From EUROC:

“Another unforeseen outcome of France’s smoking ban. That blue haze of cigarette smoke didn’t just add to the atmosphere of the nightclubs of Paris – it kept them smelling good, too.

For what is a nightclub, if not a place where hundreds of people gather, dance and get sweaty into the early hours? When half those punters were puffing away, the smell of smoke covered a multitude of sinners: Now the fanatically clean government has blown all traces of smoke away, clubgoers have discovered the inevitable outcome of all that hot and heavy action: Paris’s nightclubs stink like locker rooms.

Charles Bremner reports that a few nightclub owners have complained off the record that clients, and in particular women, are staying away. Of course, no-one wants to go on the record as owning a smelly nightclub, so the story isn’t over the French papers yet.

Short of fumigating the clubs every morning, what can be done? Are we about to see a new trend for strong perfumes to mask the smell – or are clubbers going to return to the days where ladies would carry perfumed bouquets to mask the smell of plague?

And before you think we’re having a go at the unwashed French, our correspondent in Britain tells us that if anything…”

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