Perfume Experts Help Expose Joan of Arc’s Relics as Forgery
Warning: The following post contains somewhat graphic material. Do not read while dining…
The current issue of Nature has a fascinating article about the alleged relics of St. Joan of Arc and two of the leading ‘noses’ in the perfume industry. In a description that reads like an episode of CSI, perfumers Sylvaine Delacourte (Guerlain) and Jean-Michel Duriez (Jean Patou) were invited by forensic scientist Philippe Charlier, to sniff the supposed remains of St. Joan of Arc.
Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen, Normandy, in 1431. The relics were discovered in a jar in the attic of a Pais phramacy in 1867, with the inscription “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans”.
Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincaré′ Hospital in Garches, near Paris, began studying the relics last year. He and his colleagues examined the remains (a charred-looking human rib, chunks of apparently carbonized wood, a 15-cm piece of linen, and a cat femur — which was consistent with the medieval habit of throwing black cats on the the pyre of supposed witches) using a battery of techniques. These included infrared and atomic-emission spectrometry, electron microscopy, pollen analysis and, amazingly, the help of perfumers.
Perfumers Durie and Delacourte were given these relics and nine other samples of bone and hair from Charlier’s lab without being told what the samples were. They were not allowed to discuss their findings with each other. Both perfumers smelled ‘vanilla’ in the samples from the relics. As it turns out, vanilla is inconsistent with cremation.
“Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body,” says Charlier. “You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt.”
In other words, the remains were most likely of a mummy origin, not from a cremated body. Other evidence supporting this claim quickly accumulated, thereby establishing the relics of St. Joan of Arc as fraudulent. The Church, according to Charlier, is ready to accept the results.
Let’s hear it for perfume forensics!
To read the entire article, please click here.
