The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

Incense is one of the oldest continuously used aromatic materials; perhaps the first letter of the perfume alphabet. For centuries, it has been the language men speak to the gods as well as the physical experience binding together the faithful; the invisible realm made perceptible to mortal senses.

  The word, derived from the Latin incendere, ‘to burn’, is practically synonymous with perfume, which comes from fumare, ‘to smoke’. Most ancient cultures burned incense: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, Hindus, Chinese. Even today, from Saint Peter’s in Rome to the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, and from the diwans of Oman to the temples of Benares in India all the way to Californian meditation centres, incense is still burned all over the world. The practice is both so archaic and so alive that the smell stirs ancestral memories even in those who aren’t drawn to spiritual pursuits.

  In various cultures, the word equivalent to ‘incense’ can designate aromatic resins, woods from various trees or complex blends, from the dazzlingly refined compositions of the Japanese art of Kōdō to the sickly joss sticks burned in Chinese restaurants. But the incense we’re putting into Duende is the real stuff: the resin of the tree Boswellia carterii, known as olibanum or frankincense in the Bible.

  Bertrand has told me that, to him, incense is blood, and many traditions bear out this symbolic association. Incense did mingle with the blood of ritually slain animals or human beings on countless altars. In fact, the Ancient Greek word for sacrifice, thuos, originally meant ‘substance burned to obtain fragrant smoke’: it encompassed both the aroma rising from the roasted carcasses of sacrificed animals (the Olympians fed on the smell while humans feasted on the flesh) and the scent of incense. But incense was also literally thought of as the blood of the trees that gave away their fragrant resins through wounds in their bark, as the anthropologist Annick Le Guérer explains in Le Parfum: des origines à nos jours. Those trees themselves were often believed to be supernatural beings, humans or nymphs metamorphosed through divine intervention, so that, again, spilling their resin was literally spilling blood. The very beauty of their fragrance was proof of their holy nature. Did the gods not exhale sweet scents? Perfume was the vital principle of blood in its purest form; the very essence of sublimation.

  * * *

  We’ve come down from Bertrand’s lab, where he’s spilled a phial of a particularly diffusive material that would cover up pretty much any other smell, to discuss Duende N°6 and 7 on the terrace of a nearby café. The roar of the traffic rushing on the Quai du Louvre is deafening; gusts of dry wind blow the minute blond hairs of plane tree flowers into our eyes and noses. Bertrand complains he has trouble smelling anything in this weather. Imagine what it’s like for my untrained nose. So we’ve been veering off on tangents. I’ve wanted to question him for some time about his relationship to incense. The first perfume of his I wore, back when I hadn’t the least idea who he was (nor any perfumer, for that matter) was put out by the Japanese brand Comme des Garçons in 2002. Avignon, named after the city where the papal court took refuge in the 14th century to escape the clan conflicts that raged in Rome, was such a striking evocation of Catholic incense that I couldn’t wear it without feeling faintly sacrilegious.

  It’s not quite clear how far back the use of incense goes in Christian rituals. Some fathers of the Church condemned it because it was widely used by pagans: persecuted Christians were forced to burn a few grains of incense on the altars of Roman Emperors who were worshipped as gods – it was either that, or off to the lions. But it is mentioned in the Gospels and by the 5th century it was officially part of Christian liturgy. It was certainly a welcome cover-up for the miasma of the unwashed masses, mingling with those rising from graves both inside and around churches. But it had a deeper, mystical meaning: it symbolized the prayers rising to God and the sweet scent of Jesus’ words penetrating to the very souls of the faithful. The blood of the olibanum tree was a metaphor for the blood spilled by Christ. Catholic liturgy thus acknowledged and appropriated a symbolism that went back millennia …

  Mayest thou be blessed by Him in whose honour thou art to be burned. The tears of a wounded tree are twice blessed in the Mass. Twice blessed therefore is the creature of nature which, being wounded, gives up its fragrant tears in honour of Him who wept over Jerusalem; in honour of Him who was wounded and shed His precious blood for the whole world; in honour of Him whose unbounded love extends to all nature. All nature in turn serves Him, but the tears of olibanum are twice blessed.

  The friend I was with when I bought Avignon, like me a pure product of Quebec’s Catholic educational system, was impressed by the accuracy of the rendition, though she tried to dissuade me from buying it. ‘Why would a woman want to smell like a church?’ (That was rich from a woman who’d once bought a cassock so she could dress her lover up in it …). But I sniffed Avignon obsessively. It carried me back to Holy Week in Seville, my first full-body immersion in church incense, since when I was a child Masses in Quebec involved guitar-playing priests in Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired buildings rather than the imposing liturgy of the Old World. I used to burn actual church incense on charcoal tablets, which I bought in a Catholic geegaw shop on the place Saint-Sulpice. I stopped when a neighbour, alarmed by the smoke seeping out from under my door onto the landing, called the fire brigade. Delighted as I was to find a couple of brawny French pompiers in their skin-tight black uniforms getting ready to break down my door, I forewent church incense from that day on.

  Avignon was one of the fragrances that put Bertrand on the map and it enjoys a cult status. Since then, incense has been a leitmotif in his work, and pops up in at least one composition out of four, which amounts to something like an obsession.

  ‘You’re right,’ he nods. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by it. It could be my Catholic upbringing coming out, my childhood spent in churches. The smell of incense blending with the smell of old, damp stones … It’s the only thing I’ve kept from Catholicism. The rest, I’ve rejected. It brings back too many bad memories.’

  As Bertrand reminisces about the strict ‘Old France’ education inflicted on him and his siblings – his grandmother, he says, was as handy with the horsewhip as with the Bible – I suggest his vocation as a perfumer may have been a way for him to break free from it. By re-appropriating incense as a sensuous pleasure, he’s managed to exorcize painful memories. After all he could have rejected it just as passionately as he says he’s rejected his religious upbringing, though there is something religious about the term ‘vocation’ …

  ‘Exactly! It’s a priesthood!’ he chuckles.

  I tell him about my own phase of incense madness. I chewed the small resin chunks (they tasted soapy) because I’d read somewhere it would make me exhale the scent through my pores. I stopped because I was afraid that the resin would clog up my gut and land me in A&E. Intestinal obstruction would have been a far cry from wafting all the perfumes of Arabia. Though the punchline makes him laugh, he cocks his head, dead serious:

  ‘So you have a very mystical side to you.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  He’s really in earnest. In fact, he’s one of the most earnest people I’ve ever met, almost like a child. His question sets us off on one of those involved, intense discussions that always seem to develop when we’re together. Hunched over our blotters, we go on about the way poetry and artistic creation fatally lead us to wonder about transcendence. We’re both cold sober and it’s 6 p.m., but you’d swear this was one of those rambling philosophical talks you fall into at 6 a.m., after you’ve dug up that bottle no one ever bothered to open, the one with the weird label on it, because you were all out of whisky. I end up pulling out a 1918 prose poem by Pierre Reverdy, ‘The Image’, which I had printed out. In it, the poet claims that ‘The more remote and accurate the connection between two realities that are brought together, the stronger the image – the stronger its emotional potential and its poetic reality.’

  I feel th
at’s what he’s done with my story, I tell Bertrand: listening to it, he connected orange blossom and incense in ways both ‘remote and accurate’. I’d registered it like a sensitive plate. Twenty years later, he saw it intuitively. His senses had processed the connection even before he became aware of it; then he figured out rationally that their common mineral notes were what drew orange blossom and incense together.

  ‘You’re right. It’s a gut feeling. I don’t always know where I get that stuff. I guess the body knows things you don’t.’

  ‘But those moments of grace can only happen when you master your technique perfectly. Like a dancer…’

  It’s still all about the duende, isn’t it? ‘Not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive’, as Lorca writes. We both pensively duck our noses towards the blotters. Despite the raw wind and exhaust fumes, what’s rising from N°6, creamy and petal-fleshy, is drawing me in. Bertrand explains he started out with N°3, which was the most obviously orange blossom/incense, and tried to keep that duality while making it ‘more attractive and modern still, more floral and headier’, adding a heady, fruity, full-flower jasmine, ‘so delicious it’s almost like banana’.

  N°6 is quite green. I thought we were toning down the green? Bertrand says he took out the green note that smells of hyacinth and ivy – it’s not our story, not a Spanish spring – but not the one that smells like sap and pollen and feels moist. He’s also diminished the percentage of incense. In N°7, on the other hand, he’s kept a higher dose of incense but counteracted its harsh effects by adding even more green and boosting the fruity facets of the jasmine: ‘almost strawberry jam, banana jam’, he says. He’s also added beeswax and honeyed, pollen effects, ‘to bring out the fleshy side of the flowers’, and worked on an amber tobacco base, reinforced by immortelle, ‘to bring out the cigar effect’. Immortelle comes from Spain, he adds, so it’s part of the story.

  But I’m a little disappointed not to find the velvety, woody accord that I kept coming back to in Duende N°5, I tell him.

  ‘I dropped it completely. Zero. You told me to go for N°3. I can work it back in if you want, but not as strong, because even though it’s vibrant it skews the story too much. You lose the orange blossom note. Maybe I’ll amp the incense back up … I did these yesterday, I don’t have any distance. We’ve got to see what effect they have on skin.’

  I suddenly remember I was intending to ask him about the blood note. I don’t know how it came in. As far as I recall, I never mentioned it in my story.

  ‘But of course you did!’ he bristles. ‘We were sitting right here, at this very table, when you talked about it, the day you gave me the book by Lorca!’

  That was the day he’d forgotten we had an appointment and we just went down for coffee. I must have blocked out our conversation because I was a bit upset, but now that he mentions it, I do remember reading out parts of the book to him. That’s when the name of the perfume went from ‘Séville Semaine Sainte’ to ‘Duende’. I’ve noticed that Bertrand always gives evocative names to his scents-in-progress: for instance, the Nuit de Tubéreuse he gave me a sample of the first day I came to see him started out as ‘Belle de Nuit’. The name is the idea, he tells me, and the idea must be absolutely clear from the outset. The orange blossom-incense-blood accord sprang from the notion of duende as soon as he’d read Lorca. Since Holy Week is about the Passion of Christ, there was already blood in the story, so it makes sense.

  ‘We could add the smell of ashes,’ he muses.

  ‘That would be going back to Ash Wednesday, and the story unfolds during the night from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday … But I did tell you about the smell of old stones that came from the church…’

  ‘Ah, yes, we could work that in … But no, we’d be falling back into stuff I’ve already done so many times. I’d be repeating myself.’

  ‘Then let’s not. We want something new! I get the feeling this isn’t like anything you’ve ever done before, is it?’

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t. Absolutely not.’

  14

  ‘Do you know what you want?’

  Today’s our last session before the traditional French full-month August holidays, and I’m seething. I’ve lived in Paris half my life but I’ve never become used to the whole country coming to a standstill for a month. Like half his compatriots, Bertrand will soon be waltzing off to the South of France and he’s in a rush to wrap up – again – so he lunges into technical explanations without any foreplay.

  The three mods he’s just mixed, numbered 8, 9 and 10, are tweaks on Duende N°6: he’s added different green floral notes in varying doses. Algix, Canthoxal, Lyral, Lilial … As he bombards me with the names of molecules, I realize I’m tuning out. I’d need to smell them to understand what he’s saying. So I wait until he’s done with the chemistry lesson to ask him the question that’s been needling me lately: what’s the current state of the perfume compared to a finished product?

  ‘It’s subjective,’ he answers. ‘We might be practically done. Or consider that this is just the starting point. Some perfumes were great successes based on one or two mods. Others were monumental flops after going through five hundred mods over two years, with teams of perfumers working on them. The main thing is to know when to stop. To know how to choose. You need to know exactly what you want.’

  And that’s when he pops the Question.

  ‘Do you know what you want?’

  Indeed. What do I want? Do I have any idea of what Duende needs to be? Maybe I’ve just been going along for the ride, commenting, storytelling, philosophizing; entwining threads of words around his work … That’s what I always do: find a door that’s open, walk through, enter another person’s world, try to make sense of it, to capture it in words. Writers are greedy that way. Usually, what I ask from a perfume is to be taken elsewhere. This time, I’m the one who’s taking the perfumer to a place he’s never been. Bertrand, are you following me? I’m lost too …

  After a few seconds of silence, Bertrand bursts out into a teasing laugh. Affectionate, but only just.

  ‘I know very well where I’m going. I’m starting to get the accord that will be about ninety per cent of my formula. I’ll embroider on the remaining ten per cent. Work on the top and base notes.’

  I’m still mulling over his question. He’s thrust me into a position that I have neither claimed nor sought out.

  ‘Hey, you know what? I’m not your client. I’m not a brand owner, I’m not a project manager, I’m not an evaluator and I’m not commissioning a bespoke perfume. That’s not my position. I’ve handed my story over to you and now I’m registering how it develops.’

  ‘Still, you need to be able to tell me whether the perfume is adapted to your story.’

  He’s not about to let me off the hook. Have I been failing him somehow? I haven’t even told him how beautiful I found what he was doing, especially the last floral accord we agreed on, N°6, which I’ve worn frequently over the week.

  ‘I think we’ve started getting there since the last time.’

  ‘Since I came up with N°6. Because the accord is already becoming good. That’s fundamental. We’ve got to create something that stands up. That’s original but pleasing. We’ve got to avoid segmentation. We can’t afford it. Otherwise, we’ll please a small number of aficionados but our perfume will never live.’

  A perfume needs to fulfil three fundamental criteria so that it lives, and lasts, and goes on gaining recognition as time goes by, he adds.

  ‘One: originality. Two: diffusive power. Three: tenacity.’

  This is the first time I’ve heard Bertrand use a marketing term like ‘segmentation’. The first time he mentions commercial success. Of course he wants his perfumes to sell well. This is how he makes a living. If ours never goes into production, he’ll have invested as much time and effort as for the stuff that does make it to the shelves. Even if he recycles his ideas, it’s still a frustrating process. I can’t blame him for wanting this
one to be successful, should a company decide to commercialize it. But there’s more than profit involved. He wants his stuff to be loved. To be worn. To endure. Perfumers know their work is heartbreakingly ephemeral. Many products don’t even make it past their first year. And since there’s a bit of my soul in that bottle, I too want Duende to survive …

  Meanwhile, it’s not Duende’s chances of making it into the 22nd century that concern us, but how long it lasts on skin. If I’m not up to Bertrand’s standards as a project manager, at least I can serve my purpose as a human blotter. Duende N°6 doesn’t have enough staying power, so it isn’t fulfilling the third prerequisite, tenacity. I’ve had compliments on it, so the diffusive power seems to be satisfactory. But a friend of mine told me: ‘If this perfume is meant to be you, it needs to be darker, more sensuous.’ Bertrand nods.

  ‘Interesting. So we’ll play up the sensuousness of the base notes, to give it more mystery and more persistence. This will inflect the global accord by five to ten per cent.’

  ‘I still think there’s something to pull out of that sensuous base I loved in N°5.’

  ‘We’ll go back to it if we need to.’

  ‘Because it reminds me of Habanita, somehow.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘That wood, tobacco, musk and vanilla base reminds me of Habanita.’

  ‘You want me to play on that? Is it related to the story?’

  Haven’t I told him about ten times?

  ‘It’s the perfume I wore back then.’

  ‘So it’s important.’

  ‘I’ve got an old bottle which probably goes back to the mid-80s. There are just a few drops left at the bottom, it’s like liqueur.’

  Bertrand nods vigorously, eyes twinkling.

  ‘Brilliant! Bring me Habanita! I want it!’

  * * *

  One week later, after smelling the new mods at leisure, I fire off a text message to Bertrand, who must be somewhere in the area of Grasse: ‘I know what I want. Don’t work on anything before we see each other again.’