Where are the scents of yesterday? Entire countries have lost their distinctive smell

Smell is the oldest sense. We owe our existence to it. The moment you start to talk about smell, things explode in a shimmering, chaotic starburst of epistemological and ontological complication. It is involuntary; we have no noselids. Smell stays switched on in our sleep: to inspire is to smell. It has a bigger ratio of genes than any system in any species.

Yet it remains almost unspoken of. The existence of smell — either as verb or noun — seems a guilty secret. Mr Justice Caulfield, in Jeffrey Archer’s 1987 libel action against the Star, would have caused no comment had he suggested that Mary Archer had ‘elegance’. But his gallantry led him over the brink. ‘Has she fragrance?’, he asked.

The rest of his words were unheeded. There was some stirring stuff about cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex, but the public just nodded in sympathy. This, they understood. But fragrance was well out of order, suggesting a woman had a smell. Dash it all. And if she did, a chap shouldn’t mention it. Sort of chap who’d wear scent.

This is one of the French historian Robert Muchembled’s central lines of argument. (His name rhymes with Moosh-on-Blay.) He claims that smell is a universal sense, with a more or less universal lexicon of odours; our response to these, however, is not innate, but learned. The triumph of Femfresh, an ‘intimate hygiene spray for women’, proved the extent of our neuroplasticity: adult women can be persuaded that (a) they stink and that (b) the people who have persuaded them they stink are the right people to sell them the cure. We cannot only convince women that they stink, but men too. The trap is set. And here it is: if a woman smells bad, it is because she is a woman, and inherently bad.