The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  Perfumery took fifty years to catch up and produce its equivalent of the politique des auteurs; it was certainly harder going since, unlike directors, perfumers only started getting credited over the last decade. But today it has one, of sorts. Just like the Cahiers, perfume critics have singled out auteurs, Bertrand among them, tracked their production from one house to another, and analysed their signature style. And although our work together will not turn me into a perfumer in the way that Godard, Truffaut or Rohmer went from writing about movies to directing them – I have no intention of becoming one and I’m nowhere near comparing myself to these great filmmakers – it does open new possibilities. To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, ‘art and the theory of art, beauty and the secret of beauty’, perfumery and the explanation of perfumery, belong to the same continuum.

  Whatever the label – ‘lyricist’, critic, writer – I am a perfume lover trying to think through perfume, both in the sense of thinking the matter through, and in the sense that perfume is one of the languages I use to understand the world. In this new realm I am exploring, a vanilla pod can turn into a cigar and a cigar can grow into a bale of hay; the bale can spit out an almond and the almond turn to poison. The magic is conjured by connecting smells to words. Technical knowledge does not dispel that magic. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The more I learn, the stranger and more magical it gets. This is what perfume is teaching me: that once it is unmoored from the product, the process of thinking through perfume need never stop.

  39

  ‘Come on … concentrate! You’re hopeless … Hey, will you just concentrate?’

  Bertrand, Pascale and I are sitting at a round table, looking for all the world as though we are gearing up for a poker game. Bertrand’s been dealing the blotters. He’s teasing me because I keep getting them mixed up or dropping them as I try to put them in the right order and spread them out in a fan.

  ‘That’s because I don’t play cards. I hate losing too much.’

  ‘Listen to her … She hates losing. What’ll we hear next?’ he chuckles.

  I give him a little kick.

  ‘Hey, I may be hopeless with blotters, but as soon as it’s hot enough, I’ll show you I know how to handle a real fan. It’s not for sissies.’

  Maybe he’s had a really nice weekend, maybe he’s happy with the way Duende is going or maybe he’s just happy to see me. For whatever reason, Bertrand is in a particularly cheerful mood today. So am I, for that matter. It’s only been a week since our last session, and it’s exhilarating to be moving forward so quickly again. I’m not even cross at him for being half an hour late. It gave me the chance to have a chat with Pascale. It was the first time I could discuss my work with Bertrand with someone who is part of the process. Pascale is the one who’s been weighing the formulas of the successive mods for the past six months; she’s lived behind the scene and seen how Bertrand deals with other projects and clients … Since my conversations with Mathilde Bijaoui and Antoine Lie, who both said how important it had been for them to have been trusted by their ‘muses’, I’ve been worried about being too much of a pain for Bertrand. About not trusting him enough; about sticking my nose too far into what was essentially his business. But Pascale said we were doing just fine as far as she could tell. I knew what I wanted, was all. She hadn’t heard any complaints. I could have hugged her then; and again when she told me total strangers had been asking her what she was wearing when she tested N°90. So I was in a pretty buoyant mood myself when Bertrand showed up, boasting he’d swum two kilometres that morning ‘with his fingers in his nose’ – the French equivalent of ‘without breaking a sweat’, but it conjured a particularly vivid picture of Le Nez flapping his elbows in the municipal swimming pool …

  * * *

  I’ve finally managed to spread out my blotter fan to compare N°90 to mods 96 to 101. In some of the new mods, the waxy effect is more sharply defined in the top notes: Bertrand has introduced aldehyde C12 lauric, which will also help with the diffusive power. And, as promised, he’s tried out two different animal materials, African Stone, which brings out the woody incense notes, and civet, which is smoother and rounder.

  Duende has evolved into a strange, unclassifiable creature Bertrand calls an ‘oriental cologne’, which sounds like an olfactory oxymoron. But in fact, it does seem to cut through the full spectrum of fragrance families: fougère, green floral, white floral, oriental, woody incense … Just about everything but chypre.

  ‘It’s even got masculine, aromatic effects! That doesn’t bother you, I hope?’ jokes Bertrand.

  ‘Certainly not. But what’ll Michael Edwards say?’

  ‘He’d call it a floriental.’

  Michael Edwards is the author of Fragrances of the World, a classification designed to assist marketing and sales staff, based on a ‘fragrance wheel’ comprising fourteen different families defined by a set of dominant notes. The ‘floral oriental’ family, ‘soft, spicy orange flower [that] melds with piquant aldehydes and sweet spices’ on an ambery base, is descended from the 1905 L’Origan; it includes L’Heure Bleue, Bal à Versailles and Poison.

  ‘Mind you, it’s a floriental because I wanted it to be a floriental!’

  I stare at him blankly. Meaning?

  Bertrand is pulling a typically Duchaufourian face at me: the cocky, slightly defiant look of the mischievous kid who’s fooled the grown-ups.

  ‘I’ve taken the easy road by putting in vanilla. I wanted to give it twice as many chances of being successful, of living on … So … Allez, hop! I orientalized it.’

  True, I have been after him to take it easy on the musk and vanilla; I am concerned that the combo will nudge Duende too close to some of Bertrand’s other compositions, and make it a little too commercial if the balance isn’t just right. But I’ve got to acknowledge that we did need the musk to make the floral note hold longer: I’ve been testing N°90 on skin and it’s definitely an improvement. Still, I don’t see why he’s cocking his head on his shoulder, looking as though he’s about to stick chewing gum into my hair.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that? Come on, spit it out!’

  ‘Well, vanilla wasn’t necessarily part of the story.’

  Tsk, tsk … Once more, Mr D. is ever so slightly rewriting history.

  ‘Oh, please! It was totally part of the story from the moment I brought in Habanita!’

  ‘True. You’re right’, he nods.

  ‘Come on, concentrate!’ I tease him.

  * * *

  While Pascale is weighing a couple of new mods, we go down to the café next door, pick a table in the sun and order cheeseburgers – they’ll be vile, but the health-food lunch bar doesn’t have a terrace – still excitedly discussing Duende. I tell Bertrand that while wearing N°90, images of gardens and flowers kept flitting through my mind; memories of sucking nectar out of flowers …

  ‘Exactly! Nectar! That’s very important. Nectar makes you think of honey, which makes you think of beeswax – bees adore orange blossom.’

  He explains that he works with words as much as he does with smells. Words echo other words, colours, and colours turn into odours, situations, places …

  ‘… like that plaza full of orange trees in full blossom buzzing with drunken bees. From there you go to beeswax candles, from candles to incense.’

  It all comes back to what we were discussing almost a year ago on this very terrace: the ‘remote and accurate’ connections that underlie poetic images. How you intuitively grasp the connections between the smells in a story to create a form, even before becoming aware of all those connections. How, once you become aware of them, you develop the consistency between the olfactory and the narrative, and strengthen the connections so that they are subconsciously perceptible to the wearers.

  I remember the email I sent to Bertrand after he’d almost given up on Duende: I’d told him that the orange blossom and incense accord was good because it existed in reality. It’s not a matter of copying reality, but of
deciphering the secret harmonies of smells that have existed together for mankind over the centuries. How long has incense been burned in countries where orange trees grow? How long have beeswax candles been lit at the same time as incense? This is what we were telling each other about oud, incense and smoke the other day: that they connect us with smells we’ve lost and sometimes don’t even remember losing. Perfumes rouse those unconscious, age-old memories. They connect the remotest past to our deepest soul, our soul to the body, and our body to the world. What are those connections between the smells of our bodies and, say, the fattiness of aldehydes or beeswax, the lactones and indolic notes in white flowers, the animalic whiff of civet or African Stone, if not ways of reaffirming the continuum between ourselves and the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms?

  Modern civilization has ripped us out of that continuum: perfumers, if their work is true and free, restore us to it. But to do so, they must seek out that truth in their own stories: for Duende, the beautiful memories of church incense that allowed Bertrand to transcend the hardships of a strict Catholic upbringing. When I told him my story, those memories connected with mine: with the voluptuousness of Catholic rites transcended into the glory of a spring night in the south of Spain. What is most intimate is what will speak to others. Perfumers build the labyrinth in which we lose ourselves out of all those secret harmonies and connections. They bring out its beauty: reinvent it so that it can be felt by all. ‘The poetic act’, the French poet Mallarmé wrote at the turn of the century, ‘consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.’

  Now that we’ve found the rhymes, the thread that would guide us into the labyrinth and out, I ask Bertrand whether this is how he envisioned the fragrance when we first set out.

  ‘Well, yes, pretty much. What’s incredible is that it’s all in there. All the elements we started out with. We just learned to put the puzzle together.’

  We pick at our cheeseburgers for a while in silence.

  ‘Incredible,’ Bertrand finally lets out. ‘C’est ça, un parfum.’

  That’s what a perfume is …

  So we talk about other things as we finish our lunch; of the way you have to come to terms with the past to move into the future, and first it’s about our lives but then it leads us back to what we do for a living. Bertrand tells me he’s reconsidering things he’d rejected earlier on in his career. He’s starting to break free, he says, working on ‘crazy accords’ he hopes his clients will accept; making his move into new territories.

  That’s when I make mine. I hadn’t meant to bring it up today, but all of a sudden it seems like the right moment to ask him whether he’d be game to work with me again on another perfume, if the right project came along.

  He would. This time, I don’t faint.

  40

  ‘You’ll see. I’ve changed everything!’

  I stop dead in my tracks.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve changed everything?’

  I’ve just bumped into Bertrand at the biennial raw materials exhibition organized by the Société Française des Parfumeurs. This is the very event where we’d re-connected after that fateful radio show, and attending it has been a striking way of measuring just how far I’ve come in a world where I took my first steps just three years ago. The last time, I drifted among unfamiliar faces. Now I keep running into the lovely people who’ve taught me, guided me, spent hours discussing the art of perfumery with me: Isabelle Doyen, Sandrine Videault, Mathilde Laurent, Dominique Ropion, Mathilde Bijaoui, Élisabeth de Feydeau, Annick Le Guérer, Pamela Roberts, Olivier Maure … It feels as though the cast of my fragrant Wonderland has come together for the grand finale. But I hadn’t expected to see Bertrand, who’s popped in one hour before closing time and who is now dragging me from booth to booth to smell raw materials.

  Our latest exchange was a bit stormy. I’d written to him to express my doubts about the latest mods he’d done: I felt the larger quantities of vanilla and musk and the addition of rose were pulling the scent towards too-familiar grounds. He replied that he’d already moved forward, based on a mod picked by L’Artisan Parfumeur in the meantime. That riled me up so much my fingertips were tingling. I shot back that, if my opinion wasn’t considered relevant, there was no longer any point in my testing.

  It wasn’t the fact that L’Artisan Parfumeur had weighed in on the development that irked me: that was entirely normal. After all, much as I considered Duende to be my baby, it was their product, to be part of their collection. They weren’t going to let Bertrand run off for a year and a half and come back with a finished product, however much they trusted him. But I was annoyed that Bertrand hadn’t kept me informed, and hadn’t mentioned which mod they’d picked. What if the submission they’d preferred was precisely the one I felt was the least interesting? There wasn’t much I could do if they had.

  Fortunately, minutes later, he was apologizing for the way he’d put it: actually, the people from L’Artisan Parfumeur had felt the same way I did about his most recent tweaks, and he saw their point, so he’d gone back to mod N°90 and was going to move forward from there. Clearly, I didn’t have to worry about the brand’s aesthetic options. I shouldn’t have done in the first place, considering Bertrand’s body of work with them.

  Still, changing everything? Bertrand, what have you done to our baby?

  But he’s got such a huge grin on his face, and seems so happy with his new take on the formula, that there’s only one thing for it. Take the leap of faith.

  ‘You’re scaring me … But I trust you. Absolutely.’

  * * *

  Once I’m back in the lab one week later, I’m so distracted at the prospect of finding Duende radically altered that I can’t smell properly. I’m pecking my nose at my blotter fan like a hen that’s afraid it’s lost its chicks, frantically asking about this or that material rather than analysing the new mods.

  Bertrand reassures me: everything is still there, though in different doses, except the jasmine absolute because it felt too cloying. The formula was so tightly packed the accords couldn’t breathe freely, he explains. As he was working on another product, he found a new way of doing the orange blossom accord that was more expressive, more diffusive and less costly. More expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better, and in this particular case he is convinced that this formula for the orange blossom accord is an improvement. I agree. It is more faceted: brighter, greener, more cologne-like in the top notes and more sensuous in the base notes.

  When Bertrand asked me, almost one year ago, whether I knew what I wanted, I couldn’t say. I just knew that, if the orange tree was there, there was no one under it. We’ve spent months wandering in the labyrinth, trying to summon the presence, the soul that is conjured when a heartfelt story finds its fullest expression in scent. When we almost got lost because I’d made us take a new turn with Habanita, and Bertrand was bumping into dead ends, I’d written to him: ‘You’ll get there, and your perfume will be heartbreakingly beautiful.’ And then I went to light a candle to Mary Magdalene.

  She’s just answered my prayer.

  Now I know what I want. I want this: mod N°123. Is there any magical thinking involved? Today is the 23rd. I was born on the 23rd. One-two-three: two people and an orange tree.

  It’s so obvious there isn’t even a decision to make. Everything is there, but everything is clearer. Bertrand has spilled sunshine into the Sevillian night. It isn’t my olfactory memory of Seville I am regaining when I breathe in Duende N°123: it is the emotion of walking into beauty. The duende.

  So, is that it then? Are we done?

  Bertrand shakes his head.

  ‘When you find the accord, it’s easy to make it evolve up to its near-final form, which corresponds to ninety-five per cent of the completed formula. But you’ve got to realize one thing: the main effort of the perfumer – and, I believe, of most artists when they are working on a piece – bears on the last fiv
e per cent.’

  This fine-tuning, he explains, is the most crucial part of the process. For a fragrance to be successful, there are two prerequisites: a good hook, those expansive top notes that will draw you in, seduce you. And a well-balanced formula, which will give it the maximum volume it can reach.

  ‘To give it soul, you’ll work for ages until it’s perfectly polished. No. Not perfectly polished. Perfectly within the idea and balance you want to give it.’

  How long will that take? I’ve more or less resigned myself to picking up the work in September – the French summer holiday debacle is soon approaching.

  And then, a few days later, an email drops into my inbox. The final version will be selected in two weeks by Sarah Rotheram, the CEO of L’Artisan Parfumeur.

  This is it.

  * * *

  Before this last session, Bertrand and I are meeting again, this time with Alissa Sullivan, who is in charge of olfactory development for the brand and studied at ISIPCA.

  Though I’d exchanged a few emails with Alissa when we discussed potential names for the scent, we only met a few weeks ago at the press launch of a new product. I spoke with her and Nick Steward, the head of marketing and product development, about getting together to share our impressions on the last steps of the development. And here we are.