Manuel Canovas is a French textile house with a Spanish name that produces some of the finest, most shockingly expensive fabrics in the world. In 2007, the company introduced a collection of five fragrances.

All five were created by the perfumers Viviane Romani and Patrick Bodifee under the creative direction of Byron Donics. Two — ’Ile Bleu and Anse Turquoise — smell cheap and are to be avoided; one, Route Mandarine, is a decent classic citrus; the fourth, Pink Riviera, is excellent — a rosy young thing in a shimmery summer dress. The perfume equivalent of laughing after inhaling a helium balloon at a party, it is delightfully kitschy.

The last, Ballade Verte, is deep and richly woven as a Canovas fabric. Ballade Verte is a classic perfume of the early-20th century French school. It is not innovative — it is emphatically not meant to be — but is instead a nice piece of retro work, the olfactory equivalent of vintage couture.

“Verte” means green, and this scent smells like the authentic aromatic gum resin galbanum (if it is not galbanum, it reproduces its smell), an ancient raw material now available in modern Iran. Galbanum, which plays a crucial role in the interesting neo-retro Pucci perfume Vivara, is listed as a sweet herb in chapter 30 of Exodus. “And thou shalt make it a perfume,” God tells Moses, “a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.”

It is, in fact, bitter to the taste, but the scent is like nothing else: Deeply, darkly, earthily green, old and musty in the best way, a rich and almost rotting organic green like fresh branches mixed into soil. Dirtier than vetiver, richer than basil, greener than myrrh.

Romani and Bodifee have domesticated the fragrance of these materials, and the result is a scent to wear on chilly nights at parties in marble halls — perhaps the foyer of the New York Public Library — where the candles burn, the men wear black tie and the women wear long black gowns, pearls and ancient green galbanum.