Six olfactory creations for the Château de Tarascon

I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the Château de Tarascon, a medieval building on the architectural model of the Bastille.

This fortress, with residential and military functions, was built on the western bank of the Rhône river, once the natural border of Provence.

Today, this medieval castle, although very well preserved structurally, has been emptied of its contents over time. In order to offer the visitor an immersive visit of this place, I was commissioned to create six scents by the mediation team.

First of all, four emblematic spaces were chosen to evoke through scents life during the late Middle Ages:

- The garden : the Middle Ages mainly had gardens dedicated to medicinal plants. I proposed to create a scent inspired by the ancestral recipe of the Theriac, a universal remedy very fashionable at that time. Although invented well before, its Montpellier variant was very popular in the late Middle Ages, and was on sale at the Beaucaire fair on the other bank of the Rhône river. This balsamic, woody and spicy scent transports us to an old-time pharmacy, between the sweetness and bitterness of the medicinal plants that compose it. It is a blend of essential oils of cinnamon leaves, Saint Thomas bay, guaiac wood, birch, cade, calamus, blue chamomile, cardamom, ginger, myrrh, opoponax and peppers.

- The chapel : every stately home in the Middle Ages had a chapel. I was inspired by an incense recipe given to Moses by the Lord in the Old Testament. This smell of resins and ambergris puts us in a state conducive to communicating with the afterlife. It is made up of incense resinoid, essential oils of galbanum and styrax and an ambergris accord.

- The banqueting hall : I was inspired by hypocras, a drink (and even a medicine) very popular in the Middle Ages. This winey and strongly spicy smell, rounded off by the sweetness of sugar, suggests memorable intoxicated ends to meals. It contains a sweet wine accord enhanced with essential oils of cinnamon leaves and ginger.

- The steam room : a very rare room at that time! Inspired by Aleppo soap imported in Provence in the 12th century, the scent of laurel is accompanied here by a humid and woody facet that plunges us into a stimulating bath taken in a wooden vat. Its formula is made up of essential oils of noble laurel, larch needles, Saint Thomas bay, hinoki branches and incense resinoid.

Then a fifth space was chosen, evoking the building's prison function during the 18th and 19th centuries.

I created a smell of humidity, disinfectant and metal chains to evoke this hostile environment where sailors were kept chained and where vermin, vectors of typhus, swarmed. An olfactory cocktail of accords of damp stone, disinfectant, metal and mustiness.

The sixth creation was in the realm of fantasy: La Tarasque, the emblematic beast of Tarascon. Impregnated with the smell of mud and putrid water of its habitat, this beast frightens with its ugliness suggested by its smell of a wild animal, devourer of men. It is made up of ambergris and costus accords, essential oils of cade, cypriol and Himalayan spikenard.

Would you like to smell these creations? This summer, the Château de Tarascon is offering the olfactory tours Par le Bout du Nez every Wednesday at 10 a.m. during which you can smell them while wandering around the building.

Here below the article published in the newspaper La Provence on August 1, 2023.