When he joins Michel and me, a handsome forty-something with open features and the lilting accent of Provence, the garden starts buzzing, and it’s not just the bees. Olivier Maure is an entrepreneur but he’s also a believer, and almost as much a child of Sainte-Blanche as Michel: he was hired by the Roudnitskas when he was nineteen years old, came up through the ranks and rose to be the head of the plant, then its majority shareholder. He now helms Accords et Parfums, the production branch, and Art et Parfum, the creative branch. This is still very much a family operation, and as the vital, voluble Oliver and the tall thoughtful Michel lean to pick herbs or draw down branches so that I can smell leaves and blossoms, I feel as though I want to be part of it.
But it is of my long-distance friend Sandrine Videault I think as I climb the staircase of the Roudnitska villa, pausing to gaze at the paintings lining the walls. Sandrine came to Sainte-Blanche in 1992 as a business student to interview Edmond Roudnitska for her Masters dissertation on the luxury industry. When she left eight hours later, she was on her way to becoming a perfumer, and had found mentors in the Roudnitskas.
I gasp as Sandrine must have done when Michel leads me to the first-floor terrace, with its Ionic columns and wisteria hanging from the pergola. From this eagle’s eyrie – the eagle that spreads its wings on the family crest, a symbol of Edmond Roudnitska’s lofty views on his art – you can see the coast of the Riviera spreading its arms to embrace the Mediterranean: two hundred kilometres of coastline from the Bay of Nice to the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. In the muggy autumn air the view is hazy, but when the mistral sweeps the sky blue, Corsica rises from the sea. Here too it seems important to smell the things the Roudnitskas planted, and I do, leaning into the box hedge to sniff its green leaves (cat pee!) while Michel stoops to pick a sprig of rosemary and crush it between his fingers for me to inhale.
When we’ve settled into the blond-wood-panelled corner office where Edmond received his visitors and Thérèse worked, its windows revealing an even clearer view of the hills rolling towards Grasse, Cannes and Nice, I ask to experience the master’s scents in situ. Despite having smelled them all their lives, Michel and Olivier dip strips for themselves and, together, we contemplate Roudnitska’s 1949 Diorama, a lush fruity chypre with an almost animalic ripe-melon top note and leathery undertones. The scent straddles the spicy, plum- and peach-tinged Femme and the sparer, more sparkly Parfum de Thérèse.
It is indirectly because of Le Parfum de Thérèse that I met Michel a year ago. In a review I’d done of Émotionnelle, a fragrance he composed for the American brand Parfums DelRae, I’d recognized a tribute to his mother’s perfume, though the scent was sold as a reminiscence of DelRae Roth’s first trip to Paris. I’d even guessed its working title: ‘the Melon’. Michel was moved and wrote to explain that he had indeed composed it from his memories of his mother’s scent, purposely refraining from consulting his father’s formula.
Olivier fetches another of Michel’s compositions, Noir Épices, which came out at the same time as Le Parfum de Thérèse in Frédéric Malle’s original line-up.
‘When you weigh it, it’s a feast for the nose, because the sequence is perfect even in the vat. Each time you add a new ingredient, there’s a balance’, he enthuses.
‘Oh? I didn’t know that,’ says Michel.
Weighing is the term used in the perfume industry for measuring and adding the quantities of materials specified in formulas into the vat where the oil is blended. It can be an automated process but for the smaller volumes treated by Accords et Parfums it is carried out manually, especially since the formulas are very complex and many of the products are so costly they must be handled ‘with care, feeling and delicacy’, explains Olivier. To him, weighing a formula is like performing a score, and the Accords et Parfums team communes around the ingredients to make sure it will be performed without a false note.
‘What’s interesting when you make up large quantities is that you know straight off which perfumer you’re working for. Just by weighing, you read the way they write.’
Perfumers not only have distinctive palettes but also their own way of harmonizing proportions. As each material is added, the structure unfolds one accord after another: ‘You can smell the fragrance taking shape all the way from the garden,’ says Olivier.
For instance, he explains, Bertrand uses a lot of rich, powerful, complex raw materials, not in an overdose necessarily, but not as a trace, like many perfumers do. He manages to harmonize these materials, to give them softness, roundness, ‘almost as though he were drawing with charcoal. And you can tell he starts each of his formulas from scratch.’
I wonder what Duende will smell like when it is mixed: I hope I’ll come back one day to follow its birth. I envy Olivier this daily intimacy with aromatic materials and with fragrances as they take shape, the depth of understanding it must yield, the sheer physical pleasure of being permeated by those beautiful smells …
Olivier is just as talkative as I am and by the time our conversation winds down, the plant has closed for the day. I’m crestfallen: I’d expected to see the mixing of some fragrant cocktail right under my nose, perhaps of something I know. Olivier tells me there’s nothing very spectacular to see. Still, he’ll show me around, so we walk across to the plant. I stand in the gravel courtyard while he fetches the key and lifts a corrugated iron curtain to let me into a warehouse whose walls are lined with plastic and metal drums on shelves: litres upon litres of raw materials, both natural and synthetic.
Sourcing, buying and stocking them is the first service provided by Accords et Parfums, and a major one, as independents can’t generate enough volume to buy large quantities. Accords et Parfums can count on a network of suppliers built up over sixty years to ensure sufficient high-quality stocks at a good price. Materials can also be purchased directly from local or foreign growers/distillers. Brokers play an important part in the process: they buy up large quantities of natural materials as they become available, even when composition houses don’t have an immediate need for them. Say you miss the narcissus season or the patchouli crop in Indonesia is poor, you’re done for if stocks haven’t been built up in preceding years. Brokers have those stocks on hand.
There’s half-a-million euros’ worth of materials in this room but money’s not what I’m thinking of. When you’re used to sniffing a strip dipped in a dinky little phial, the idea of sticking your head into a vat of myrrh – a gem-clear, syrupy brownish-red goo wafting whiffs of mushroom – of holding enough jasmine concrete in your hands to smear yourself from head to toe, or of diving into the 250-litre stainless steel vat giving off smoky resinous fumes … It’s enough to induce a terminal attack of kid-in-a-candy-shop indecisiveness. Olivier shakes me out of it by prising open the lids of several drums and letting me moan a little as I snort. He seems to get a kick out of smelling the stuff too: working with it for half a lifetime hasn’t made him blasé.
The rest of the stock is in quarantine, which is to say that it hasn’t been analysed and approved for use yet. We step into the next room, where the raw materials and perfume blends are tested for quality, chemical composition and compliance (naturals may contain allergenic molecules in varying quantities according to the season’s crop, provenance or extraction process). These analyses ensure that suppliers haven’t played fast and loose with their wares. For instance, they might add synthetic linalool, a molecule already present in lavender essential oil. This type of tampering, called ‘commercial quality’, ensures that a composition house will become dependent on the material provided by a specific supplier. The practice used to be widespread but has become less frequent over the past decade as composition houses equipped themselves with testing facilities.
The first analysis is carried out by a sophisticated piece of apparatus that takes years to fine-tune: the nose. Materials are also chemically analysed and submitted to gas chromatography, a technique that can read the breakdown of a material or fragrance. The gas chromatograph looks like
an oversized microwave oven. You pump a bit of the material you want to analyse with a syringe and pop it into the machine, where it is volatilized in a hot injection chamber. As the different molecules go back and forth between the gas phase and dissolution in a high-boiling liquid, they do so at different speeds and in varying patterns. These patterns come out as a series of peaks and troughs on a graph. You can then read them with a piece of software. When you slide the arrow on a peak, a pop-up window tells you which molecule it is, with a percentage of certainty.
There’s nothing more to see, so Olivier leads me back to the gravel courtyard and, while I admire the vista one last time, he tells me his plans for Accords et Parfums.
‘We don’t want to be a company that’s done beautiful things: we want to use our history to go on doing beautiful things. And the idea is starting to create a buzz, because our way of seeing things is totally atypical. For artists, it’s a way of expressing themselves fully: this is what’s missing in the industry nowadays.’
But it’s not just about art, he says: it is also about the pleasure of working together; about friendship. I don’t know what Bertrand is doing just now, but he must be on the verge of deafness from the buzz in his ears. Olivier is convinced he’s going to be huge.
We climb into the company van so that Olivier can drop me off at the dingy Hôtel des Parfums, surprisingly one of the few decent accommodations in the touristic town of Grasse, its rooms plastered with warnings to lock doors and windows at night for your safety. I realize I’ve forgotten to let him smell the two latest versions of Duende. It’s the first time I show it to anyone connected with the perfume industry, but I figure I’m keeping it in the family. We’re heading for a roundabout as I spray a bit of each on my wrists.
‘I can’t stand it! I just have to smell this now!’
Olivier lunges for one of my arms, pulls it towards him as he negotiates the roundabout with his free hand and ducks nose-first towards my wrist.
‘I can totally recognize Bertrand’s style here!’
Without letting go of my wrist, he asks me to hold out the other one and inhales robustly.
‘Uh-uh. It’s very good but … I shouldn’t really be saying this, I guess … But … there’s still work to be done, isn’t there?’
We’ve reached the hotel. Olivier parks the van, gets out and holds out his own wrists, grinning.
‘I’ve got to try them on too. May I?’
I spray his arms and he waves them about to dry them.
‘Sorry,’ he grins, ‘the day’s been muggy and I’m a bit whiffy.’
Before I know it, I’ve blurted out:
‘Oh, please don’t apologize: I love the smell of men…’
But what I really mean is: Olivier, I love the way your sweat smells, just like rye bread out of the oven.
On his skin, N°14 is breaking up pretty badly, the grapefruit and flint sticking out like shards of glass. I study both mods, all the while copping an olfactory feel – hey, why shouldn’t I?
Still, it’s time to let this nice fellow get back to his office: my visit has disrupted his routine and he’s got a lot of work to do before returning to his family. We stand in the parking lot, still talking a mile a minute.
‘Funny,’ says Olivier, ‘the first time I met Bertrand a couple of years ago, this is where I dropped him off, at this time of the day. He said “I think we’ll be meeting again.”’
I lean forward to kiss him on both cheeks – we’ve shifted to the familiar tu which means la bise, rather than le handshake, is now in order.
‘Well then, I’ll say it too: Olivier, I think we’ll be meeting again.’
26
As I stalk the arcades of the rue de Rivoli on my way to the lab, Lou Reed is droning into my iPhone buds that he’s waiting for the Man …
Today’s the day I’m putting down my zebra-striped four-inch-heel stiletto. I’ve been waiting for the man for nearly six weeks. We met once after the August holidays and now it’s late October. In fact, since we started working on the project six months ago, it seems I’ve done almost nothing but wait: Bertrand’s been away from Paris nearly half the time on various promotional jaunts, sourcing trips and holidays, and when he is in Paris, there’s always something more urgent on his agenda.
Granted, he’s the hottest indie nose-for-hire at the moment. Clients eager to capitalize on his talent and reputation are beating a path to his lab; he’s juggling several contracts and each time I see him, he tells me he’s about to take on more. Fair enough: he’s freelance, ambitious, eager to explore as many different registers as he can. But he’s got no agent, no PR, not even an assistant to help him handle increasing demands on his time and creativity, and I’m wondering whether he knows how to pace himself. More than that: I’m worried. I like the guy, respect the artist, and want neither to burn out. The angel in me wants to protect him; the muse is whispering that his art must be nurtured, not exploited, not even by himself. But my demon duende is slipping dark, mouth-burning anger between my lips. The fact that I can’t stand being pushed back into the crowd of those clamouring for his attention is a matter of pride, and since that can’t be helped I’ve got to swallow it. Yet it’s not just a matter of pride. What we’ve been doing is different from his usual gigs. The idea sprung up when our orbits intersected: spontaneously, gratuitously and, therefore, out of necessity. If there’s a blood accord in Duende, it’s because there is a bit of our lifeblood in the phials lining up on his shelf and their twins huddling next to my computer. But lately it’s been running a little thin.
I’m not just waiting for the Man. I’m waiting for the Moan, the one I let out when a perfume hits me at gut level. The Moan hasn’t come out, though that may be part of the protracted process of composition: dozens of mods before you can let go of any rational judgement and surrender to the beauty. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering whether we haven’t taken the wrong fork somewhere. The last time we saw each other, Bertrand told me from now on I’d be seeing small tweaks, unless we wanted to change our course drastically.
And that’s just it. We’ve been focusing on tweaks; narrowing the scope to technical details: safe ground for him, not least, I suspect, because it’s a terrain where I have very little say and he can move quickly. Meanwhile, we’re losing sight of the thing that brought us together. It’s not just because he’s been morphing into a star over the past few months, the acclaim and contracts giving him constantly renewed motives for distraction. I’ve been thinking about my conversations with artistic directors, especially Christian Astuguevieille and Pamela Roberts, who both worked with Bertrand, but also Serge Lutens and Frédéric Malle. They all said the same thing. Ask yourself what the perfume wants. Trust the perfumer. Give him as much poetic licence as he needs. But make sure he stays focused on the story.
It’s time I heeded those lessons. I’m the one who should be keeping us on course yet practically all I’ve been doing so far is to mirror Bertrand’s decisions. When he asked me whether I knew what I wanted, I couldn’t answer, and that still smarts. When I mentioned that the few friends who’d smelled the various mods had all been saying, ‘This isn’t you,’ Bertrand kept repeating that he was perfecting the floral note. We’d inject more sensuousness afterwards. What could I say? I’m not the perfumer; I don’t know how it’s done. But however it’s done, I do know one thing: this is my story.
By the time I’m climbing the stairs to the lab, Nico is cooing, ‘I’ll be your mirror…’ into my earphones. Well, guess what, Mr D.? The mirror is about to talk back.
* * *
Of course, as soon as Bertrand greets me with a smile, whatever annoyance I’d been feeling towards him dissolves: he is nothing if not disarmingly likeable. It’s only after you’ve sparred with him for a while you realize he’s got a rock-hard core, some savagely protected part of him that can’t be budged and won’t open up. The hardness I see in the way he holds himself, legs slightly akimbo, ready to stand his ground; a density in his phy
sical presence honed by years of tai chi. But Aries-versus-Capricorn head-butting would be unproductive: we’d both end up with a migraine. So as Bertrand downs a soup, a sandwich and a smoothie while I untypically pick at a salad I can’t even finish – I’ve swallowed my rant and it’s giving me a touch of heartburn – I steer the conversation towards my concerns about his career: flicking the cape, as it were, to attract his attention. He concedes I may have a point. I don’t press it. I am not my perfumer’s keeper.
Then we find our way back to our usual banter and I spill out six weeks’ worth of ideas and anecdotes, drawing him back into that little world two people create when they’ve been working together for a while, and he laughs and teases me for being so talkative – ‘You’re in love with words, aren’t you?’ – but I know from the twinkle in his eyes he’s enjoying the stories. For charm to operate, you’ve got to be charmed, and we’re both charmers: that’s our little unspoken war, I think. This may have been a game of dominance all along, one I’ve been letting him win out of sheer awe that this thing was happening at all. But underneath the comfort I feel chatting and laughing with Bertrand, that tiny nagging bite of anger is keeping me on edge. I’ve got a couple of things in my handbag that I’m waiting for the right moment to spring on him.
This time, I do know what I want. Or rather, I know what the perfume is asking for.
* * *
Up in the lab, Bertrand has two new mods to show me: numbers 15 and 16.
‘I’m focusing on the incense-blood note, maybe stupidly,’ he says as he’s preparing the blotters. ‘Maybe we need to work more on the base. Maybe this shouldn’t be a luminous perfume like I imagined at the start, with an almost cologne-like freshness. Maybe we ought to work on a headier orange blossom note…’
Good. He’s already moving towards my ideas without my having to nudge him. It makes it easier for me to formulate my critiques. For one, the banana was too strong in the last mods. When I’m in a jasmine alley, I get something oilier, spicier. And I’m still stuck on the N°5 mod we rejected last May because it wasn’t an orange blossom but a fierce, clove-laden lily. Re-reading my journal, I noticed that I was strongly drawn to it from the start and that I’d mentioned it several times afterwards. Yesterday, as I was testing mods 11 to 14, I sprayed on this fifth mod and found a quality to it that was missing from what Bertrand’s been doing lately, something that’s closer to the way I envision Duende.
The Perfume Lover Page 19