“Who mastered the smells, mastered the heart of humanity. » Patrick Süskind, Perfume. The trade secrets of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the hero of Süskind's novel, are forgotten. Or almost ; the master perfumer Septimus Piesse (1820-1882) was one of the last to know the musical alchemy and intimate history of fragrances: "There is, so to speak, an octave of scents, like an octave of notes ; certain perfumes blend together like the sounds of an instrument. Here we deliver the essentials of this 1857 classic which also retraces the history of perfumes, among the Romans, the Chinese or the Egyptians. With, in the afterword, a short treatise on the political role of flowers.