The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent. Denyse Beaulieu
young man with huge square glasses flanked by a lanky blonde in a safari jacket and a cat-eyed waif with a gypsy scarf on her head. The trio exuded a loose-limbed pop-star glamour. This was, Geneviève explained, Yves Saint Laurent, the greatest couturier in France, with his muses Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise. And Rive Gauche was the perfume he’d named after his new boutique in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the first place she’d head for when she went back to Paris.
From the ads I’d spotted in my mother’s Good Homemaker magazine, I knew perfumes ought to have fancy glass bottles and evocative names like Je Reviens or Chantilly. There was nothing poetic about that metal canister. And Rive Gauche, what kind of a name was that? So Geneviève showed me the ad for Rive Gauche: a redhead in a black vinyl trench coat strolling by a café terrace with a knowing smile. Rive Gauche, plus qu’un comportement, it said; Rive Gauche, un parfum insolite, insolent. ‘More than an attitude. An unusual, insolent perfume.’
My friend explained about the Paris Left Bank, the jazz clubs and bohemian cafés on the boulevard Saint-Germain she used to walk by as a teenager to catch a glimpse of les philosophes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I’d read about Socrates in my children’s encyclopaedia but hadn’t fathomed that there were living philosophers or that they could even remotely be thought of as cool. At my age, cool was still a difficult concept to grasp.
‘Like pop stars, you mean?’
Geneviève nodded. Yves Saint Laurent, she went on, expressed the spirit of the Left Bank: youthful, rebellious and free. I couldn’t quite figure out how the soapy, rosy-green scent that clung to Geneviève’s clothes could reflect notions like youth, rebellion, freedom or insolence, and I had no idea of what constituted an ‘unusual’ fragrance. But I did half-guess from her wistful gaze that Geneviève, trapped in a Montreal suburb where there were no cafés haunted by chic bohemian philosophers or couturiers – there weren’t even any sidewalks! – longed for that lost world. A world captured in that blue, black and silver canister …
One afternoon, our orange school bus dropped us off early so that we could prepare for the year-end recital: I sang in the choir, humiliatingly tucked away in the last row with the boys because I’d suddenly grown taller than all the girls. Geneviève had promised that, for the occasion, she would do my hair up in her own signature style, a complex hive of curls fastened with bobby pins. I scrunched my eyes and held my breath as Geneviève stiffened her capillary edifice with spurts of Elnett hairspray.
‘There you go … Have a look!’ she said, waving a Vogue around to clear the fumes.
I opened my eyes to a chubby-cheeked version of Geneviève. The chignon was practically as high as my head: I’d tower over the boys too.
‘And now …’ Geneviève reached for her Rive Gauche. ‘As a special treat, I’ll let you wear my perfume … In France, an elegant young lady never goes out without fragrance.’
That spritz of Rive Gauche didn’t kill me; in fact, it made me feel better than I’d ever felt, so grown-up, so important – an eleven-year-old girl with the newest perfume from Paris! That’s when I resolved that when I grew up, I’d be like Geneviève, and never leave the house without a drop of perfume. And it would be French perfume, even if I had to swim across the Atlantic to get it.
4
What is it about the French and perfume? Draw up a list of the greatest perfumes in history. Shalimar, Mitsouko, N°5, Arpège, Femme, L’Air du Temps, Diorissimo? French. Study the top ten sellers in any given country. The labels may be American, Italian or Japanese, but the perfumers who composed them? At least half are French and most of the others are French-trained.
When Bourjois, the cosmetics company that owned Chanel perfumes, decided to put out a fragrance called Evening in Paris in 1928, they knew full well that they were launching the ultimate aspirational product. For millions of women, that midnight-blue bottle would hold the prestige and romance of the French capital within its flanks – it was the closest most would ever come to the Eiffel Tower. Judging from the number of Evening in Paris bottles that keep popping up on auction websites, they were right. For generations, ‘French perfume’ was the most desirable gift, short of mink and diamonds, and a lot more affordable.
But why is it that those two words, ‘French’ and ‘perfume’, have been said in the same breath for centuries? In other words: why is perfume French? If you ask most people in the industry, they’ll answer, ‘Well, because of Grasse, I guess,’ Grasse being the town in the South of France where perfumery developed as an offshoot of the leather-tanning industry. Tanning products were rank, so fine leathers were steeped in aromatic essences to counteract the stench, and Grasse enjoyed a particularly favourable microclimate for growing them. Though most of the land has now been sold to real-estate developers, it is still very much a perfumery centre, with several labs and a few prominent perfumers based in the area. But ‘Grasse’ doesn’t answer the question. There were other places in the world, like Italy and Spain, where a cornucopia of aromatic plants could be grown; where botanists, alchemists and apothecaries studied them, refined extraction processes, experimented with blends. There must be another reason why it was in France that perfume went from a smell-good recipe to liquid poetry; why it was here and nowhere else that modern perfumery was born, thrived and gained international prestige.
So why indeed? If anyone can answer the question I’ve been asking myself since I was eleven, it is the historian Elisabeth de Feydeau. We’ve just been enjoying an al fresco lunch in a garden gone wild with roses, lush with vegetal smells rising in the afternoon heat. A tall, chic blonde with a sweet, sexy-raspy voice, Elisabeth was formerly the head of cultural affairs at Chanel; she teaches at ISIPCA, the French school of perfumery, as well as acting as a consultant for several major houses; she wrote a book about Marie-Antoinette’s perfumer and a history of fragrance. So as we nibble on petal-coloured cupcakes, Elisabeth graciously shifts into teaching gear. I have indeed come to the right place for an answer, she tells me; the sacred union between France and fragrance was sealed right here where we’re sitting, in Versailles.
If Catherine de’ Medici hadn’t come to France in 1553 to marry the future King Henri II, perfume might well have been Italian. Not only did Italy enjoy a climate allowing the cultivation of the plants used in perfumery, but with Venice lording it over the sea routes, all the precious aromatic materials of the Orient flowed into the peninsula. And in the dazzlingly refined Italian courts of the Renaissance where the young Duchess Catherine was raised, perfume-making, intimately linked to alchemy, was a princely pastime practised by the likes of Cosimo di Medici, Catarina Sforza and Gabriella d’Este. Italian alchemists had started to divulge their methods of distillation and many of their perfumery treatises had already been translated. When Catherine de’ Medici arrived with her perfumer Renato Bianco in tow, she brought along the Italian tradition in all its refinement.
The French perfume industry was centred in Montpellier, where research on aromatic substances and distillation was carried out at the faculty of medicine (one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1220), and in Grasse, where skins imported from Spain, Italy and the Levant were treated. Up to then, perfumery had remained a subsidiary activity for apothecaries and tanners. Spurred on by the Italian fashion for scented clothes, leather items, pomanders and sachets, it developed into a luxury trade.
But the true turning point came from the scent-crazed king who had determined to transform his court into the crucible of elegance: it was under the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715) that the French luxury industries acquired the excellence and prestige they still boast today. And that spectacularly successful marketing operation was a very deliberate political endeavour … During his mother Anne of Austria’s regency the young king had lived through the War of the Fronde, an uprising of the nobility that had threatened the very existence of the monarchy. To keep his noblemen under control, Louis XIV decided to move his court away from Paris to the newly built Versailles. There, he transformed his most trivial activities – getting out of bed, being groomed and dressed and even using the ‘pierced chair’ (the 17th century version of the toilet, known in England as ‘The French Courtesy’) – into a series of ritual displays which courtiers had to attend to curry favour with the monarch. By compelling