The organ, not the piano

A perfumer’s workbench cabinet — rows of small numbered bottles, sometimes hundreds of them, arranged for reach rather than alphabet — is called an orgue à parfum, a perfume organ, after the pipe organ rather than any other instrument. The comparison isn’t decorative: a pipe organist plays multiple ranks of pipes simultaneously to build a single chord, the same way a perfumer combines several raw materials at once to build a single accord, and both instruments reward a player who has the whole instrument’s layout memorized well enough not to look.

Our own organ has stood in the same corner of the workshop since 1897, added to and rearranged five times as new materials entered the house’s repertoire, but never fully reorganized — the oldest, most-used bottles are still nearest the working perfumer’s right hand, a layout that outlived the four perfumers who worked from it before the current one.