Papier d'Arménie

The Papier d'Arménie booklet is small enough to sit in a pocket: twelve leaves of buff blotting paper bound into a printed cover, each leaf perforated into three strips that carry the name, the word 'Triple' and the signature of Auguste Ponsot. A strip is torn off, folded like an accordion and stood on its edge on something that will not burn. Lit and then blown out, it does not flame but smoulders, and as it goes it gives off the warm, vanilla-like smell of benzoin.

The story the company tells begins with a journey. Ponsot, a chemist, saw households in Armenia burning benzoin resin to scent and cleanse their rooms. With the pharmacist Henri Rivier he found a way to bring the habit home: dissolve the resin in alcohol, add perfume, and let blotting paper carry it. The company dates this to 1885. The paper was shown at the Hygiene Exhibition of 1888 and the Exposition Universelle of 1889, and was sold in pharmacies as a disinfectant, a claim long since dropped.

The making is slow. The blotting paper is first soaked in salt water, which is why it smoulders rather than burns, and dried. The benzoin, from Laos, steeps in alcohol for weeks before the perfume is added, and the sheets are dipped in it by hand, one at a time, then pressed, checked and dried in heated rooms before being cut and bound. The company puts the whole process at six months and twelve stages. The recipe has never been published.

It has been made in Montrouge, on the southern edge of Paris, since the beginning, by a firm that has stayed with Rivier's descendants. An explosion in a drying oven in 2017 stopped the works for more than a year. The booklets now come off the line in their millions, but the strip, the smell and the way of burning it are those of 1885.