The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Nineteen

“You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play – I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere, but our own senses will imagine them for us. These are moments, when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Eighteen

“There was something in the clear pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Fifteen

“The smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Fifteen

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c.1533-88), Sweet violet (Viola odorata) and red admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta)

“That evening at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed, and wearing a large buttonhole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narborough’s drawing room by bowing servants.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Eleven

“And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Ten

“The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.”

The Perfumes of Dorian Gray: Chapter Seven

Pink Spotted Lilies, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1936

“Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.”