French language Q&A Forum

There is a sentence in the text:
" les odeurs de cannelle et d'épices évoquent des souvenirs d'enfance"

I seem to get this wrong quite often - why is there no article after de in all of these cases (de cannelle, d'epices and d'enfance).

Thank you!

"Elle veut que tu fasses la grasse matinée demain matin."

In this exercise, which asked to conjugate verbs in Plus-que-parfait, I wrote the following sentence: Marc lui avait souri et Gilles avait deviné tout de suite que Marc avait capturé son âme!  My « avait capturé » was marked down and corrected to be « avaient capturé ».  I cannot understand why a 3rd person plural conjugation is being used here instead of singular since the sentence talks about one person, Marc, who caught/captured Gilles’s soul.