No,it's not another thread devoted to political dysfunction : )

I'm presently reading a novel title "Perfume" by Patrick Suskind. It's set in pre-revolutionary France. As the title suggests, it is heavily redolent of smells, vapours, effluvia and the many splendours of camouflaging scents of all kinds.

Here's an opening paragraph (talking of Paris at the time):

"...the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots. the stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes, from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth....the rivers stank,the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. the peasants stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did the master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank,even the King himself stank.....For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition......"

We in modern first world societies are not immersed in the smells that have accompanied (especially urban) societies through history. It made me realise how deodourised is our world and how much we take it for granted.

This book was interesting in the way it featured 'smell' as a distinct and important sense.

The importance of being able to smell and to emit smell. Something one would never think of perhaps unless losing a sense much taken for granted. This book made me wonder about what attracts people to each other despite some of the more obvious lures such as appearance but are there other hidden (pheremonal) forces at work?

Yes, all animals have their smells, but apparently we have the Christians to thank for the malodorous atmosphere described in that book.
Most humans throughout history have bathed regularly and kept themselves and their environment reasonably clean and healthy... until Christianity declared the Roman custom of bathing, to be disgusting, and the human body to be a foul thing, abhorred by god... to be despised and reviled if you want to get to heaven.

Dear Poirot,

I found Patrick Suskind's novel, "Perfume," deeply disturbing.
As one critic wrote - "while it is clear that the protagonist
is obsessed and insane - he performs within the confines
of 18th century French society in a lucid manner." Indeed.

Did you by the way happen to also see the film released in 2006
based on the novel? Equally disturbing - though the novel
was much more so.

All of us are influenced by "smells," to a certain extent -
but not to the extent of criminal insanity as in the case of
the protagonist in Suskind's novel.

Lexi,

Yes, Suskind's character, Grenouille, was disturbing.

However, the whole backdrop got me thinking about the odours that accompany all of life on earth - and how the further mankind advances, the more we are adept at masking the unpleasant ones.

Anything that strips away the Apollonian veneer and exposes the grotesque realities of existence is disturbing. Camille Paglia wrote of it thus:

"Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the west represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means "of the earth" - but earth's bowels, not its surface.....which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of the subterranean force, the long slow suck of muck and ooze. It is the dehumanising brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form."

*but are there other hidden (pheremonal) forces at work?*

Apparently there are, Pelican. But I gather much of this goes
straight from the olefactory system to other centres of the brain,
bypassing the thinking bits. So those pheromones will act, without
you being aware of it.

The experiment that I read about, involved sweaty t-shirts, worn by
blokes. When women sniffed those sweaty t-shirts and rated them,
they matched up with which guys turned on which females. Its seems
tied up with dna, ie those with dna different to their own, attracts
females. That would make evolutionary sense. Perhaps that is what
females mean, when they say that "chemistry matters".