This book examines a striking convergence of writing, olfaction, and perfume culture in 19th-century France. This was a time when colonial enterprise and perfume production flourished. Symbiotic discourses in literature, hygiene, medicine and the popular press reveal a growing apprehension of perfume, and increased vigilance to its proximity to the body. It is as if suspicion of perfume supplanted the fear of miasma as an olfactive indicator of hygienic and social danger. The more obtainable and feminized perfume became, the more toxic and symptomatic its portrayal. Doctors identified the predominance of smell and sensitivity to perfume as symptoms of hysteria and neurosis. Patients and poets alike inhaled perfume to alter time, space and states of mind. Desire and mistrust provoked by perfume in the works I study (by writers including Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Goncourt, Huysmans, and Rachilde) correlate with suspicion of smell itself in Western civilization. Focusing on novels, poetry and extra-literary works from the waning of Napoleon's reign to WWI, my book expands the rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship on the history of the senses.