Clams casino, handwritten diaries, gold lamé house shoes, paper dictionaries: certain things are slipping away. To some of these I wave a hearty goodbye — that would be you, dial-up modem — but other changes I note with a pang. Sure, some of the regret is pure nostalgia. I love the full-throated trill of a dial telephone, for example. But some of it is a lament for changes in fashion, in what’s considered beautiful. That’s how I feel about some perfume. No publicly traded company in its right mind would make a heartbreaker of a chypre like Rochas Mousseline these days. That’s too bad.

Perfumer Edmond Roudnitska developed Mousseline, and Rochas released it in 1946, just two years after Rochas Femme. Information on Mousseline is scarce. My parfum is at least 45 years old — quite possibly older — but it’s clearly a fruity chypre and Femme’s little sister. My “flacon sac” perfume came in a tiny, black lace printed splash bottle accompanied by an inch-and-a-half long eyedropper for extracting the precious extrait.

I picture a woman settling into her car after a day of shopping…

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