The Smell of Notre Dame Burning

This smell of Notre Dame burning was the smell of books older than all our lives—on fire.

This is Per Fumar, a column by Mishka Hoosen about the olfactory art of perfumery and how it has impacted his life.

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There’s a photograph my husband took of me in Paris, the day before Notre Dame burned. We were walking along the Seine, to the artist’s studio where we lived as part of a three-month artist’s residency. The bells pealed across the water and I stopped. The music lifted me by the spine and I turned to watch the cathedral across the river.

The look on my face, my husband said, made him want to take a picture of me, and so he did.

The next day, I was ill with a fever. In the afternoon, I went to bed for a nap and was woken hours later by my husband shaking me gently, saying, “Love, love, Notre Dame is on fire.” And I thought, “Of course she isn’t. She can’t burn.”

When we first arrived in Paris from Cape Town, where we now live, I ached to see it, to go inside it, remembering my visit a decade ago: the hush and murmur, the cool enveloping dark, relieved by the flicker of candles; the spilling, jewel-toned light from the rose window, under which I had stood, face upturned, and cried.

Yet, on that day, we only walked by the cathedral. I told my husband the names of the bells, and about Victor Hugo. We discussed the exquisite carvings of the facade, the angels and demons, the supplicant souls being judged. We walked through crowds of tourists queuing to go inside, happy for them, happy at the look we knew deeply: the look of someone who has spent years of a life dreaming, who has come across the world to reach that beloved thing longed for and is now standing in front of it.

I prattled brightly about all this, like a child. We had to get to work—he to a Skype meeting, me to my research. We didn’t have time to join the line and go in just yet. But we would, we said, we would.

A couple of days before the fire, on a morning walk, I watched with a crowd of old Parisians as restorations were done to some of the statues on Notre Dame. One lady exclaimed delightedly, “Oh! C’est Saint André!” as if recognizing an old friend in a picture, as the crane gently lowered his statue into careful, waiting arms.

I thought about how, before the widespread use of the printing press, before reading was an accessible skill to most people, architecture was the language used to communicate the grand ideas of faith, to revere and celebrate and ponder on God, the prophets, the saints, mortality itself. Of course someone would come to see the statue of a saint as some beloved friend, as we often feel about characters in books, and more than that even. All those human hands making lace out of stone, reaching with waiting arms to continue the work done generations before they were ever born, laboring hard for years to carve in stone a human face they recognized, in which they could see God.

I was in Paris because of love like that. I had become obsessed with perfume in the years leading up to this, and was there to research the perfume industry, to write about the art of perfumery in the midst of the anthropocene. I wanted to write about desire, ephemerality, pleasure, loss.

When my husband said Notre Dame was burning, we ran downstairs, down the street, to where the trees opened a view across the river. A slight wind brought a smell across the water. It was the smell of old, old books, burning. I was undone by it.

You know the smell of old books. You know, perhaps, what it is to lean down to one in the late afternoon, in a bookshop or library, to feel at once the age of the story, the hands passing it each to another, the comfort of history. But this smell of Notre Dame burning was impossibly old, weathered with dust, a gnarled leather cover, pages stained with the oil from centuries of hands, all wound through with fire and smoke. It went down to my gut, that smell. It was the smell of books older than all our lives—on fire.

It was the smell of old, old books, burning. I was undone by it.

Later, I would learn that the smell had most likely been the wooden roof, called affectionately “the forest” because it was made up of so many beams of oak, each from a different tree, each dating back to the twelfth century, though some of them were thought to date back even further.

That smell of old books we so love is caused by the breakdown of lignin present in the wood pulp of the paper, a smell closely related to vanillin, one of the compounds that give vanilla its scent. What I smelled there was the same lignin, more ancient than I could process, released as ash. I felt it in my entire body, a shock I couldn’t process until much later.

I thought, “Is this the smell of the world, now?”

We watched with a crowd, silently, as if at a funeral.

I remember wanting to leap up and embrace the elderly woman in front of me whose face folded in on itself, like a child’s in pain, who turned from the sight of the burning roof like she’d been struck, who put her hand over her mouth and sobbed, “Oh, horrible.” Her husband put his arm around her and hurried her away, murmuring to soothe her. We turned to hear anguished wailing coming from a young woman, walking down the middle of the road, pushing through the crowd, to cross the bridge, her eyes never leaving the flames in the belfry.

After, it wasn’t the faces, the trembling shoulders beside me, the terrible bloom of the fire across the river, that haunted me. It was that smell. Why did it twist in my gut like a curse? Why did everything I looked at—the cobblestones and the grates, the people in the shadows of medieval walls, the sudden sails of a swan’s wings on the river—make me want to fall down and wail?

That smell was one of the most profound sensory shocks of the experience. A full-body ache of associations, memory, and visceral alarm. I texted my mother, days after: “I don’t know why exactly but I feel traumatized?” Even writing it now, it feels a little absurd, to be most haunted by the smell. Indeed, for a South African, to be haunted like this at all.

Notre Dame is a fraught place. It wasn’t long after the initial wave of shock and grief swept over international media that the (rightful) point was made regarding the silence around similar tragedies, like the racist burnings of black churches in the United States, or fires in the Amazon.

Who do we mourn? Whose holy places are still considered holy to everyone? And what was it that built and maintained such an edifice? Did the Catholic Church, one of the richest organizations on earth, really need the money of ordinary people to maintain what is very much a relic of Christian and European dominance over the rest of the world, whose holy places are regularly sacked, destroyed, and disrespected?

Walking around Paris was painful. I’m not sure it’s possible to not feel some kind of conflict in that city—a twist in the gut, a bitter, fist-clenched sadness—as a person from Africa, whose continent was plundered to gild its achingly beautiful palaces and churches. But that is another thing to talk about entirely, and has been said much more beautifully by many others. Still, I carried this profound, soul-shaking ache inside me, a grief tearing at my throat, that I needed to reconcile. And I had a book to work on, while I was there. A book about smell.

Visits to perfume museums, to the jewel-box parfumeries in the Marais, felt incomplete, somehow, like I was being drawn to something else, urgently. I found myself ducking into the churches of Saint Eustache and Saint Séverin, standing in guttering candlelight, breathing in the lilies and the stone, the incense and the cool dust of the air. I searched through the alleys—through the miasma of piss and shit that is, along with fresh bread and lilies, the smell of Paris to me—for something else, as if something were beating under the skin of the world.

I started praying. I hadn’t prayed, properly, for months. I’m a Muslim by upbringing, taught to shun any attempt at depicting God through imagery, but I wept desperately before the statue of the Blessed Virgin in Saint Séverin, longing to enter into that space, that world, with my very breath. A holiness that was physical, felt and breathed through the body: scented smoke and painted tears.

So I started reading, too, about the theologies of the senses, about how others have sought God through the imperfect body, the human urge to see and touch another face, to recognize God in the hungering, beautiful flesh. I found that any barrier I thought I had between my senses and my spirit, between the lustful, hungering animal self and the reverent, striving soul, had been stripped away. I couldn’t separate them. The world demanded to enter me. It felt like the highest form of prayer.

I went to the Musée de Cluny, hung with the six tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, each of them representing one of the five senses, and the last, the uncanny sixth sense, bearing only the words: “À mon seul désir”—to my one desire.

The world demanded to enter me. It felt like the highest form of prayer.

Between the tapestries for taste and hearing, there is the tapestry for smell: the lady holding a flower to the air, to breathe its scent. Smell is placed, in accordance with much medieval thought, as the place where the physical becomes the spiritual. It troubles the borders of the self and the world. It is the place where we are undone.

The word ‘perfume’ comes from the Latin “per fumar”—through smoke. It speaks of offerings of burning incense, of sacrifice, of devotion. Its very nature is one of passage, transcendence, the physical self finding its finest realization in being undone, and from that place finding itself becoming a conduit to God. In perfume, thanks to it, there is no need for separation of animal and spirit. What makes us most earthly is what allows us to find our way back to Heaven. We are allowed, at last, to live joyously, rapturously, in our contradictions.

The thing is, we can turn away from any other artform—you can block your ears to music, look away from a painting, refuse to dance—but you cannot help but breathe. It undoes borders of inside and outside, the body and the world it moves through. It connects us. Anyone who has taken a crowded train can tell you that for free; there is no getting away from the smells of other bodies. It keeps us gloriously bound to the earth, our bodies, even as it reminds us of the spirit inside the flesh, clamoring at all our borders. As a Muslim, I learned that human consciousness started when God breathed Her Ruh—Her spirit, Her breath—into Adam, causing him to sneeze, and, bewildered, understand what he was.

Breathing in the smell of something as ancient and filled with memory as Notre Dame burning, the physicality of it, even the idea of carrying some of that place—whether the lead or the wood or the dust—within me after, changed how I understood myself in relation to the world. And to a God that sometimes felt profoundly far away.

What happened then was a transformation that came into me with the smell, that breathed itself out in prayer, and an attention so rarefied it hurt. The whole city seemed to bend me to it, to clamor at my pores and nerves. I became obsessed. I thought about Original Sin and I ugly-cried a great deal in front of pietàs. I couldn’t explain it properly to myself. Until one day, in the midst of the heatwave that hit later that summer, when, dizzy from the heat, we ducked into the Église Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement, and, in front of Delacroix’s Pietà, I broke down weeping.

Jesus looked so terribly wounded, and sore, and human. I wanted to reach out to him, and stroke his face. Maybe it was the heatwave, the worst Paris has ever suffered, making my already chronic illness so much worse. Maybe it was how I was panicking, in the face of everything, the strange, apocalyptic feel of the fire, the weather—the world as we knew it, burning.

What hit me like a bodily blow was the miracle of of a God so moved by love for us hungering, small, fleshly creatures, that He clothed Himself in the body of one of us, to suffer, and bleed, to be thirsty, and to live. To taste of wine, and bread. To also work with his own hands, to breathe in the smell of sawdust and sweat. I thought of the miracle of the Eucharist, of the taking in of exactly that—as an act of love, of worship. And I thought of how dissolved our borders really are.

I had written to a friend, both of us commiserating over our climate anxiety. “I can feel it in my body, right now,” I said. “That’s the thing—if you’re disabled. If you’re ill. If you’re sick. If you’re homeless. It’s not an abstract thing. You feel it in your body.”

And I realized, that smell that had so shaken me was also a kind of grace, a loss that physically entered my lungs. It was a gesture from one mortal thing to another, rising into air by being undone, rising in me as it died. It says, we are of each other. We breathe each other in. We remember who we are, and the world we are bound to.

The spirit moves in the invisible places to the answering soul, though the throat, through smoke—per fumar.