The scents in The Awakening belonged to a specific time and place: summer vacations on Grand Isle, Louisana, during the 1890s. The characters seemed to float and drift through their surroundings, much like the fragrance of flowers carried on the night air. Few of the scents suggested fresh, open spaces; even the smell of the sea was dense and seductive. Rose-filled vases shared space with garlands woven from red and yellow flowers. Branches from orange and lemon trees decorated a hall, their deeply polished leaves contrasting with the gauzy muslin curtains that billowed in the warm breeze. Perfumed talcum powder – poudre de riz – was lifted from the dressing table and dabbed onto sun-flushed skin. And finally, as Edna, exhausted, slipped beneath the ocean waves, she remembered her childhood home and ‘the musky odour of pinks filled the air’.

In an attempt to recreate the final, scented scenes of the book, I made a perfume with notes of carnation, clove and rose. I added bergamot and lavender. The bergamot gave the blend a hint of brightness, the lavender a contrasting cooler, herbaceous quality. The final note I selected was oak, from an expensive oakwood absolute, a highly concentrated natural extraction I kept for special occasions. It was Chopin’s reference to the gnarled and stunted trees, scattered remnants of a once-vast chenier forest, that aroused my curiosity. More than the warm, salty air of the Mexican Gulf, the heady, night-time blooms, or the lush green of undergrowth, it was the hurricane-battered but tenacious water-oaks that, for me, struck at the heart of Chopin’s ‘rare odour’.

Jerome called in on his way home from work. He was one of the lucky ones; he still had a job.

I decided to test him on The Awakening perfume I had made. I wanted to see if he could identify the book from sniffing my blend, and so I devised a multi-choice question based around smells linked to the novels he taught in his Introduction to American Literature course. I amused myself all afternoon trying to decide on the other books and finally settled on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for the stench of cattle and blood, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural for the smell of grass, leather baseballs and sweat, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for the scent of dampened fire and burnt wood. None of these novels shared a scent profile with The Awakening and so I expected Jerome to have little trouble picking Chopin’s novel from the choices offered.