Download or read book The Foul and the Fragrant written by Alain Corbin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells--from the seductress's civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools--exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.