Mod 35: the diesel fumes of rose oxide suck the life out of the orange blossom. Interesting, but not the story. Scrap it.
Mod 36: powder puff. Musk, trailing its usual partner-in-crime: vanilla. He quite likes it. I don’t. It smells too old-fashioned and, besides, I tell him, he should be giving musk and vanilla a break. He’s been using them a lot lately. Scrap it.
Mod 37: ‘Black pepper, pink pepper, incense: boom, boom!’ Bertrand says about his new take on the top notes. The two peppers pull the incense upwards. The pink one adds sparkle with a natural feel, brightness without resorting to zesty notes. But even though there’s only one per cent of the synthetic musk muscenone in the formula, we both find it annoyingly invasive. ‘That baby-skin effect bugs me,’ Bertrand grumbles.
We settle on a combination of 37 for its more incensey top notes and 33 for its darker base. Duende shouldn’t be too dark but, still, a lot more should be happening in the base notes. Whatever became of the African Stone, for instance? No problem, Bertrand says, we can work it back in. There’s a rusty, old-penny facet that’ll go towards conjuring the blood note.
‘And then there’s also that old church incense formula you brought me … I keep going back to it. It’s a perfume in itself!’
In early December, when Bertrand was struggling with the incense note, I’d done an internet search on Catholic incense and come up with a formula from 1834, a blend of several resins and balsams, sandalwood, cloves, cardamom and, surprisingly, lavender.
I’m really getting the hang of this muse business, aren’t I? Still, we aren’t there yet. At the rate we’re going, and taking into account Bertrand’s punishing workload, we agree Duende won’t reach its final form for another two months at the earliest.
So: February … March … April. 22 April. One year to the day after our first session. In 2011, 22 April falls on Good Friday. Duende must be done on time for the Madrugada.
* * *
‘What if I took you to Seville for Easter, then?’
I’ve been updating Monsieur on Duende’s progress. We pause to breathe in the briny, nutty aroma of our steamed scallops in seaweed. The chef of Le 21, Paul Minchelli, is a temperamental Corsican and you can’t get a table at his hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the rue Mazarine unless you know the secret handshake. Several major perfumers do – Jacques Polge and Jean-Claude Ellena are clients – as well as art dealers, writers, movie stars and film directors. And Monsieur.
‘I’d love to! There couldn’t be a better way to end the story.’
As soon as I’ve said the words I wonder which story I had in mind.
Seville was what drew Monsieur to me in the first place twelve years ago: I’d just published an erotic short story set there and its contents were discussed at the dinner party where we met at a mutual friend’s house. After that, I didn’t hear back from Monsieur for six months and then, all of a sudden, he wanted to meet me to discuss the story, which he’d finally got round to reading. Then I met Monsieur all over France and Europe but we never made it to Seville. Going there to measure up Duende against its original inspiration sounds like a plan.
What will happen after that, supposing Monsieur really does take me to Seville, which I’ll only believe once I’m aboard the airplane? I can’t see past the moment when Bertrand and I will say, Stop, we’re done, the perfume has become what it asked to become … For a year, what’s been driving me is the thrill of meandering in the labyrinth. Now that L’Artisan Parfumeur has peered down into it, I realize I’ll soon be airlifted out. Duende will no longer be the thread of my journey. Seville’s heart-rending beauty could be the knife I use to cut loose.
But why bother to go to Seville? Won’t Duende take me there instantly once it’s done?
Short answer: no. In fact, the next time someone brings up the perfume-as-instant-flashback cliché, I may scream. Along with asking me whether I’ve read Patrick Süskind’s Perfume or seen the film, it’s the first thing anyone mentions when I say I write about fragrance. How it brings back memories. And then, unfailingly, the most overworked piece of pastry in the history of literature splashes into the teacup: ‘I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…’
In France, any object that carries you back to your past is dubbed ma madeleine de Proust, ‘my Proustian madeleine’: it is probably the only thing most people know about the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time. So when the word ‘madeleine’ comes up in a conversation about fragrance, it is some vague notion of the Proustian epiphany that is referenced rather than the patron saint of perfumers (the small scallop-shaped sponge cake was actually named after the maid of the Marquise Perrotin de Baumont, Madeleine Paulmier, who invented it in 1755). The madeleine, still commonly served at breakfast or tea, has transmogrified into a master key to involuntary memories.
But is the ‘madeleine effect’ verifiable? Are olfactory memories really more emotion-laden, more indelible, more immediate and more accurate than those conjured by the other senses, as most people seem to believe? In What the Nose Knows, the sensory psychologist Avery Gilbert sums up four decades of research into odour-evoked memories and concludes they aren’t: ‘rates of forgetting [are] the same as for sights and sounds’. Memories of odours are ‘subject to fading, distortion and misinterpretation’, just like any other. In that respect, smell has no special status. According to Dr Gilbert, the element of surprise may be what makes olfactory memories so striking: ‘Because odor memories accumulate automatically, outside of awareness, they cover their own tracks. We don’t remember remembering them. The sense of wonder that comes with the experience is, like all magic, an illusion based on misdirection.’ In Éloge de l’odorat (‘In Praise of the sense of smell’), Dr André Holley, a neuroscientist at the Université Claude Bernard in Lyons, puts it another way: what’s so striking is ‘the contrast between the immateriality of the cause and the emotional strength of the effect’. Whereas the ‘visual creatures we are’ can summon images from the past more readily, the encounter with a smell is ‘rare, more unexpected and therefore more precious’.
I can’t deny the evocative powers of smells, and I won’t. It may well be that my relationship to perfume has been perverted by my approach to it, or that after years spent alongside Parisian intellectuals I’ve caught their bent for taking the opposite view of anything that sounds like received wisdom. The fact is that the cliché of perfume-as-petite-madeleine riles me because it demotes its object to the rank of smell and reduces it to being the instrument of an emotional experience. What has been bypassed is intelligence: the madeleine school of scent appreciation isn’t meant to make you think, but feel, which costs a lot less effort. But the perception of perfume is not a purely emotional experience. Fragrance is a cultural, artistic construct, with its own rules and history. As a product caught up in history, it adds new scents to the catalogue of memories; as an artistic product, it plays on cultural memories and connotations as well as on the personal experiences of the perfumer or the wearer. ‘Wouldn’t a radically new smell be threatened with a protracted purgatory in the register of bad smells, because it’s not in accordance with memorized sensations?’ writes Dr Holley. ‘It is only through a subtle association of the known and the novel that new olfactory forms can be adopted.’
Memories are the ingredients of perfume-making, but the end result shifts them, inserts them within a new form, much as the madeleine leads not back to Marcel Proust’s past but ahead, towards In Search of Lost Time: ‘Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.’
Proust could have stayed at home spreading cake crumbs on his bed while mawkishly reminiscing about his childhood. Instead, he fished out his s
oggy madeleine and went on to raise ‘the vast structure of recollection’. It was his future as a writer he was seeing in that teacup.
I’m not asking that much from Duende and, besides, my experience of orange blossom and incense is the very opposite of the Proustian flashback: I was aware of smelling them at the time and I committed them to memory. I can summon the smells mentally and identify them in a fragrance. Perhaps if someone captured the headspace of the Semana Santa, re-created it and plunged me into it unawares, I’d experience the same uncanny déjà-smelled feeling as le petit Marcel and flail helplessly, caught in a temporal short-circuit, as I try to identify the source of my emotion … In fact, it did happen to me once, with the orange trees in Marrakech.
But I know full well that my perpetually mutating chimera won’t actually smell of the Semana Santa or carry me back there. I don’t expect it to. I don’t even want it to. Just as the story I told Bertrand last year is a reinvention so vivid it has crushed my memory of what truly happened on that night in Seville, Duende is not a travel memoir but a piece of fiction writing itself as we go along. It isn’t taking me back in time. It is moving me forward.
Duende is the future memory of what I’m living now.
33
‘Yes … Oh yes!’
This comes out as soon as Bertrand thrusts his blotters under my nose. He’s gloating too, eyes flashing behind his hipster glasses.
‘Oh, this is becoming good, it’s becoming so goooooooooooood! I’m finally getting where I wanted to go.’
When he emailed me two days ago saying we absolutely had to see each other before he left for his skiing holiday, even for half an hour, he sounded excited (me, not so much – half an hour?). It turns out he had every reason to, and my spontaneous ‘Yes’ is even more of a vindication than the Moan. It’s as though a veil had been ripped off Duende. It’s come into sharper focus, with stronger contrasts, its burnished gold whorls and flesh-white blossoms catching the brass-bright cool moonlight or the first dawn sun … There’s a technical reason for this. Bertrand has removed cedramber and rose oxide because he hated, just hated, their ‘empty aspirin tube’ powderiness (he’s cute when he gets so worked up about a note: it’s all he can do not to stamp his foot and spit on the floor).
But he’s also added something to Duende that’s made it come full circle from the very first proposals to mods 53 to 55 (he’s been working like the devil: the last time I saw him we’d left it at 37). When he tells me what it is, my heart sinks.
Lavender.
To me, the stuff smells like those tourist souvenir shops in Provence with the piped-in chirp of cicadas, the ones that sell mustard-coloured table cloths with olive patterns and tulle sachets stuffed with dried lavender flowers that always end up reeking of dust. It’s the smell of the colognes Anglophile Frenchmen splash on to match their Prince of Wales-patterned suits. It’s the noxious fume of Brut-doused louts. Every time I test a lavender fragrance, I feel like I’m sprouting a chest rug and a glass of Ricard.
So why in the name of Mary Magdalene is lavender so right for Duende all of a sudden? How did Bertrand figure out it was just what was needed to topple it over into the Yes zone?
Is it my fault? I’m the one who brought him the 19th-century church incense formula that featured lavender. I’m also the one who reminded him in an email that, before Christmas, he was thinking of adding thyme, which he’d completely forgotten about. He was dickering with the thyme and getting nowhere. From there, he segued into another aromatic note, lavender: it was his idea from the outset and he’s nothing if not a headstrong Capricornian. So he put in Provence lavender, but also a special type of absolute from Spain called the Luisieri.
The minute he makes me smell it, the Luisieri blasts away any preconceived ideas I had about the stuff. It’s a perfume in itself, with a smooth, almost liquorice-like burnt resinous cistus darkness, dried fig, amber, tobacco, honey and animalic facets, along with the combustible aroma of the maquis. You can even see how it could be tugged into an incense note. This is so tough and tender that, if it were a man, I’d date it. And it fits perfectly into my original story since it is also known as Seville lavender.
Bertrand and I once talked about the common point between his conception of perfumery, his practice of T’ai Chi and his love for African art, and I suggested it was all about the justesse du geste, the rightness/sureness/accuracy of gesture. You could also call it elegance, in the scientific sense of the term. Lavender is an elegant solution.
But lavender in Duende is also right in a way that reaches beyond its necessity in the formula, or Bertrand’s wish to reference Spanish fougères and reinforce the Habanita effect with the cistus-like facets of the Luisieri. The newly unveiled Duende is reaching into me.
* * *
After leaving the lab, I cross the Pont des Arts from the Louvre to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I’ve lived so long in Paris that each walk has become an increasingly poignant, unwilling pilgrimage, moving in and out of ghost-ridden zones as memories seize me and slap me and send me spinning into all of my pasts … Lingering in front of a bookshop, absent-mindedly sniffing my wrist, I remember I stopped here once before, making time before meeting Monsieur at a hotel on the rue des Saints-Pères early on in our affair, and that’s when I suddenly understand why Duende feels as exhilarating as falling in love.
To me, lavender was the scent of falling in love: the one note Monsieur insisted on when he asked me to pick out a new fragrance for him. It reminds me of the Mouchoir de Monsieur he wore for years, so it’s almost as though Monsieur had invited himself into my story of Seville a decade ahead of the time we met. And as though he’d slipped into Duende, ten years after I bought a candy-striped knitted cashmere scarf identical to his, and swapped them secretly so I could smell Monsieur on me when I went back home to my husband.
Should I recant on my rant about perfume-as-memory? Bertrand’s intuition has bounced off the curves and hollows of my soul like an ultrasound scanner to sculpt the volumes of Duende from the spectres he’s found there.
But it’s not just the lavender. It’s Duende itself. It is stirring from its chrysalis to become its own creature and starting to play games with me. For the first time, I crave smelling it, but I sneaked sniffs of N°54 and N°55 for a week before actually wearing it, as though the waiting would make it even better. Then, after one week’s wait, I just grabbed N°55 and sprayed it on the way you lean in for that first kiss – offhandedly, no lead-in, no build-up, so that it’s done with. But instead of going into raptures, I found myself kicking into analytical mode almost unconsciously – a background programme running as I went about my daily tasks, as it does when I’m wearing a scent to review it. I’m analysing Duende like a finished product. And that’s new too.
Hi Bertrand,
I don’t know if you’ve worked on the next mods yet but here are my impressions of Duende.
1/ I adore it. It moves me. There, I’ve said it.
2/ I get spontaneous compliments on it. One of my readers, who I met to give her a scent she’d won in a draw, wrote this to me one hour later: ‘I forgot to ask you what perfume you were wearing. It’s beautiful, it even borders on the sumptuous. And it’s really creative. I’ve never smelled anything like it.’ So there you go! But …
3/ It’s behaving a bit weirdly. After that first burst of lavender which really lights up the blend – that was a genius idea – the honeyed tobacco and balsam stick close to the skin, just a smudge I can barely perceive. But when I leave a closed room where I’ve been for a while, I come back to find an entirely different smell, all incense and wood. It seems to be living in two different spaces, one too near, one too far, both just out of my grasp … The two volumes need to be bridged, what’s tamped down pulled upwards and outwards, the lavender thrust deeper into the heart. What I smell on my skin is gorgeous, but it needs more volume!
D.
Hi Denyse,
Wow! Thank you, Miss, for this thorough update. I’m ve
ry happy to read what you tell me. It really confirms the ideas I have about the product. We’re closing in on it and I think I know exactly how to finish it. I’ll drop you a line when I’ve got something new to show you.
B.
34
We’re almost there. The orange blossom is back. No longer the odd-smelling raw material with hints of snapped peapods and raindrops on hot asphalt I smelled that first day in Bertrand’s lab, the orange blossom absolute that tugged at my memory. Now it’s fully fleshed out, a flower, a tree, a plazaful of trees with their clusters of white stars and their dark waxy-green leaves and the wrinkled unpicked bitter oranges from the previous year, as though lighting up the night-time scene with lavender had released the flowers’ scent – Bertrand had told me at the very outset that we needed to find the nightlights, the flares …
Everything he’s been trying to put into Duende all along is finding its place at last. This is the nectar-laden floral accord he’d been perfecting when I derailed the process by bringing in Habanita. But now it’s got authority. It belongs. He nods.
‘That’s it, exactly. When I first used the lavender, I was trying to close the loop before I’d even drawn the circle. Now we’ve got our structure, so I can put back everything I had to take out, the way it’s supposed to be, where it’s supposed to go.’
We settle on N°63 after smelling mods numbers 56 to 64: it’s the one where the orange blossom expresses itself most beautifully against the backdrop of the balsamic resinous base. Each element in the formula adds its vibrancy to the others: the wood accord boosts the slightly spicy facets of the jasmine; the jasmine, boosted by the wood, resonates with the orange blossom through their common indolic facets – Bertrand says it’s ‘like a domino effect’. As a result, all the secondary accords, the green, the balsamic, the musky, have also become more ample without crowding each other.
The Perfume Lover Page 24