Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life

$22.95 at de Young Museum.

Elixir tells the story of two dissenters—chemists who redrew the boundary between life and nonlife. In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent worked at Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day, they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux. In their spare time, they hunted the vital force underlying life itself. Their ideas, roundly condemned by established chemists, led to the discovery of structural differences between naturally occurring molecules…