Casanova wrote still more emphatically concerning the same point; in the preface to his Memoires he states:  “I have always found sweet the odor of the women I have loved”; and elsewhere:  “There is something in the air of the bedroom of the woman one loves, something so intimate, so balsamic, such voluptuous emanations, that if a lover had to choose between Heaven and this place of delight his hesitation would not last for a moment” (Memoires, vol. iii).  In the previous century, in England, Sir Kenelm Digby, in his interesting and remarkable Private Memoirs, when describing a visit to Lady Venetia Stanley, afterward his wife, touches on personal odor as an element of attraction; he had found her asleep in bed and on her breasts “did glisten a few drops of sweatlike diamond sparks, and had a more fragrant odor than the violets or primroses whose season was newly passed.”

In 1821 Cadet-Devaux published, in the Revue Encyclopedique, a study entitled “De l’atmosphere de la Femme et de sa Puissance,” which attracted a great deal of attention in Germany as well as in France; he considered that the exhalations of the feminine body are of the first importance in sexual attraction.

Prof.  A. Galopin in 1886 wrote a semiscientific book, Le Parfum de la Femme, in which the sexual significance of personal odor is developed to its fullest.  He writes with enthusiasm concerning the sweet and health-giving character of the natural perfume of a beloved woman, and the mischief done both to health and love by the use of artificial perfumes.  “The purest marriage that can be contracted between a man and a woman,” he asserts (p. 157) “is that engendered by olfaction and sanctioned by a common assimilation in the brain of the animated molecules due to the secretion and evaporation of two bodies in contact and sympathy.”

In a book written during the first half of the nineteenth century which contains various subtle observations on love we read, with reference to the sweet odor which poets have found in the breath of women:  “In reality many women have an intoxicatingly agreeable breath which plays no small part in the love-compelling atmosphere which they spread around them” (Eros oder Woerterbuch ueber die Physiologie, 1849, Bd. 1, p. 45).

Most of the writers on the psychology of love at this period, however, seem to have passed over the olfactory element in sexual attraction, regarding it probably as too unaesthetic.  It receives no emphasis either in Senancour’s De l’Amour or Stendhal’s De l’Amour or Michelet’s L’Amour.

The poets within recent times have frequently referred to odors, personal and other, but the novelists have more rarely done so.  Zola and Huysmans, the two novelists who have most elaborately and insistently developed the olfactory side of life, have dwelt more on odors that are repulsive