Joan of Arc's Remains Smell Like a Mummy

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Nature *is reporting today that the charred stuff once believed to be the sacred remains of Joan of Arc is actually bits of an Egyptian mummy. Professional perfume sniffers helped break the case. French researchers employed the "noses" to confirm what mass spectrometry and other dating methods had already told them: the remains, discovered in a jar during the nineteenth century and labeled "Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans," were not the burned bones of a saint, but the bits of a stolen mummy. Apparently, the remains smelled of vanilla and plaster:

[Noses] Delacourte and Duriez sniffed therelics and nine other samples of bone and hair from Charlier's labwithout being told what the samples were. They were also not allowed toconfer. Both smelled hints of 'burnt plaster' and 'vanilla' in thesamples from the relics. Theplaster smell was consistent with the fact that Joan of Arc was burnton a plaster stake, not a wooden one, to make the whole macabrespectacle last longer. But vanilla is inconsistent with cremation.
"Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body," says Charlier.
"You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt."

Other,
more conventional, evidence pointing to a mummy origin quicklyaccumulated. Microscopic and chemical analysis of the black crust onthe rib . . . showed that they were not in fact burnt,
but were impregnated with a vegetal and mineral matrix, with no traceof muscle, skin, fat or hair. "I see burnt remains all the time in myjob," says Charlier. "It was obviously not burnt tissue."

It's not uncommon to find mummy remains in weird places, partly because it was popular to unearth and use them for medicine during the Middle Ages. Apparently mummy parts were floating around everywhere, and they were far easier to find than Joan of Arc's actual burned bones.

Joan of Arc's Relics Exposed as Forgeries [via Nature]