We are not often told when historical heroes were unpleasant in this respect, but in the case of Louis XIV. we have the authoritative evidence of Madame Montespan, who after their “divorce, when having a public set-to with her sun-god in the glittering salles of Versailles, discomfited that little, red-heeled, bewigged, and pompous mannikin with the following broadside:
“With all my imperfections, at least I do not smell as badly as you do!”
His ancestor, “Lewis the Eleventh,” says Burton in “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” “had a conceit everything did stink about him. All the odoriferous perfumes they could get would not ease him, but still he smelled a filthy stink.”
A modern rhinologist would suspect this monarch of having been afflicted with maxillary antrum suppuration. It will be noted, however, that there is no record that the odour he himself perceived was perceptible to others. The fœtor, as we say, was subjective, not objective, in which respect it differed from that of another historical personage, Benjamin Disraeli to wit, who was the subject probably of the disease known as ozæna. (See later.)
CHAPTER VI
THE ULTIMATE
In a former chapter we dwelt upon the curious fact that memories aroused by olfactory stimuli are independent of the will. Now there is yet another way in which smell ignores the head of the cerebral hierarchy.
Although on occasion confining its operations to the subconsciousness, and exercising, so to speak, only a backstairs influence upon the mind, olfaction much more frequently insists upon recognition, breaking in upon our privacy, like a disreputable acquaintance, at most inopportune moments.
If you do not wish to see you can look the other way. When you would rather not hear you can be inattentive. A proffered handshake you can ignore. A dish you dislike you may decline. But you can’t help smelling—no, not even if you turn up your nose.
Olfaction is thus the great leveller among the senses, equality having here a reality but rarely found elsewhere. For odour makes its way into the nose of king and cadger, duke and drayman, lady and lout, indifferently. Nay, by an ironical law of olfaction the fœtors are more powerful than the fragrances, and vervain the feeble turns tail before the onslaught of scatol (as well it might, indeed!), in which case there is nothing to be done but to bear it (without the grin mostly); or to follow the wise example of vervain; or to remove the offence, as we have done in England these latter days, only to render ourselves, as I have carefully pointed out in Chapter I., all the more sensitive to it when it does come.
To many of us it comes on the dog.