smell memory

He sat with his arms crossed over his knees, and, lifting his face toward Emma, he looked at her fixedly from very near. She could distinguish in his eyes little lines of gold radiating out all around his black pupils, and she could even smell the scent of the pomade with which his hair was glazed. Then a languor came over her; she recalled the vicomte who had waltzed with her at La Vaubyessard, whose beard had given off the same smell of vanilla and lemon as this hair; and reflexively she half closed her eyelids the better to breathe in. But as she did this, straightening in her chair, she saw in the distance, on the farthest horizon, the old stagecoach, the Hirondelle, slowly descending the hill of Les Leux, trailing a long plume of dust behind it. It was in that yellow carriage that Leon had so often returned to her; and by that very road he had left forever! She believed she could see him across the square, at his window; then everything blurred together, some clouds passed; it seemed to her that she was still circling in the waltz, under the blaze of the chandeliers, in the arms of the vicomte, and that Leon was not far off, that he was coming...and yet she could still sense Rudolphe's head next to her. And so the sweetness of this sensation permeated her desires of earlier times, and like grains of sand before a gust of wind, they whirled about in the subtle whiff of the fragrance that was spreading through her soul. Again and again she opened wide her nostrils to breathe in the freshness of the ivy around the capitals. She drew off her gloves, she dried her hands; then, with her handkerchief, she fanned her face, while through the pulsing at her temples she could hear the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the Councilor intoning his phrases.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis