Featured Image:
Les heures de la nuit (1821), The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Vogue, a century or so ago, often featured the “fancy dress balls” of the day, especially as they pertained to charity events and the idling of the rich—the magazine proclaimed such costume parties (in the 1913 article “On With the Masque!”) to be a “whirling vortex of  merriment in  the guise of bird, beast, or flower, or as the elements of nature, or in plumes borrowed from many nations.”

If you chose not to draw on cultural stereotypes, there was always the glorious, satiny bat. In a 1910 Vogue guide to costumes for fancy-dress dances, readers are advised to avoid “the gaudy and tinseled models.” Instead, it steered readers toward “the bat” among its other recommendations of “Venetian fruit seller” and “Italian peasant.” Foremost: “For brilliant effects, when necessary, there is available a glazed tarlatan … It is originally intended for wrapping furniture and bric-a-brac when the house is shrouded for the summer.”

Such celebration of the bat’s style coincided with the grimmer reports of the time of the actual beast’s less debonair qualities, from its bloodsucking on sleeping victims to its anti-dapper swagger. The Bronx Zoo was the first to exhibit vampire bats in captivity, in 1933; the New York Times quoted the zoo’s curator of mammals and reptiles upon the bat’s Dracula-like arrival to the city: “It used the wings as stilts, more or less, and in walking looks like a giant spider.”

Jean Painlevé, who was described in his New York Times obit as “a biologist, fetishist, filmmaker, and aquanaut” filmed a vampire bat in 1939. When the short was released in 1945, “The Vampire” became a clear allusion to the Nazis. The Times describes the film as featuring a bat that “gives a guinea pig a gentle kiss on the lips, which, as the subtitles explain, numbs the victim in the place where the bloodletting will occur …”

A few reports from the 1870s noted the vampire bat’s inclination toward toe sucking.

“Many tales have been told of the Vampire Bat,” writes the Reverend J.G. Wood, in Wood’s Animal Kingdom of 1870, “and its fearful attacks on sleeping men—tales which, although founded on fact, were so sadly exaggerated as to cause a reaction in the opposite direction. It is reported to come silently by night, and to search for the exposed toes of a sound sleeper—its instinct telling it whether the intended victim were thoroughly buried in sleep. Poising itself above the feet of its prey, and fanning them with its extended wings, it produced a cool atmosphere, which, in those hot climates, aided in soothing the slumberer into a still deeper repose. The Bat then applied its needle-pointed teeth to the upturned foot, and inserted them into the tip of the toe with such adroit dexterity, that no pain was caused by the tiny wound. The lips were then brought into action, and the blood was sucked until the Bat was satiated. It then disgorged the food it had just taken, and began afresh, continuing its alternate feeding and disgorging, until the victim perished from sheer loss of blood.”

This account seemed to be directly referenced, and dismissed, in The Columbian Cyclopedia of 1897: “Vampire-bats sometimes attack men, when sleeping in the open air; but the stories of their fanning their victims with their wings, while they suck their blood, are fabulous.”

Fabulous, indeed.

The Delineator, the turn-of-the-century fashion magazine, featured the fancy-dress bat costume in the article “Carnival and Masquerade Costumes”: “The mantle is of black satin, made double and whaleboned to represent large wings cut something like an umbrella top. The arms should be gracefully raised at frequent intervals to suggest this winged creature in flight.”

Meanwhile, an 1898 article in The Puritan on “Novelties in Fancy Dress” describes the bat costume as “a very ingenious and artistic affair” with black taffeta silk for wings, and ribs of featherbone. “These wings are attached to the long black gloves and are fastened over the shoulders in fichu fashion, meeting over the bust in front and finished by a small entire bat. The decoration for the head is a large bat’s head and small bats decorate the slippers.”

But film scholar Diane Negra suggests, perhaps, that the bat’s arrival at the fancy-dress balls signaled that the party was over. She notes that “in the early decades of the century, makeup was integrally tied to a cultural sense that the boundaries of class were collapsing, and the vamp iconography of pale skin and heavily made-up lips and eyes might well have connoted transformative desire to audiences at the time.”

Silent-film actress Musidora, along with famed designer Paul Poiret, practically invented the vamp in the silent film series Les Vampires, drawing from the bat’s stealthy sense of style. Musidora’s character, Irma Vep (vampire in anagram) creeps around in Poiret’s flesh-tight body suit (recently reimagined in the Alicia Vikander series Irma Vep by Louis Vuitton’s artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière).

But it wasn’t Musidora in the literally bat-like getup of  the film. In Les Vampires, a ballerina (played by Marfa Koutiloff) dies on stage in the fancy-dress wings of a vampire bat, mid-performance, her finger having been pricked in her dressing room by a poisonous ring. (This truly is in the spirit of the vampire bat’s modus operandi of counting on the digits for sustenance: “They do not seem inclined to attack large animals, and never man,” wrote Augustus C.L. Arnold in 1875, “only while he is sleeping, when they inflict a small wound in the great toe, without awakening him, and suck the blood in such a way, that when the bat withdraws, the wound remains open, and still continues to bleed.”)

Certainly among the most stylishly repulsive vamps in history are “the Vudkodlaks of the Servians” as described under the heading “vampire” in Alden’s Manifold Cyclopedia of Knowledge and Language in 1892. They were “particularly fond of the blood of young girls. They pair with the Wjeschtitza, female ghosts with wings of  fire, which by night sink  down on the breast of sleeping soldiers, and inspire them with their fury. As anyone killed by a vampire becomes himself a vampire, when a Wallachian dies, where this superstition prevails, a skilled person, generally a midwife, is always called in, to take precautions against the corpse becoming a vampire, by driving a nail through the skull, rubbing in various places the lard of a pig killed on St. Ignatius’s Day.”

A Cup of Chocolate (1844), by Charles Beranger
© Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

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At nine o’clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.
—The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

 

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The decadence movement, coincidentally or not, coincided with “the great chocolate boom,” when chocolate consumption, production, and import rose dramatically in the West. Visiting the American frontier as part of his lecture tour in 1882, Wilde inspired his hotel manager in Iowa to serve him his hot chocolate in a cup as thin as the “tender petal of a white rose.”

But after the great boom made chocolate widely available, people became far less delicate about their candy consumption. The frenzy led to a 1920 proposal put to the English Parliament that would prohibit the sale of candy in theaters at night, in a “sugar-saving” move. A drama critic in London protested that “chocolate is the foundation of our drama.” In an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on the subject, an American journalist wrote dismissively of the excessive candy eating of London theatergoers: “Men alone, women alone, children, whiskered aged men, women with teeth, and without ’em, chew, and lick, and gulp in a fashion unapproached in America. Once in the blackness of the theater the grim, reserved Britisher throws aside his restraint and abandons himself to an orgy of candy gluttony.”

That same year, an Australian critic wrote in The Age that “perhaps the chief purpose of the modern theatre is to be an eating house where chocolate is served in the stalls and ice cream in the galleries … It is not outside the bounds of possibility that the control of the theaters will very soon pass out of the hands of those who still make some pretense to provide dramatic entertainment and pass into the hands of those who provide lollipops.”

As usual, Paris was decades ahead in such decadence. In Bizarre: An Original Literary Gazette (1855), Carl Benson wrote of the Folies-Nouvelles of Paris, a “pantomime theater” that had become a place where “people eat sugar candy.” He goes on to write that “said candy (sucre d’orge a l’absinthe) is atrociously bad stuff, by the way, tasting like tansy tea coagulated, but it is the chic to eat, or rather suck it.”

Decadence aside, apostles of temperance pushed chocolate as a salubrious substitution for liquor. But rest assured, delinquents grew quickly deft at corrupting candy, creating an eternal friction between the childlike nature of sweets and the naughty potential for moral and dental decay.

“Give the children plenty of pure sugar—and they will not have need of cod-liver oil.” This was part of a treatise for the moral foundation of candy making, as represented by the industry itself, in the article “How to Sell Confectionary” by a representative of the National Candy Company in 1910. He also celebrated the role of candy in the military: “The United States government buys pure candy by the tons and ships it to the Philippines to be sold at cost to the soldiers. All men crave it in the tropics, and the more they get of it the less whisky they want.”

And the industry provided in other humanitarian ways too, he insisted. “It may be a jocose estimate,” the candy man said, “but it is said that there are fifty thousand widows in England who get a living by conducting small confectionary stores.”

It’s perhaps this line of thought that led to Candy Medication, a guide published in 1915 by Bernard Fantus, M.D., who claimed to have experimented with cod-liver-oil chocolate cream. But such experiments led to more successful marriages of candy and pills, and he offered among his recipes “sweet tablets of opium.” In his introduction, Fantus explained that “it is the author’s hope that this booklet may be instrumental in robbing childhood of one of its terrors, namely, nasty medicine; that it may lessen the difficulties experienced by nurse and mother in giving medicament to the sick child; and help to make the doctor more popular with the little ones.”

Meanwhile, other doctors were offering dire warnings about such candy-coated contentment. In his Second Book on Physiology and Hygiene (1894), J.H. Kellogg warned of sweets spiked with booze: “Children have been found in a state of partial intoxication as the result of eating freely of such candies.”

Candy injected with whiskey or brandy came to be called “wink drops,” according to an article in a Kentucky newspaper in 1896. In what may have been a warning or a celebration, the paper noted that “the very latest phase of social wickedness is the bonbon with the little ‘jag’ concealed beneath its sugary exterior.”

So the temperance movement was quick to revise its advice. Under the subheading “Ways to Drunkenness,” New Catholic World (1899) depicted the drunken woman as someone who “as a matinee girl … fills her bonbonniere with the brandy-drops and absinthe candies sold so freely in the up-to-date candy-shops. Or it may be that she takes paregoric or peppermint frequently when she doesn’t feel well, and Jamaica ginger at the slightest excuse.”

It stands to reason, then, that the candy industry has had a long history of peddling adult indulgences in sweet facsimiles, from candy cigarettes to candy lipstick. (“Put it on, eat it off,” the package encouraged.)

The mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1968, called for a ban on the “Hippy Sippy” novelty candy, which critics said too closely resembled a drug addict’s hypodermic needle. The narcotics commission and local parents complained that “the novelty is as unsuitable for children’s play as toy rat poison.” To make matters worse (or, perhaps, better for the candy dealer), Hippy Sippy was sold with lapel buttons promoting the candy with lines like “I’ll try anything” and “We sell happiness.”

Sippy Powered Candy (no relation to Hippy Sippy, as far as I know) and Mini-Cola Candy, both sold with straws, sent Clair-Mel City, Florida, into a tizzy in 1989, according to the Tampa Tribune. The stuff was as snow white and powdery as nose candy, and the kids at school were snorting it, cocaine-style. “I plan to take the candy off the shelves because kids seven years old can’t handle this,” a convenience store manager said. He hadn’t done it yet, though, because of its popularity.

But candy makers have gotten in trouble even when their tainted candy hasn’t intoxicated. In France in 1974, Michel Ricoud sold candy that he promoted as aphrodisiacal, but a court testimony found the sweets contained no such potential for arousal. “I offered hope,” he pleaded with the court. “I brought illusions, I created a psychological effect which made my clients happy.”

This past winter was among the most brutal I’ve known. With its record-low temperatures and record-high snowfall, my only avenue of escape into spring was through the bottled flowers in my cabinet—and through my little blue notebook of scent.

Perfume is often thought a social gambit, applied mostly when we know we’ll see others; one scents oneself in order to be sniffed at. But isolation and quarantine rendered us unsocialized, so if we wore perfumes and colognes at all, we probably did so for purely personal and private indulgence. We could breathe it in, stir up nostalgia, and remember ourselves.

Whenever I sprayed on Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet, it was for its suggestion of a very dry gin martini in a very quiet hotel lobby in the middle of an afternoon. Atelier Cologne’s Vanille Insensée put me in a pastry shop with a cup of sweet tea, with Sarah Vaughan’s “September Song” playing overhead. When I wore 1740 from Histoires de Parfums, I could imagine somewhere I’ve never been: a game of blackjack in a gambling den with red leather banquettes, sipping scotch whiskey, no ice, neckties unknotted.

Language is an important part of our sense of scent, from the poetry and beauty of its ingredients to the stories that perfume can tell.

I’ve spent the past five years or so writing a novel called The Perfume Thief with a plot that hinges on rare ingredients and the history of perfume. Its main character, a woman named Clementine, has spent her long life as a gentleman thief, stealing into ladies’ boudoirs to abscond with expensive fragrances and priceless bottles. She eventually settles in Paris, where she gets swept into the French Resistance during World War II and embroiled in some espionage—some of that intrigue concerns a perfume inspired by a royal assassination in 1599.

So my little notebook is full of scents going back centuries, details lifted from old books, pharmaceutical reports, chemical guides, recipes, and newspaper and magazine advertisements. But it’s also my own personal map to scents that captivate. As spring has sprung around me again, I’m in the garden amid the candy-sweet perfume of wild plum blossoms and the tiny lavender-colored blooms of the Korean lilac. Soon enough there will be the rich and lush scent of the honeysuckle and the dusky Russian sage. There will be thickets of basil and dill and cilantro.

But how can I define it beyond that? Even holding the lilac to my nose just now, words flutter away. Writers have long written about the elusive nature of describing scent—a rose is a rose is a rose. Or, as The Ultimate American Gardening Book puts it: “The problem with writing about scent is that you can’t describe it in any meaningful way except by comparison—and most flowers smell more like themselves than anything else.” A copywriter for a perfume advertisement in a 1930 issue of Vogue abandons all effort for a fragrance called Liu (“pronounced LYOU,” the ad offers unhelpfully): “With what words can we describe it truly? With none, alas, for its charm is to the senses, not to the ears or to the brain!”

And this is why the history of perfume writing, whether for magazine ads or for the labels on bottles and boxes or for articles and blogs, is so often about capturing a mood and sensibility that approximates a perfume’s basic qualities. And the poetry of the ingredients, the alliteration and rhyme, or the staccato and stumble, can evoke drama and pageantry, or innocence and civility, or mystery and attitude.

In The Book of Perfumes, Eugene Rimmel noted that “modern” books on perfumery (Rimmel was writing in the 1860s) could be divided into two classes: “simply books of recipes,” which he dismisses as antiquated, and “works written in a high-flown style.”

While Rimmel doesn’t expound on how high that high-flown style flies, I’d say there’s a third realm of perfume writing: that which simply describes the spices, flowers, and methods of extracting scent from the world and the piquant industry itself, with its fields and markets and casks and bottles. So much of it lends itself to the imagination and to sensory delight. Even agricultural reports, when outlining the cultivation of scent and flavor, can provide that magic carpet ride that Elizabeth Arden references in the ad copy that opens this article.

A book of perfume that preceded Rimmel’s—The Art of Perfumery, and Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants (1855) by G.W. Septimus Piesse—can make even “milk of dandelion” sound exotic, with its “esprit tubereuse,” “green oil wax,” “expressed juice of dandelion root,” and “sweet almonds.” Even the recipe’s inclusion of “curd soap” pleases.

Like the thief in my novel, I combed antique books and periodicals for things worth stealing, so my perfume thief could have a lucrative career. As Putnam’s magazine outlined in its article “A Plea for the Sense of Smell,” I went searching for “tea odors from China, and sandal-wood from India, and mocha from Arabia, and chocolate from Spain, mingling their delicate suggestions with Russian odors of shelved books in spacious libraries and the fumes of the more doubtful Cuban weed.”

So in The Perfume Thief, I imagine Clementine herself studying unexpected texts, such as Diseases of Children in Hot Climates (for its pharmacopeia and remedies), and The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits, and books on varnishes, on fairy gardens, on confections; she reads the collected letters of an asylum nun who gathered mood-affecting herbs, and she consults books on tobacco, on the tools of a shoemaker (leather, strings of natural fibers, polish), on the gardens of clairvoyants, and even one on love songs written
by a botanist.

My own blue notebook includes notes from Harper’s magazine, which also explored the peculiarities of perfume. In 1856, it reported, “It is conjectured that the smelling principle of the violet is derived from prussic acid contained in the flower. If so we owe to the deadliest of poisons one of the sweetest of perfumes.” (Such conjecture was misleading it seems; today we enjoy violets on cakes, in soups, and in tea.) Harper’s also describes rose water as “merely the water in which the roses have been distilled, and from the top of which drops of oil have been carefully taken with a feather.”

And it defined something called potato ether: “distilled from potato spirit—yields
at least three [perfumes]—they go by the names of Pear, Apple, and Grape oil, from a resemblance between their odors and these fruits; confectioners use them largely to perfume their finest candies.”

Clementine would most certainly have consulted the “Annual Report on Essential Oils, Synthetic Perfumes &tc” of 1920 for both business and pleasure. It outlined the value of certain ingredients, like bergamot oil, which was in short supply after a 1908 earthquake in Calabria. “Thousands upon thousands of bergamot trees had to be felled to make room for the barrack camps to supply … the villages destroyed by that terrible earthquake, at about the same time a new disease of the citrus trees appeared.” The report would also inform Clementine about the exceptional nature of the sweet oranges of the West Indies and the worries about peppermint rust attacking Japanese plantations. She would read about birch sap for hair waters and camphor for India ink. She would read about sea fennel, artemisia, wild thyme, apricot kernels.

The chemist George Askinson, in his 1922 book Perfumes and Cosmetics: Their Preparation and Manufacture, writes of how “fine olibanum [from East African trees] appears in light yellow tears, very transparent and hard” and of a paste (made of ambergris, benzoin, orris root, and cinnamon) used to perfume jewelry by inserting small quantities within the diamond settings.

The letters of the traveler R. Arthur Arnold, collected in 1868 under the title From the Levant, the Black Sea, and the Danube, offers his depiction of the bazaars in Turkey, with their “blocks of alum and saltpetre, the blue-green of sulphate of copper, heaps of henna … lumps of odorous rhubarb, ginger, cloves, gums, and glues,” and the “curious dried roots and herbs that hung pendant from the roof ” among mosaic needlework, daggers inlaid with silver, and primrose slippers.

Vaccination won’t spirit us to 19th century spice markets, but it’s bound to arouse the senses as we shuffle off the lockdown and reacquaint ourselves with the aromas, both fragrant and foul, that we lost in our solitude. This time around, you might keep your own diary of scent. You might be surprised by how efficiently the mere mention of a scent or a confluence of scents can conjure up a place, or a moment, or a long-lost memory.

Surely the most lush and extravagant creative-writing workshop in history played out in June 1816 at Lord Byron’s summer rental on Lake Geneva. It was a “wet, ungenial summer,” according to the preface Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, speaking to the genesis of that tale of reanimation. She and her soon-to-be-husband, Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Claremont, joined Byron and his physician John William Polidori for some literary antics. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron proposed one rainy night.

Not only did this writing exercise lead to Mary Shelley’s classic horror (she writes in her preface that she sought to “quicken the beatings of the heart”), but it has excited any number of artists since. That June night has been depicted in opera (Mary Shelley), theater (Bloody Poetry), film (Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound), and fiction (Frankisstein by Jeannette Winterson, El año del verano que nunca llegó by William Ospina), just to offer a few examples. (There’s also an episode of Doctor Who.)

Seeking to re-create these febrile nights of heady indulgence yourself, to electrify your own heart-quickening fiction? We offer a few shopping suggestions and their price points:

$2.6 million:
The house on Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley is said to have written part of Frankenstein.

At the dawn of the pandemic last April, a house in the little French village of Nernier was put up for sale for $2.6 million. A plaque on the side of the house notes: “Mary Shelley, in this humble house, during April 1816, wrote several pages of her notorious book ‘Frankenstein.’”

The plaque is either lying or knows something historians don’t: There’s no other indication that Mary ever spent time in Nernier, and all other accounts (including Mary Shelley’s own) date the beginning of Frankenstein to Byron’s challenge that summer. (Byron’s rental, where they all set out to write about ghosts, still stands: The Villa Diodati has since been broken
up into luxury apartments. That building too has a misleading plaque, claiming John Milton stayed there in 1638, though the house wasn’t built until after the poet’s death.)

Percy Shelley, however, did tour Lake Geneva with Byron and stayed one night in a lodging house in Nernier, which likely eventually led to the plaque’s bit of revisionist history. Mary stayed behind in the house near Villa Diodati that she and Percy rented themselves; that house no longer stands.

Regardless, that little plaque can go a long way toward stirring the imagination and atmosphere, and the house itself is right on the lake and exquisitely restored. And it has a romantic history all its own, according to the real estate agent in an article in the Daily Mail: “Many years ago, when the alcoholic drink absinthe was legal in Switzerland, but banned in France, this house became a hotspot for smuggling across the lake from the Swiss side to the French side.”

$4,800 to $455,000:
Mary Shelley first editions.

A complete three-volume set of Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (contemporary green half calf gilt, black and red labels, published 1826) sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $4,800. The catalog notes: “The last leaf of volume three contains an advertisement for Frankenstein.” We recommend The Last Man because it too was a pioneering work of literature, often credited as the first sci-fi dystopian novel. And it should quicken your heart with its prescience, as it is set in the 21st century during a pandemic complicated by political issues. We recommend you buy the house in Nernier, settle into your quarantine, and read the book’s descriptions of Switzerland as you gaze across Lake Geneva:

Under the icy vaults of the glaciers, beneath the shadow of the pines, the swinging of whose mighty branches was arrested by a load of snow; beside the streams whose intense cold proclaimed their origin to be from the slow-melting piles of congelated waters, amidst frequent storms which might purify the air, we should find health, if in truth health were not herself diseased.

Mary Shelley’s vision of the apocalypse matches somewhat her own account of traveling to Lake Geneva in 1816, in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. “Never was a scene more awefully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines.” That year, Europe was feeling the effect of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, which was responsible for a global cholera pandemic credited with the deaths of millions.

If you’re feeling particularly flush, seek out a first edition Frankenstein. The Cadillac of Frankenstein collectibles has to be Lord Byron’s own copy of the first volume, which was given
to him by the Shelleys and signed by the author. After a lucky heir stumbled upon the book among his late grandfather’s belongings, it went on auction in 2013, selling for $455,000 according to some reports. (It’s one of two signed first editions known to exist—only 500 copies were printed originally.)

Free on Tubi:
Gothic, a film by Ken Russell.

The late 1980s saw two films devoted to June 1816 at Villa Diodati: Gothic and Haunted Summer. But the two couldn’t be more different—the breathy and misty-focus Haunted Summer barely even acknowledges the ghost-story competition, while Gothic is a trippy tribute to excess and hedonism, complete with an automaton stripper with push-button nipples, walls draped in red, an occasional fisheye camera lens to render everything bloated and looming, an electro-pop soundtrack by Thomas Dolby, and Julian Sands’s hair (which shows great range, from windblown to kinky perm). While I’m willing to celebrate a naked Eric Stoltz frolicking, poet-style, in a stream as Percy Shelley in Haunted Summer, its Sands’s portrait of the author
as a young man that consumes. (To gay men of a certain age, Julian Sands is the ur-text of sublime cinema nudity: His flawless form and boyish insouciance is featured in both Gothic and A Room With a View, in which his teatime skinny dipping seemed somehow revolutionary.)

Barely five minutes into Gothic, Sands is rushing across the lawn, practically skipping, picking up a peacock along the way. Quickly things move from this sunny introduction on to the decadence often associated with that historic night: We eventually find Sands naked on the roof during an electrical storm.

The cast includes Natasha Richardson as Mary (who the New York Times noted “doesn’t seem tall as much as she seems mysteriously elongated, a flesh-and-blood wraith”) and Gabriel Byrne as Byron, who dismisses any fears of judgment from the neighbors. “Let us blind them with our wickedness,” he proclaims.

Illuminated copper engraving, 1705, by Maria Sibylla Merian. Wikimedia Commons.

The traveling bug lover, in the earliest days of insect study, brought back from foreign trips magical tales of sailors becoming drunk and dizzy from sucking on honeycombs built by intoxicated bees, of beetles that sprayed a rose perfume, of villagers who strung together glowworms to light their way in the dark.

Poetry and fantasy were key to entomologists’ research, a whimsy that sometimes tested their authority. “Madame Merian had a poetic fancy,” declared a Mr. Davis, with a condescending huff, at a meeting of the Entomological Club in 1836. He’s speaking of Maria Sibylla Merian, the pioneering entomologist and scientific artist. She did groundbreaking research during her travels in the early 18th century, gathering insights into metamorphosis and other fabulist tales. And though her work is still admired and consulted today and her art still exhibited, Mr. Davis found it all too fantastical. In his lecture, he speaks of her “gross misstatements” and stories more fabulous “than which the history of gnomes and fairies cannot boast.”

He also refers to the legend that Madame Merian illustrated a luminescent bug in the night by using the light of its glow as a lamp, though these were not her own claims at all: They were tall tales attributed to her, inspired by her fame for discovery. Nonetheless, he stirred up a heated debate among his club members, demanding that they make changes to their motto and logo, which reference Madame Merian’s research. He proposed that they acknowledge the inaccuracy and that “the representation of Fulgora Candelaria, which appears on the wrapper of the Entomological Magazine, be forthwith deprived of the radii intended to indicate luminosity, and that the motto, signifying ‘allow me to illuminate the world,’ be henceforth omitted.”

He was so determined to dim her glow, he was dimming the glow of the entire club. They were right, though; she and other entomologists had noticed that the bug glows in the dark, but later scientists would determine it was likely a bacteria that gave it its shimmer. But other of her “fancies” cited by Mr. Davis have since been proven sound, such as the leaping tarantula that was only just recently named after her.

But Madame Merian’s humiliation wouldn’t end with Mr. Davis. Her listing in the book Women in the Fine Arts (1904) concludes with: “This extraordinary woman, whose studies and writings added so much to the knowledge of her time, was neither beautiful nor graceful. Her portraits present a woman with hard and heavy features, her hair in short curls surmounted by a stiff and curious head-dress, made of folds of some black stuff.”

Despite this criticism of her folds of black stuff, Madame Merian, as with many entomologists and fashion designers, appreciated the links between insects and style. The 19th century entomologists William Kirby and William Spence wrote of “the beaus of Italy” catching fireflies “to adorn the heads of the ladies with these artificial diamonds by sticking them into their hair.” They wrote also of the Elater noctilucus, a glowing beetle, worn in St. Domingo, one on each big toe.

Kirby and Spence cite the story of a maid who worked for the biologist Jan Swammerdam and discovered a number of wood lice in his garden; the bugs roll up into a little ball when alarmed. Mistaking them for beads, “she employed herself in stringing them on a thread; when, to her great surprise, the poor animals beginning to move and struggle for their liberty, crying out and running away in the utmost alarm, she threw down her prize.”

This impulse may somewhat speak to inclinations by designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli, who created a necklace designed to make it seem as though your sweater were crawling with bugs. More recently, Jennifer Herwitt has designed jewelry such as a choker of linked ants in yellow gold and a diamond butterfly belly ring as part of her “Collection of Living Jewels.” The fashion designer Nicholas Godley has harnessed the cannibalistic golden orb spiders of Madagascar, which spin a strong, silken web, to create fabric.

And scientists have written of insects that demonstrate a fashion sense that dovetails with their sense of survival.

“If you place a number of large ant-flies in a box, the wings of many of them will, after some time, gradually fall off like autumnal leaves,” writes William Gould in 1747. “These [wings] are, to other insects, their highest decorations, and the want of them lessens their beauty, and shortens their life. On the reverse, a large ant-fly gains by the loss, and is afterwards promoted to a throne, and drops these external ornaments as emblems of too much levity for a sovereign.”

Kirby and Spence tell of a lace-winged fly that intimidates by wearing the pelts of its victims, a thick coat “composed of the skins, limbs, and down” of aphids. But they’re just as happy to dress in something pretty; the scientists placed a fly in a glass bottle with a silk cocoon and slips of paper, and the bug put those on too.

James Rennie, the Scottish naturalist, seemed particularly appreciative of the whims and follies of insects, and even attributes the damage they do to a fashion sense they share with humans: “The moth that eats into our clothes has something to plead for our pity, for he came, like us, naked into the world, and he has destroyed our garments, not in malice or wantonness, but that he may clothe himself with the same wool which we have stripped from the sheep.”

“Down with the pretty ladies of the old school! Down with the old masters! Away with the pretty ladies!”

Ken Russell’s Dante’s Inferno (1967), a BBC biopic of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, features rebels building a bonfire of classical paintings, prancing among the flames with torches, shouting their dismissal of the elegant women who modeled for the  masters. But the film opens with  the exhumation of Rossetti’s own pretty lady, his dead wife and fellow artist, Lizzie Siddal, a hand reaching in among the skeleton’s wild locks of hair to retrieve the pages of Rossetti’s poetry he’d had buried with her in his time of mourning. (Seven years after Rossetti abandoned his poems thusly, he allowed his literary agent to secretly dig her up to pluck the manuscript from the pillow of Siddal’s coffin; to Rossetti’s disappointment, the pages were decayed and falling apart, worms having devoured some of his favorite lines from his poem “Jenny,” about a prostitute.)

While Dante’s Inferno was filmed in black and white, the history of the Pre-Raphaelites, and so much of Victorian-era artistry, seems to me steeped in color. It seems also steeped in death and romance (preoccupied, especially, with the romantic decline of women). Arsenic, lead, earth, ash, poison—all of it a palette for portraits of beauty by mortals summoning spirits with paint and pigment.

By some accounts, Siddal was addicted not only to laudanum (the drug that killed her) but to an arsenical face powder she used cosmetically. And arsenical paints were irresistible to not only Victorian artists but anyone seeking to commune with the extremities of color. One of the most comprehensive books on color from the era, Chromatography; Or, a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, by George Field, includes a warning with its recommendation of Arsenic Yellow: “It must not be forgotten that it is poisonous.”

Arsenic as a Domestic Poison, by Edward S. Wood, M.D. (1885) explores the medical statutes of various countries in its approach to arsenical paints. In Russia: “The employment of substances injurious to health for coloring articles of food and sweetmeats, such as comfits and gingerbread, marmalade, pastille ices, etc., shall be entirely prohibited.” However, it does allow for some industrial uses of arsenic paint, when beautification is of high necessity: “exception to these rules shall only be made in favor of wall-paper, and for tissues in which the patterns, flowers, leaves, moths, stripes, etc., are alone traced in arsenical paint on a more extensive ground of non-arsenical coloring matter.”

A prolific author of parenting guides, Pye Henry Chavasse, makes sure to repeat his warnings about arsenical paint in many of his books, including Wife and Mother; or, Information for Every Woman, and Advice to a Wife on the Management of Her Own Health and on the Treatment of Some of the Complaints Incidental to Pregnancy, Labour, and Suckling. In his The Physical Training of Children (1875), he writes of the dangers of these sucklings sucking paint: “Children’s paint-boxes are very dangerous toys for a child to play with: many of the paints are poisonous, containing arsenic, lead, gamboge, etc., and a child, when painting, is apt to put the brush into his mouth, to absorb the superabundant fluid. Of all the colors, the green paint is the most dangerous, as it is frequently composed of arsenite of copper—arsenic and copper—two deadly poisons.” He concludes the section with this helpful advice: “There are some paint-boxes warranted not to contain a particle of poison of any kind: these ought, for a child, to be chosen by a mother.”

The lead in paint even led to a common diagnosis, something called “painter’s colic,” a deathly condition affecting artists, trapped in their musty garrets, breathing in the toxic fumes of their paints. Pre-Raphaelite hanger-on James McNeill Whistler is said to have suffered from painter’s colic for a time, which certainly didn’t subdue his Harmony in Blue and Gold, otherwise known as the “Peacock Room,” an extravagant, richly imagined interior design and mural project.

The writer Lord Ronald Gower (who is believed to be Oscar Wilde’s inspiration for the character Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray) wrote about the Peacock Room for Vanity Fair, under the pen name Talon Rouge, while Whistler was still at work on the project in 1877: “I pity those who may have to look forward to a long succession of meals in this room of harmony. One could not feed on ordinary food in such a room. Perhaps locusts and wild honey might be allowed, but then comes the question of the apparel to be worn on these solemn occasions. I know only of one ladies’ costume which would not interfere with the gold and blue around and above, and that dress (including a hat) is composed entirely of peacock feathers, but I fear it has moulted long ago.”

But color in the 19th century wasn’t always fatalistic and melodramatic; it was often quite quiet, and even poetical. Artists’ manuals of the day describe paints and pigments derived from such things as “the inspissated juice of buckthorn berries,” from volcano ash dug up from the earth, from cuttlefish, horse hestnuts, the juice of the leek, from rue, parsley, columbine, and black nightshade, from the bones of pigs, stags, and oxen, and the stones of peaches.

“A pigment known as ‘purree’ or Indian yellow is produced in Monghyr from the urine of horned cattle fed on decayed and yellow mango leaves,” according to Animal Products: Their Preparation, Commercial Uses, and Value (1877).

A writer credited as Mrs. Merrifield, author of Original Treatises Dating from the XIIth to XVIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting (1849), describes the pigment kermes as derived from “the dead bodies of the female insect of the coccus ilicis, which lives upon the leaves of the prickly oak.”

Mrs. Merrifield seems to perfectly capture the Pre-Raphaelite inspiration to marry art and environment in this cityscape: “The colour called Venetian red is procured from Verona. Besides its use in painting, this earth was formerly much employed in making the bricks of which many of the old buildings of Venice are constructed. The fine colour of these bricks, heightened perhaps by their contrast with the green waters of the narrow canals, can scarcely have escaped the observation of travellers.”