The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  His gaze softens.

  ‘You like it. Good … that’s good,’ he says almost tenderly. ‘We’ll get back to it.’

  * * *

  When you smell formulas that have a lot of common ingredients, it’s what’s different that sticks out, as though your brain blocks out the identical bits. In this case, in contrast with mods 18 and 19, mod 16 comes off as banana jam, which it wouldn’t on its own. But the new stuff isn’t working out either: the Habanita base, like a hungry enzyme, gobbles up the orange blossom even in mod 19, which has the smallest proportion of it, one fifth. Clearly, classic-era forms like the one Bertrand rebuilt are incredibly powerful, especially Habanita – it was marketed as the most tenacious perfume in the world. This is because there are only base notes in the formula, he explains.

  ‘It’s the base notes that give the direction, no matter what they say. You’d almost have to work on the base notes first to know exactly what a perfume’s going to become.’

  That must be why people who are used to wearing classic perfumes don’t find contemporary ones strong enough. As soon as you stick in the stuff that’s in the Habanita base, it crushes everything. But the experiment is interesting, because it helps me understand what perfumery used to be like.

  ‘First and foremost, you worked on the base notes,’ Bertrand repeats. ‘What you put into the heart and top notes was almost solvent. That’s actually what Jacques Guerlain used to say: that he used bergamot as a solvent, in sufficient quantity to finish his formula. That’s why there’s as much as thirty per cent bergamot in Shalimar. To him, it didn’t mean anything. His perfume was done. Still, his bloody bergamot did something. It had an action. But it wasn’t part of the formula.’

  I love it when Bertrand talks about the lore of the industry. Like couture, perfumery is a trade where oral tradition is part of the learning process; when he was an apprentice, anecdotes about historical figures were swapped in the labs by people who’d actually known them. Bertrand’s mentor was Jean-Louis Sieuzac, who started out at Roure before going to work for Florasynth, the company that took Bertrand on as a trainee when he first came to Grasse. Roure had its own school of perfumery, where the pedagogical methods devised by the head perfumer Jean Charles were used to train several generations of perfumers, including Bertrand, indirectly, via Sieuzac. And, as a beginner, he had to reproduce ‘by nose’ a great many classics, something student perfumers still do, so that of course he knows classic structures inside out.

  It just so happens that the same friend who found my 1948 Habanita sent me the English translations of some articles by Jean Carles, written for an industry magazine between 1961 and 1963 and published in William I. Kaufman’s 1974 Perfume. When I mention this to Bertrand, he tells me that this very book was one of the things that made him want to become a perfumer, though when he first read it in 1982 it had become so rare he was never able to buy his own copy. So it makes perfect sense that Bertrand is echoing Jean Carles: ‘As indicated by their name,’ the latter wrote, ‘the base notes will serve to determine the chief characteristic of the perfume, the scent of which will last for hours on end and will essentially be responsible for the success of the perfume, if any.’ To Carles, the heart notes were just ‘modifiers’ meant to cover up the unpleasant facets base note materials gave off initially. Top notes were designed to draw in the customer, ‘with or without reason, as in no case can the top note be the characteristic note of the perfume.’

  Today, top notes are what perfumers focus on, at least in the mainstream, in a complete reversal of the Jean Carles method. As consumers seldom take the time to test a fragrance throughout its entire development or even to try it on skin before buying it, perfumers compose things that give off a seductive blast in the top notes and that smell good on cardboard. Little effort or budget is wasted on the base notes, which is why they often end up smelling so nondescript and generic, a mishmash of woody notes smothered in laundry musk.

  For the time being though, our problem is just the opposite one: base notes so strong they take on a life of their own.

  ‘OK, let me try out just one last thing before we wrap up,’ says Bertrand.

  This time he adds only one tenth of the Habanita base to the orange blossom. As soon as he’s shaken the little phial, he dips in the blotters. The blend is likely to be a bit of a mess: to really judge a perfume you’d need to let it macerate at least one week after you’ve added alcohol to the oil, though one month would be better. But it’ll have to do.

  This time, the orange blossom, incense and blood accord stands its ground.

  ‘Still, even if we play with the two bases we’ll have to add other products. We’re only up to thirty, thirty-five materials, so the formula won’t be getting out of hand. There’s something to go on here!’ Bertrand concludes.

  * * *

  Of course I can’t wait one week to try out Duende 20 on skin. The next morning I spray it on my wrists, hair and chest. Sticking my nose inside my sweater is a good way of getting a concentrated blast, so it’s more effective to assess the form of the fragrance than gluing the wrist to the nose: a bit like stepping back from a large painting to see the composition rather than the fine details.

  But however I smell it, Duende 20 is going all over the map. When it’s just moving out of the top notes, the aldehydes tend to stick out, which makes it smell like a candle. When the orange blossom struggles out I find it a bit too soapy. And then the mineral effect literally explodes, giving off a slightly burnt-hair stench. But when I sniff my wrist, I don’t get that note at all: it’s all sweet tobacco, musk and vanilla. It seems a monster has shambled out of Dr Duchaufour’s lab … And then an email pops into my inbox.

  Denyse, I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel our appointment tomorrow. The mods I made after you left are crap … I’m even starting to wonder whether the orange blossom and incense accord is really relevant. I’m down in the dumps.

  B.

  I call Bertrand back immediately. He’s not picking up so I leave a message.

  The train is rumbling into Daumesnil station when the Farfisa organ of ‘Ninety-six Tears’ tinkles from my bag half an hour later. I can barely make out Bertrand’s voice in the station, so I run back up the stairs into the icy dusk of the place Daumesnil to huddle on a bench. I’m sick at the idea of having tampered with Bertrand’s creative process, yet oddly calm. We can’t both be freaking out. I shift into crisis-control mode.

  The new ideas aren’t working out, he says, and he’s tired of running round in circles. The Habanita accord smells too old-fashioned. He tested Duende 20 on his skin the day after our last appointment and it was awful. Then he tried adding the woody, spicy lily and it didn’t work out either. He hates the costus. Maybe there shouldn’t even be actual incense in it. Maybe he should substitute other materials.

  OK, if the Habanita accord is too invasive, I say, we’ll ditch it. It had to be tried out. Don’t worry. There’s time. Let’s get together soon and just sit down and smell everything again quietly, you don’t have to come up with anything new, we’ll just take stock, think things over, now that I’m more of a partner, take advantage of that, rely on me.

  By the end of the conversation Bertrand is considering solutions, such as streamlining the formula of Duende 20 to remove the old-fashioned elements; I suggest trying out the orange blossom accord with Duende 5 but without the Habanita effect. What I want is the sensuousness of it. It needn’t be literal. I’m still convinced we needed to shake things up.

  Of course that’s also the problem, I think as I hang up and make my way back to the station, still rattled. I’ve become more of a partner but I’m also more intrusive than any client of his ever is. I am derailing the process. Possibly asking for what can’t be done. Things that won’t work together within his style or won’t work together, full stop. I’ve never realized until now how tough it must be to pull off this project. Bertrand is working under a triple constraint: interpreting my story as faithfully as possible;
not repeating himself within a body of work of nearly fifty perfumes, several of which feature an incense note, and one of which is an orange blossom soliflore; coming up with an accord that’s different from everything else on the market, all the while juggling rich, complex materials that sometimes interact in unexpected ways, despite his in-depth knowledge of them.

  Still, I can’t help thinking some good might come out of this creative snag, frustrating as it is at the moment, if only because I’ve found out how much he cares about the project. That he trusts me in moments of doubt. And that I trust him now more than I ever have, precisely because of this moment of doubt.

  Bertrand, when you had the intuition about the orange blossom and incense accord, it was immediate, obvious. I have absolute trust in that intuition, that of a great perfumer. And in the accord, because it exists in reality. You’ll get there, and your perfume will be heartbreakingly beautiful. Actually, you know what? Même pas peur.

  D.

  28

  Is there an uglier church in Paris than La Madeleine?

  Though the demented meringue of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre looks like a pastry chef’s idea of Byzantium by way of Disneyworld, at least it’s got a certain hysterical élan. But this pompous faux-Roman temple looming sullenly at the end of the rue Royale doesn’t seem to know whether it is the National Assembly, the National Library, the Stock Exchange or the Opera. In fact, it almost became all of those things between 1763, when Louis XV laid the cornerstone, and its inauguration by Louis-Philippe in 1845. There was a project to turn it into a temple to the French Revolution, then to the glory of Napoleon’s Great Army; in 1837, there was even talk of making it Paris’s first railway station. In the end, it was returned to its original destination as a church but, frankly, there couldn’t have been a worse mausoleum to house the relics of Mary Magdalene. It is as though the triple chastity belt of snarling traffic, cast-iron railings and Corinthian columns had been expressly designed to contain the overflowing femininity of the sexiest saint in history: stiff male virtue, whether it is revolutionary, imperial or bourgeois, rising up to keep the erstwhile courtesan in her place.

  * * *

  I’ve stepped into La Madeleine on a sudden impulse after realizing I’d never once set foot inside despite living in Paris for over two decades, an oversight that can only be explained by its ugliness because, for a miscreant, I’ve certainly spent a great deal of time in churches. When I was travelling around Europe with my parents, we didn’t pass one without at least peering into it. My mother and I would sprinkle ourselves with holy water of dubious bacteriological status and light candles, dropping pesetas, liras, guilders or francs into tinkling brass boxes, setting Europe ablaze with our wishes.

  I’ve never entirely shaken the candle habit and, as Bertrand is tackling his duende, it seems like the right time to have a word with Mary Magdalene. After all, she is the patron saint of perfumers, as well as glove-makers and apothecaries (a logical extension of her speciality since both of the latter tradesmen were the original perfumers), but also hairdressers, gardeners, penitent sinners and converted prostitutes.

  Before he decided to build an expiatory chapel in 1815, King Louis XVIII considered consecrating La Madeleine to the memory of his brother Louis XVI and sister-in-law Marie-Antoinette. The match between the tragic queen and the patron of perfumers, hairdressers and harlots would have been particularly fitting: in the slanderous pamphlets that circulated before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was berated for her love of luxury and her unbridled lust, which sucked the country dry of its riches and vital forces.

  Both lust and luxury, as it happens, are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the seven deadly sins and one to which women, given their weak, vain nature, were thought more vulnerable. But if the fashion-mad Marie-Antoinette could have stood accused of spending too much on her baubles, she was never the sexual ogre libels made her out to be. Of course, that wasn’t the point. What spurred on the slanders or, more specifically, their pornographic nature was an age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man’s desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled? And what then could be more terrifying than a queen in the throes of luxuria, whose power is unchecked by an impotent husband, as Louis XVI was thought to be? To the authors of the pamphlets, Marie-Antoinette was but the latest in a line of lustful queens that started with the wife of the stuttering idiot Emperor Claudius, Messalina, said to prostitute herself in brothels out of wantonness. The violent and fantastic nature of the accusations was directly proportionate to the terror aroused by the erotic power of women.

  The fate dealt out to Mary Magdalene by the Catholic Church may bear witness to this fear. She started out in the Gospels as a beloved disciple of Christ. She ended up a whore, albeit a penitent one.

  * * *

  Perfume was part of her story from the outset. Her emblem in Christian iconography is the alabastron, the vase of alabaster containing precious aromatic substances. And her earliest known representation, in a Syrian fresco dated AD 232, is as one of the myrrhophores, the women bearing myrrh to Jesus’s sepulchre to embalm his body, as the art historian Susan Haskins explains in Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. In Mark’s Gospel, she is the first, along with Mary mother of James and Salome the Virgin’s sister, to discover the sepulchre open and empty. She is also the first to see Christ resurrected in the garden of Gethsemane. She bears the news to the other disciples, thus becoming the first apostle (the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘messenger, person sent forth’), in fact the apostle of apostles. She is also identified by Mark and Luke as the woman ‘out of whom went seven devils’, and those devils may well have sealed her fate: surely they were embodiments of the seven deadly sins, and surely luxuria must have prevailed in a woman.

  In the four canonical Gospels, Mary Magdalene barely utters a word. But she plays a very different role in the apocryphal Gospels of Philip, Thomas and Mary (the latter supposed to be the Magdalene) suppressed by the Church as it eliminated its competitors by labelling them heretics. In this parallel tradition, Mary Magdalene is the bearer of teachings Christ imparted solely to her.

  As the Church gradually pushed women back from the positions of ministry they had held in early Christianity, Mary Magdalene relinquished her initial status as the apostle of apostles: to all ends and purposes, she was gagged. Her morphing into the figure of the penitent whore sprung into motion in the third century, as she was gradually conflated with two other female figures in the Gospels, whose common point with Mary Magdalene was perfume.

  The first is an unnamed ‘sinner in the city’, supposed to be a prostitute or an adulteress. She washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair and anoints his feet with fragrant ointment in the house of Simon the Pharisee, in a sensuous gesture that almost seems to be the feminine equivalent of baptism. The second is the sister of Martha and Lazarus, Mary of Bethany, who also anoints Jesus by pouring precious spikenard over his head in a pre-figuration of his embalmment rites (‘against the day of my burying hath she kept this’).

  It was around this triple Mary Magdalene that the legend formed throughout the Middle Ages. She became the heiress of the castle of Magdala, descended from kings, and the bride of John the Apostle, who abandoned her immediately after their wedding at Cana to follow Jesus. Out of spite, she threw herself into prostitution, adorning herself with jewels, rich fabrics and perfumes the better to flatter her senses and entice her lovers, until she saw the light, repented her past sins and followed Jesus too. One version of the legend has her living out the rest of her days in a grotto in contemplation and penance, having forsaken all worldly goods, clad only in her long tresses: this time, she was conflated with the 5th-century Mary of Alexandria, a form
er courtesan who had retreated to the desert of the Holy Land.

  As a penitent harlot, Mary Magdalene was invaluable to the Catholic Church. She symbolized the redemption of Eve and was an easier female figure to identify with than the Virgin Mary. If Jesus could forgive a whore, take her into his fold and even grant her the privilege of being the first to see him after his resurrection, then any sinner could be saved, even women who, like her, had given in to luxuria. And thus she became the protectress of reformed prostitutes in the charitable institutions founded to save them from their life of sin. Not to mention a favourite subject for painters. Her penitence in the grotto, clad only in the unfurling waves of her golden hair, pert breast darting out between vine-like tendrils, was an excellent excuse to paint beautiful naked women in the guise of religious art, especially after Renaissance artists revived the tradition of the classical nude. But not everyone was fooled. Susan Haskins quotes a Florentine nobleman, Baccio Valori, who told Titian that his Magdalene in the desert, though she had been fasting, ‘was too attractive, so fresh and dewy, for such penitence’. The canny Titian ‘answered laughing that he had painted her on the first day … before she began fasting’. By the 18th century, most of these penitent Magdalenes, some of which were portraits of famous courtesans and royal mistresses, had turned into thinly disguised erotica.

  * * *

  When Sister Aline tackled her story in my high-school catechism class, the Magdalene was also an excellent excuse for teenage girls to talk about sex. Sister Aline was pretty cool about that. This was the 70s and Quebec had thrown off the shackles of the Catholic Church to fast-track itself into nationalism, feminism and the sexual revolution. But I don’t remember Sister Aline telling us that the Church had cleansed Mary Magdalene’s reputation in 1969. The unnamed sinner and Mary of Bethany had resumed their discrete identities, which the Orthodox Church had always staunchly maintained: Mary Magdalene was no longer the ‘penitent saint’ but one of Christ’s disciples. Perhaps Sister Aline thought of this as a demotion and preferred the sexy Magdalene of her childhood?