Encore Provence

by Peter Mayle

  Looking around, I was struck by the contrast between the place of origination and the eventual place of use. Here we were in a primitive building in the middle of a field, sweating like prisoners in a sauna, watching great clumps of vegetation being boiled in equipment that resembled a giant chemistry set for beginners. And where was it all going to end? About as far from its modest beginnings as you can imagine – on a dressing table or a shelf in some perfumed enclave, dabbed on drop by drop. It's a long way from a tin shed to a boudoir.

  Moist, but more knowledgeable, we left the furnace heat of the distillery for the priory of Salagon, built in the twelfth century for Benedictine monks, abandoned during the Revolution, and now restored as the home of the Heritage Conservatory of Haute Provence.

  It is always amazing to me that buildings like this, with their massive blocks of stone and great, perfectly formed spans of vaulting, could have been constructed without the aid of modern machinery. No cranes, no hydraulic winches, no electrically powered stone-cutters – just hand and eye and an infinite amount of back-breaking labour. I couldn't help thinking of the months it took us to restore a small house, and I took my hat off to the extraordinary patience of those monks 800 years ago.

  They would have approved of a recent addition to the church grounds, which was what we had come to see: a large botanical garden, laid out in that meticulously ordered way the French adopt when they want to show nature who's in charge. No irregularities, no wayward and undisciplined twigs, none of nature's summer abandon. The plants, in their perfect little squares, were organized by scent as well as by species, and we were given a conducted tour, sniffing as we went, through carpets of green, grey and blue. Everything had its Latin tag, and there was not a weed to be seen. I had the feeling that lizards would be treated as trespassers.

  By now, the sun was beginning to dip, and many of us were doing the same. After a long, hot afternoon, fatigue nasale had set in, and we could sniff no more. It was time to give the senses a rest before the final event of the day.

  *

  Dinner was outside, at half a dozen long tables in the garden of an old farm in the hills above the village of Mane, and the aperitifs were having a rejuvenating effect on the press corps. It was, so one beauty editor told me, a considerable improvement over her last assignment, which had involved slime baths and a diet of lettuce and lemon juice at a health spa. She was a woman who admitted to having a demanding appetite, and claimed that she found it impossible to write on an empty stomach. She loved being sent on a job where the rations were good. France, for her, was food.

  This made me wonder how the others were reacting to their first taste of Provence, and when I asked them it was interesting to find an almost total lack of consistency. The Japanese couldn't get over the size of the houses, the enormous tracts of empty land, the absence of crowds and noise and high-rise buildings. They found the food ‘interesting’ and the wine strong, but what really impressed them was the luxury of space – almost inconceivable to someone sentenced to life in a Tokyo flat.

  The Americans were accustomed to space, and even some of the countryside of Haute Provence looked vaguely familiar; not unlike the Napa Valley without cars, as one woman said. Her initial impressions were the crumbling beauty of the buildings – ‘They're so old’ – and, not surprisingly from someone coming from the world capital of efficient hygiene, the incomprehensible mysteries of French plumbing. How do they take a shower, she wondered, when you have to hold the shower head with one hand and the soap with the other? Or do they do it in pairs?

  The British, fresh from a typical early summer at home – scattered showers developing later into rain – loved the light, the heat and the chance to eat outdoors. One woman, casting a professional beauty editor's eye over my face and trying to suppress a wince, said that too much sun is very ageing. But on the whole, the journalists approved of the climate, and they were also pleased to discover that the people in Provence were actually ‘quite nice, and not at all snotty, like the Parisians are’. The poor Parisians, everyone's favourite target.

  It was a good evening, and it had been a good day. No new school could have hoped for more attention at the beginning of its first term, and for once nobody was there to criticize. We all wanted the idea to succeed.

  Partly to find out if it had, and partly to continue the education of my own nose, we went to see Ferrero again some months later, this time at his office outside Grasse. I'd never been to Grasse; all I knew was that it had been the centre of the perfume industry in France since the early nineteenth century. I had visions of old men in straw hats pushing wheelbarrows piled with rose petals, of rickety tin-roofed distilleries like the one at Rocher d'Ongles, of entire streets and most of the population smelling of mimosa or Chanel No. 5. These fancies faded in a traffic jam going into town, and disappeared altogether at the sight of reality. Grasse was busy, crowded and workmanlike.

  It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo and Catherine de Medici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you've ever smelt a tannery, you'll understand why). And then fashion came along to set the town off in a new direction.

  There was an outbreak of elegance in Renaissance Italy. Perfumed gloves became all the rage, and anyone with an eye for the essentials of life insisted on having fragrant, well-dressed fingers. Catherine de Medici, in her capacity as fashion consultant to the aristocracy, arranged for gloves to be supplied by Grasse, and the tanners promoted themselves, showing an early appreciation of the importance of the right label. No longer humble artisans wrestling with buffalo hides, they now preferred to be thought of as gantiers parfumeurs, purveyors of perfumed gloves to the gentry.

  All went well until the Revolution, when aristocrats and most of the trimmings of aristocratic life disappeared – the king, his dukes and counts, their private cooks and Parisian palaces, all sacrificed for the greater glory of the republic. Not surprisingly, scented gloves, frivolous, elitist and highly undemocratic, went too. The people of Grasse – by now quite attached to the idea of the label, and delighted to discover how flexible it could be – dropped any reference to gloves and simply called themselves parfumeurs. And perfume survived. Even in Revolutionary France, it was clear that not everyone wanted to smell like a republican.

  Today, some of the companies in Grasse make the perfumes they sell, but many others rely on the specialist talents of independent noses. This is big business, as we discovered when we arrived at Ferrero's offices. The building is modern and, inside and out, looked as though someone had just been over it with a duster, buffing every surface to a high gloss. The air inside the building carried its own pleasant, very subtle scent – eau de bureau, perhaps – and the loudest noise was the sound of our footsteps on the marble floor as we followed Ferrero past calm, neat offices lined with bottles and computers.

  ‘The creation of a perfume,’ he told us, ‘starts either with a brief from a client or a brainwave. In both cases, I begin with the tableau olfactif, the picture of the perfume in my head.’ He went on to develop the painting analogy, substituting nose for canvas and scents for colours. ‘How many different degrees of blue or pink are there? Hundreds. How many different degrees of citrus, or verbena, or jasmine? Thousands.’

  I think we saw most of them, and smelt a good many, in the course of the morning, until our noses were reeling. But the clear winner, in terms of making a memorable impression, was not a sublime floral essence or a miraculous mixture of herbs, but the kind of smell you would cross the street to avoid. A smell to bring tears to your eyes.

  Ferrero took a taper, dipped it in a flask, waved it under my nose, and inclined his head. ‘This is quite remarkable,’ he said. ‘What do you think it is?’

  It was foul; acrid, and strong enough to pucker the nostrils. But even I, a nasally challenged man if ever there was one, could reco
gnize it. At least, I thought I could, although I hesitated to answer. It couldn't be what I thought it was – not here, not in this temple of fragrance.

  ‘Well?’ said Ferrero.

  ‘Well,’ said I, ‘it seems familiar…’

  ‘Another sniff?’

  ‘No, no.’ I was still groggy from the first one. ‘It's most unusual. I'm just trying to…’

  He held up a finger and put a stop to my floundering.

  ‘Pipi de chat,’ he said. ‘Entirely artificially made, with chemicals. Interesting, n'est-ce pas? Indistinguishable from the real thing.’

  Interesting wasn't the word I would have chosen to describe the smell of cat's urine, and I couldn't see immediately why it deserved a place in the tableau olfactif, but strange and wonderful are the ways of perfume artists. That same morning, I learned that whale vomit and goat musk – used sparingly, of course – also have their place in the creation of an irresistible scent. It's a question of how they react when mixed with other ingredients. And on that low note, we went to lunch.

  Ferrero was a delightful and informative companion, and even had the waiters eavesdropping as they served each course in an effort to pick up a little perfume wisdom. When I asked him the obvious question – why a tiny bottle filled mostly with water could cost as much as a bigger bottle filled with Château Latour – he shook his head.

  ‘People have no idea,’ he said. ‘They think the price is high because of the expensive packaging, and of course this has something to do with it. But think of the ingredients we use.’ I did, and I'm ashamed to say that pipi de chat came to mind rather than attar of roses. ‘Essence of iris, for example, is now a hundred and ten thousand francs a kilo. And the cost of petals! You need ninety to a hundred thousand petals to make a single kilo of essence.’ He shrugged, spreading his hands in dismay at the investment required to keep us all sweet-smelling.

  The second obvious question was how he knew when he had concocted a winner, and here computer technology and micro measurements took second place to feminine intuition. Or, as Ferrero put it, the wife test.

  ‘I take home a little flacon of the new scent,’ he said, ‘and leave it where my wife will notice it. I say nothing. Rien. It is as though the flacon has arrived by magic. I wait. Still I say nothing. If the flacon is empty at the end of the week, that encourages me. If the flacon is still full, perhaps I think again. She has a good nose, my wife.’

  I had been keeping an eye on the Ferrero nose all through lunch, interested to see how it reacted to the stimulus provided by good wine and wild mushroom soup and the local speciality of cabbage stuffed with sausage and bacon, and I noticed one or two appreciative twitches. But it wasn't until the cheese tray was brought to the table that the nostrils began to flare in earnest, even though the tray was three feet away.

  ‘If you like a strong cheese,’ he said, pointing to a creamy wedge with prominent dark blue veins that seemed to throb with cholesterol, ‘that is a fromage détonateur.’

  So it was, one of the percussion instruments in the cheese orchestra, and it deserved another reflective glass of wine.

  It's a curious job being a nose, and in one way must be rather unsatisfying. However you explain it – nature, luck, genes, years of application, an early formative encounter with pipi de chat or whale vomit – you are endowed with a great and unusual creative gift. Your nose in a million, your instincts and your blending skills are the most important ingredients of perfumes that are slapped on to cheeks, dripped delicately on to bosoms and dabbed behind hundreds of thousands of ears every day. And yet your work is signed by someone else: Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Lagerfeld, Miyake, Chanel. Never by you, the creator. You are that rare soul, the successful but anonymous artist, internationally unknown.

  I thought how odd it must be to meet a stranger – man or woman, in an office or at a party – who smelt familiar, and how difficult it must sometimes be to restrain yourself from whispering: It was I who made you smell the way you do. I dare say you could get away with it in France, but probably not in America. Someone would inevitably sue you for nasal harassment.

  Of all the small pleasures of the day, the best came last, when Ferrero gave me a copy of a letter he had written to the head of the perfume university in Versailles. It was to apply for a place on behalf of one of the blind students from Lardiers, a seventeen-year-old named David Maury who had shown exceptional promise. In fact, Ferrero wrote that he had been ‘stupéfait par l'acuité et la pertinence olfactives’ shown by the student. Coming from a professional, this is a powerful recommendation, and it looks as though the young nose will be accepted.

  8

  In Search of the Perfect Corkscrew

  Last Christmas, an extravagant and well-meaning friend presented me with what he called a state of the art corkscrew. It was a most serious piece of equipment – beautifully made, with what looked like a hydraulic leverage system. It was guaranteed to extract the most obstinate cork. My friend told me it was a connoisseur's corkscrew. He demonstrated it for me, and it did indeed remove the cork with the ease and smoothness one might expect from a modern triumph of alcoholic engineering. And yet it has never seen active service in our house. Not one more cork has it pulled; it still sits in its box, unused and unloved.

  For an explanation of my apparent ingratitude, we need to go back to a summer lunch in a small village house not far from Avignon. I was the guest of Régis, a man who has for years kindly assumed responsibility for instructing me in the pleasures of the table. (It being well known, as he often reminds me, that any talent the English possess in matters of gastronomy is confined to breakfast and ripe Stilton.) Régis is not a cook, but describes himself as a gourmet/gourmand – that is, a knowledgeable and happily greedy student of the table, alert to every nuance in a recipe or a bottle. He claims that most of his adult life has been devoted to eating and drinking, and he has the stomach and expertise to prove it. He is also a practising chauvinist, convinced that France leads the world in everything worthwhile.

  Before we settled down to lunch, Régis had decided that we should exercise our palates – the only form of exercise he ever takes willingly – by comparing the virtues of two white wines from the Côtes du Rhône: a young Condrieu and an older, fatter Hermitage. There they sat, in twin buckets on the table, the bottles glistening with beads of chilled sweat. Régis rubbed his hands as he looked at them, twirled the bottles in their icy water, and then flexed his fingers with the air of a concert pianist about to do battle with Beethoven. Reaching into a trouser pocket, he pulled out a corkscrew, which he unfolded carefully.

  With a graceful, practised turn of the wrist, he passed a short, curved blade around the neck of the Condrieu, and the top of the capsule dropped off, a surgically neat cut with no rips or ragged edges. After drawing the cork, he held it to his nose, sniffed, and nodded. He repeated the process with the Hermitage, and was about to put the corkscrew back in his pocket when I asked to take a look at it.

  Never had I seen such a handsome corkscrew. It was based on the design of what is sometimes called The Waiter's Friend – blade at one end, lever at the other, screw in the middle. But there the resemblance stopped, because this was to ordinary corkscrews what Condrieu is to grape juice. It was a good weight in the hand, with a haft of polished horn, steel-tipped at each end. A spine of darker, patterned steel ran along the top of the handle, ending with a flat, stylized image of a bee. Stamped on the surface of the lever was the word Laguiole.

  ‘That,’ said Régis, ‘is the best corkscrew in the world.’ He poured two glasses of wine, and grinned. ‘French, of course.’ And then, as we drank, he proceeded to fill the gaps in my corkscrew education.

  Laguiole is a town in the Aveyron region of southern France, a town famous for knives. The ancestor of today's Laguiole corkscrews originated around 1880, following the invention of the cork. (In fact, corks had been introduced some time before, in the eighteenth century, but nothing happens with breakneck speed in
southern France.) Over the years, refinements such as stainless steel have been incorporated into the design, but little else has changed – not, at least, in the making of the genuine article.

  Unfortunately, said Régis, it's a wicked old world, and impersonations can be found everywhere: knives that resemble a Laguiole, but which have been assembled by machine (this takes about an hour), and which are sold at much lower prices. The making of a ‘véritable Laguiole’ involves around fifty separate operations, many of them carried out by hand. Each true knife is still put together by a craftsman instead of a machine, and each blade is stamped with an L. That's one sign of authenticity. There are others, traditional symbols of the elements: water is represented by the wavy notches on the back of the blade; air by the stylized bee; fire by the flame design running the length of the spine; and earth by a group of tiny brass nails – signifying grains of wheat – set into the handle. Without these, the knife in your hand may be sharp and handsome and even well made, but it won't be the real thing.

  At this point Régis felt it was time for another demonstration, and reached for the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that would be supporting the cheese later on. ‘You see this?’ he said, pointing to the short blade of the corkscrew. ‘A serrated edge. It cuts the capsule more cleanly than a straight edge, and it doesn't get blunt.’ He disposed of the capsule and pulled the cork. ‘Another thing,’ he said as he sniffed the cork thoughtfully. ‘You will observe that the screw is in the form of a queue de cochon, a pig's tail - hollow, and grooved so it won't split the cork. Une merveille. You must get one.’