St. Thomas à Kempis is credited with the statement that the chamber of the blessed Leduine was so charmingly odorous that people who were privileged to enter it were delighted, and wishing to enjoy her perfume to the full, were wont to approach their faces close to the bosom of the Saint, “who seemed to have become a casket in which the Lord had deposited His most precious perfumes.” After the death of St. Theresa a salt-cellar which had been placed in her bed preserved for a long time a most delicious odour. And so on indefinitely, some of the stories being, as might be expected, a little too plain-spoken and artless for modern readers. It is difficult to account for the pleasant odour of Saints whose pride it was to live without change of raiment, to harbour parasites, and to abstain from washing. Nevertheless that certain persons exhale a naturally pleasant aroma from their bodies is true. Alexander the Great is noted by Plutarch as having so sweet an odour that his tunics were soaked with aromatic perfume, and taking a flying leap through the pages of history, we come to Walt Whitman, who had the same characteristic. Indeed, a piny aromatic odour, of considerable strength, is occasionally noticeable in certain people, and I can myself testify that it becomes stronger on the approach of their death. We are not often told when historical heroes were unpleasant in this respect, but in the case of Louis XIV. we have the authoritative evidence of Madame Montespan, who after their “divorce, when having a public set-to with her sun-god in the glittering _salles_ of Versailles, discomfited that little, red-heeled, bewigged, and pompous mannikin with the following broadside: “With all my imperfections, at least I do not smell as badly as you do!” His ancestor, “Lewis the Eleventh,” says Burton in “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” “had a conceit everything did stink about him. All the odoriferous perfumes they could get would not ease him, but still he smelled a filthy stink.” A modern rhinologist would suspect this monarch of having been afflicted with maxillary antrum suppuration. It will be noted, however, that there is no record that the odour he himself perceived was perceptible to others. The fœtor, as we say, was subjective, not objective, in which respect it differed from that of another historical personage, Benjamin Disraeli to wit, who was the subject probably of the disease known as ozæna. (See later.) CHAPTER VI THE ULTIMATE In a former chapter we dwelt upon the curious fact that memories aroused by olfactory stimuli are independent of the will. Now there is yet another way in which smell ignores the head of the cerebral hierarchy.