the nation quite by storm with her jaw-dropping Shakespearean roles. Madame Modjeska must have possessed a real gift, since she never fully mastered the English language and delivered her interpretations of Portia (a Venetian), Lady Macbeth (a Scot), and Juliet Capulet (a Veronese) in a thick and sometimes impenetrable Polish accent.
Be that all as it may, so popular was Dame Modjeska that the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York—an early catalogue company selling home goods to heartland families—introduced a line of Modjeska-scented perfumes, powders, and soaps to honor the great thespian.
Having been born and raised in Buffalo, and having grown up into a passionate student of the Gilded Age, recently I began to be tempted to open up this rarity and give it a sniff.
Could it resurrect some inherited memory of strolling along the teeming streets of Buffalo in its glory days?
Might it even transport me back to the dress circle of the snug Star Theatre, when on a cold January night in 1900 Madame M gave her swan-song in Buffalo?
Had this bottle found its way to me for a reason?
Without further fanfare, then, I will tell you what happened when I removed the onion-skin from the bottle and carefully removed the wax seal.
My wife joined me on my journey into the past, and here’s what we discovered.
First of all, it was a little difficult to dislodge the delicate glass stopper, and for a little bit I feared it might break.
But after a few minutes of careful wiggling, it loosened, and with due ceremony I removed the stopper and we leaned in to sample the fragrance.
It was magical—magical, I say again. First, the ineffable aroma of American Beauty roses, as fresh and lively today as the bouquets presented to Dame Modjeska at her final curtain call.
Then, a hint of sweet powder, as delicate and innocent as a child’s laughter.
And last, a wisp of something I could not, and cannot, place—though it seems to linger just out of reach; a thing at once tantalizingly familiar and yet agonizingly distant. An irrecoverable mystery—the thought behind a snapshot’s captive smile, the sound of a voice I can’t quite recall, but which I can never quite forget.
Might that mysterious something be the recovery of some long-lost memory? I’m not certain about that, but I am certain of this: today I made a new one. That will have to suffice.