HARVARD

Theresa Levitt Elixir A Parisian Perfume House

Condition: New

Size: 320 Pages

Description:

Elixir tells the story of two young chemists who were not convinced, and how their work rewrote the boundary between life and non-life.

In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent were working in Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux, drawing on alchemical traditions that equated a plant’s vitality with its aroma. In their spare time they hunted the vital force that promised to reveal the secret to life itself. Their ideas, roundly condemned by established chemists, led to the discovery of structural differences between naturally occurring molecules and their synthetic counterparts, even when the molecules were chemically identical.