The Olfactory Death March

The French are famous for their exceptional wines and cheeses, shrunken workweek, and (as far as stereotyping casts them) massive B.O. When I moved to France, I took this stereotype with a grain of salt because, well, isn’t France also the land of perfume and cologne? (Hmm, maybe I’m onto something there…) I was relieved to find that while the stereotype (like most) has some measure of truth – as in any large city, riding the underground can treat you to quite the heady, malodorous bouquet – the French body odor problem isn’t as widespread as the insulting jokes at the frogs’ expense would have you believe.

When I told a student, several months back, about the B.O. stereotype (trust me, it was in context – I would never spring that on an unsuspecting Frenchie), he wasn’t insulted but was a bit perplexed. He’d never heard of it before and couldn’t make heads or tails of its possible source. Well. Clearly he nor I had never been to the fifth floor of a different student’s office building.

Let’s go back to last week, when I first met with the latter student on his building’s fifth floor. I walked out of the elevator and was immediately bowled over by a stench so insidious, so powerful, I almost fainted. I tensed my nostrils and tried to breathe only out of my mouth (and at moments, to not breathe at all) as I marched quickly down the hall to the appointed meeting room. I must have walked 100 feet and in that space the reek didn’t fade, but rather hovered, like a cloud of toxic gas. Yes, it was high-octane B.O. worse than any gym locker room I’ve ever encountered, worse than the worst days in my former high school classroom when 15-year-old boys would saunter in fresh from lunchtime, ripe with basketball court stench and a layer of awful cologne to disguise it. For this was a B.O. so strong that although no people were present, the odor managed to permeate the entire hallway – haunting it, if you will. I finally reached the meeting room, closing the door firmly shut behind me, wondering how on earth my student could bear it. (I didn’t dare ask. I was just thrilled and relieved to discover that he wasn’t a perpetrator of the ungodly hallway stench.)

But the subject managed to work its way into conversation anyhow. I met the same student again today on the fifth floor of olfactory doom. I braced myself and made the same quick, breathless dash down the corridor, again noting the absence of any people (hello, ghost stank!) before finding safe haven in the meeting room. So. Fast forward to about an hour later. While discussing a news article we’d read about smoking bans, my student mentioned that it recently came out that after all the cigarette-induced haze lifted from the French nightclubs, people realized the smoke had all along been masking another, deadlier scent. (Uh-huh, you guessed it.) This discovery prompted the first-ever deodorant-brand sponsored event, “Axe Night,” at a popular “discotheque” (by the way, don’t you love how Europeans still call it that?). Apparently the event was so successful that more are coming.

I may have thought the B.O. stereotype was rubbish, but it appears I’m not the only one who’s discovered proof of a higher authority on the subject. And while I hit an apparent mother lode of French B.O., I must be grateful that I’ve eluded both a potentially rank-smelling student and noxious dance floors alike.