VERIFIEDPRIMARY
Tableau de Paris, tome I
Louis-Sébastien Mercier
CLM-OLDCHURCH-001 · VERIFIED
The smell of Paris churches in 1782
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.
The statement the claim rests on was found word for word in the text of the cited page or chapter of the digitised source, fetched from the named service, and an editor read that whole text against every part of the claim. The passage is cited by its locator; SmellBook does not reproduce the passage. Source text from Wikisource (proofread transcription).
- Tableau de Paris, tome I, p. 128 Printed page 128 is image 149 of the digitised volume.
Time described: 1782. The passage states no time; the source's publication date is used as the latest possible time it describes. Checked 2026-10-05.
active · reviewed 2026-10-02 · corrections 0
CANONICAL PROFILES1
SUPPORTING SOURCES1
Permanent identifier smellbook:claim:the-smell-of-paris-churches-in-1782 · Graph record (JSON)
Dataset history In the SmellBook dataset since the dataset release of 2026-10-05 · sha256 d10c2deef978.