Rights: The text is in the public domain (basis recorded). The provider's own terms of use apply to the digitised copy. Published in 1782; the author died in 1814, so the text is in the public domain. The scan is of a facsimile reprint of the 1782 edition.
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CITATION CHECK
Title, creator, publisher and date checked against the catalogue record on 2026-10-05 by an automated check. The Wikisource Index record gives the author, the title and the year 1782; the Wikimedia Commons record of the scan identifies it as the Gallica copy of a 1979 Slatkine facsimile of that edition. The chapter spans images 147–156. Date confirmed to the year. SmellBook publishes only the citation, the location of the passage and its own claim, never the work’s text.
In the first volume of his Tableau de Paris (1782), Louis-Sébastien Mercier writes that a cadaverous odour could be smelled in almost all the churches of Paris, blaming the dead buried there, and adds that some held it to be the mouldy, cellar-like smell of the great stone buildings mistaken for the odour of death.
A description of Paris churches published in 1782; it records a contemporary complaint and a disputed explanation, not how old churches smell today.EXTERNAL RECORD