Nostrodamus and the Pandemic, Strange parallels, page 1

Plauge Remedy

To make the basis for a perfectly good and excellent aromatic powder whose perfume is not strange, but confers an agreeable and long-lasting sweetness, though it can only be prepared once a year:

Take one ounce of the sawdust or shavings of cypress-wood, as green as you can find, six ounces of Florentine violet-root, three ounces of cloves, three drams of sweet calamus, and six drams of aloes-wood.

Reduce the whole to powder before it spoils.

Next, take three or four hundred in-folded red roses [the recent Bloomsbury version entitled 'The Elixirs of Nostradamus' repeatedly translates 'rose rouges incarnées' as 'black orchids'!!], fresh and perfectly clean, and gathered before dewfall.

Pound them vigorously in a marble mortar with a wooden pestle.
When you are half through pounding them, add to them the above mentioned powder and immediately pound it all vigorously, while sprinkling on it a little rose-juice.

When everything is well mixed together, form it into little flat lozenges, as you would pills, and let them dry in the shade, for they will smell good.
And note that from this mixture may also be made aromatic soaps, cypress powder, violet root powder, aromatic balls, perfumes, 'Cyprus birds' and perfumed waters.

And in order to make the mixture even more excellent, add as much musk and ambergris as you either can or wish.

If these two are added I do not doubt that you will produce a superbly pleasant perfume.

Pulverise the said musk and ambergris, dissolving it with rose-juice, then mix it in and dry in the shade.

Quite apart from the goodness and scent that this mixture lends to the items and mixtures mentioned above, you only have to keep it in the mouth a little to make your breath smell wonderful all day.

Or if the breath was stinking, whether as a result of the teeth being rotten or because of bad smells emerging from the stomach, or because the person involved had some stinking ulcer somewhere, or some other odd case that obliged him to flee people's company, keep a little of it in the mouth without chewing, and it will give out such a good smell that nobody will be able to tell where it is coming from ['Whence is that goodly fragrance blowing.'?!].

And in time of Plague, keep it often in the mouth, for there is no smell better for keeping away the bad and pestiferous air.