La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (21 page)

What did I want to leave behind? A perfume legacy as if I were handing down a country house or a wine collection? I was touched. She assumed I wore perfume. More than that, she assumed I had a perfume identity. And she wanted to know my perfume identity as a way to become closer.

I still didn’t confess everything to Sophie-Caroline. “I don’t have a very strong olfactory sense,” I said.

I asked her what image she wants to convey with her perfume. “Ladylike and attractive, subtle and sexy,” she replied. She likes her friends to comment on perfume as they would on a dress. And fidelity to a few perfumes allows the memory of her scents to live on.

“I want to wear the same perfume because I want my children to remember me one day by my scent,” she said. “When I’m long gone and they’re opening a wardrobe and remembering, ‘Aaaah, Mommy.’”

Even men can go to great lengths to make sure their scents follow them. A young French friend told me about going to a party at the apartment of a man she found attractive. When the party was over, they went out dancing. They kissed. Before they parted, she realized she had left her expensive black cashmere scarf at his place. He promised to return it to her, as they were to meet again. Time passed, and he did not call her. She was forced to contact him, and when he met her, it was only to hand her the scarf in a sealed plastic bag. When she opened it up later with friends, she was hit with the velvety smell of iris. It was Dior Homme, the scent he wore.

“He wore my scarf!” she exclaimed, at once incredulous and amused. Her friends smelled the scarf and decided that no, the scent was much too strong; they said he must have sprayed Dior Homme all over it so she would remember him. She replied to the gesture with an unsigned text message citing a line from the best-selling novel,
Le parfum
, by Patrick Süskind: “The purpose of perfumes was to produce an intoxicating and alluring effect.”

A week later, he sent her a Facebook message, asking her to join him for a drink. But she was already interested in someone else and never replied. For months afterward, however, she enjoyed his scent on her scarf. “It was absolutely delicious,” she said. “And when it finally disappeared, it was sad.”

The interplay of smell and memory is a familiar theme in literature and in memoirs. In “Another Memory,” a short story by Marcel Proust, the narrator speaks of the power of a scent emanating from a room in a dilapidated, once-grand hotel. He is walking down a corridor to his room when he encounters a scent “so richly and so completely floral that someone must have denuded whole fields…merely to produce a few drops of that fragrance.” The “sensual bliss” it produces is so intoxicating that the narrator feels compelled to linger outside the room. Later, when a pair of lovers leaves the room, he seizes one of the broken flacons they have left behind, capturing a few drops of the bottled remnants of their love affair. Recounting this memory, he says, “The scent of a weakened drop still impregnates my life.”

The great perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain once told an interviewer for
L’Express
that his earliest memory of smell dated back to when he was four years old. It was the smell of his mother’s strawberry tart. For the adult Guerlain, the smell of strawberry tarts was synonymous with tenderness. “It moves me always,” he said.

Sylvie Jourdet, a perfumer and the president of the French Society of Perfumers, told me that her epiphany came one day as she was working in a laboratory and sniffed an essence of the white privet flower. “We had rows of privet at our family house by the sea in Normandy,” she recalled. “That smell brought me back to the great moments of happiness of my childhood. We all have our Proustian moments, and that was mine.”

That makes exquisite sense. I recall the day my two daughters and I sorted through some of my mother’s belongings after her death. We opened her velvet-lined jewelry box. “It smells like Grandma,” my daughter Alessandra said. She was right. The scarves smelled of Johnson’s Baby Powder. That was the scent Grandma had left behind.

A wonderful story about a perfume’s power to create desire was told to me by Bernard Toulemonde, a trained botanist and food engineer who is a senior executive at International Flavors & Fragrances, or IFF. A giant American conglomerate with a headquarters in New York and a large operation in Grasse, it creates flavors and smells for, among other things, car waxes, laundry detergents, toothpastes, baked goods, and yogurts.

When Toulemonde was director of a global flavors research laboratory at Nestlé in the mid-1980s, he and his team of experts and scientists entertained themselves by playing games with smells during their morning coffee breaks.

“Even though we were working in food flavors, we were very much attracted by fragrance, fragrance being more, should I say, sexy?” he said. “More attractive, certainly than flavors, which are more technical. We had a really good time. One of our favorite games was to pick a theme and try to illustrate it with a perfume. We probably had something like fifty to a hundred perfumes to play with. One morning, the theme was, ‘Illustrate the woman you would follow down the street.’ And something unbelievable happened. There were twelve of us, and all twelve of us picked the same perfume, without talking to each other! It was the first time this had ever happened!”

“No!” I replied. “What was it?”

He told me it was First, by Van Cleef & Arpels.

Toulemonde said he couldn’t remember exactly what it smelled like, just that “it produced a good mood in you, because you were following a woman and that put you in a good mood. Purely seducing, you don’t know why. You’re just seduced.”

“But it’s not based on any reality?” I asked.

“Not any rationale that I can explain,” he said. “I’m totally unable…. Perhaps a toxicologist would tell you, ‘Yeah, that’s normal because there is this molecule attracting you or doing something to your brain.’”

First is a classic soft scent created in 1976 by Ellena, who was then a young perfumer. And when I visited Ellena in his studio, I told him Toulemonde’s story. He laughed out loud. He had created First, he said, to win his mother’s approval. “I can admit today that in making First, unconsciously, I wanted to prove to my mother that I was able to make a very beautiful perfume,” he said. Still, he added, he would not be tempted to follow a woman wearing it. When he smells First, his mother appears.

I went several times to the city of Grasse to search for the romantic past of French perfume. A tannery town set into a hill on the Côte d’Azur, Grasse first became known for perfume when Catherine de Médicis popularized perfumed gloves in the sixteenth century. As leather from Italy and Spain proved too competitive, Grasse left tanning behind and moved into growing plants and processing them into essences to make perfume.

Grasse is a small, closed place. It has retained its narrow, winding streets and centuries-old homes with hidden gardens. Doors do not open easily to outsiders, and families can still be referred to in the local patois as
estrangers
—foreigners—a generation after settling there. Most of the perfume industry has gone elsewhere. About a hundred companies remain, largely to furnish raw materials made from natural substances to perfumers and perfume companies around the world. In most cases, the substances themselves come from elsewhere—India, Bulgaria, Morocco, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia. Even so, the corporate heads of the big perfume houses remain fiercely proud of Grasse, bragging that the town bears witness to the rich history of French perfume and that the best French perfumers have learned the art of creating their scents there.

Despite globalization and competition from flower growers around the world, the French refuse to abandon the romance of the past. On a very small scale, they still produce their own flowers. One fall morning, I toured the farm of Joseph Mul, who grows and processes flowers exclusively for Chanel. Field trips there during harvest time—roses in the spring, jasmine in the fall—are a standard part of Chanel’s polished publicity pitch to journalists. But Mul, who is now in his seventies, is the real deal, a fifth-generation farmer. His son and son-in-law are his partners and will carry on the business after he is gone.

Mul has the twanged accent of the south and the cracked skin of a man who has broiled too long in the sun. On the day of my visit, he wore jeans and a checked cap; the Lacoste polo shirt stretched over his rounded belly was a giveaway that he was no ordinary farmer.

About fifty pickers, most of them women, were sprinkled across the jasmine field. Most were from North Africa, Tunisia mainly, although there were a few Roma—gypsies—as well. Most stayed in dormitories on the farm. The pickers were exposed to the cruelty of the sun and the wind as they bent over the jasmine plants. They pinched and plucked the tender white blossoms one by one and placed them in wicker baskets. Many of the women wore colorful scarves and long skirts over pants. The scene was as picturesque as a painting by Millet, but it was not serene.

Mul is so attached to his flowers that he claims to have a permanent interaction with them. He knows when a rosebud is full and with a tiny movement of his index finger can coax it to open. He knows when his jasmine plants are “under stress” and not getting enough water. The stakes are high. About seven million jasmine flowers—six hundred kilos—are needed to make one kilo of absolute, the precious pure concentrate used in making fine perfumes. Produced here, it can be twenty to thirty times more expensive than the jasmine extract from India or Egypt.

The pickers arrived with their full baskets at a storage facility where workers wearing protective gloves and aprons poured the flowers into metal crates. The smell of fresh jasmine invaded the small room with such fury that all of the oxygen felt pushed out. My head ached; my heart raced. There was something overripe about the sweetness.

Later, over chilled wine with oranges, Fabrice Bianchi, Mul’s son-in-law, turned the conversation to his childhood. “In the morning, we had to pick jasmine,” he recalled. “Since then, this smell reminds me of having to wake up at dawn. Since we hadn’t had anything to eat, by nine we’d have a
pan bagnat
, this sandwich with tomatoes, olives, hardboiled egg, anchovy, olive oil. And for me, the smell of jasmine along with the
pan bagnat
, it brings back my entire carefree childhood.”

The subject moved to a woman’s smell, and Mul’s eyes sparkled with play. “What I love in a woman is that even when I don’t know she is in the room, I recognize her first by her perfume,” he said. “This gives me pleasure. You know she’s here because you already have loved her perfume,” he continued. “It’s exactly the same as when you go into a field of jasmine or of roses. Ah…you see. This is the poetry of scent.”

“So it’s anticipation that counts?” I asked.

“With all that can be foreseen,” he replied.

The French have made a global business of perfume to fit the image of who they think they are or would like to be: romantic, alluring, mysterious. Chanel uses more sophisticated strategies than its flower growing to preserve and reinvent the romance of its scents. Above the Chanel flagship store in Paris, the third-floor apartment of Mademoiselle (as Coco Chanel was called) is preserved as a shrine. Chanel, who redefined the ideal woman as a free spirit, entertained here but slept at the Ritz. Her furnishings remain—seventeenth-century Chinese lacquered wooden screens, silver and gold boxes, Art Deco furniture, shelves of books bought more for their looks than for their content. I imagined I smelled her perfume there. Later I learned that the rooms are periodically spritzed with Chanel No. 5.

The goal today at Chanel, the company built by Mademoiselle and her famous fragrance, is much more than to keep her memory alive; it’s to deepen, broaden, and control it. So Chanel markets the quality that comes with permanence. It needs to keep consumers convinced, for example, that Chanel No. 5 is made with the same ingredients as always, juices of centifolia roses and jasmine flowers grown on French soil near Grasse, not in far-off (read, inferior) fields of, say, Turkey or Bulgaria.

Yet Chanel is also caught between its commitment to tradition and its need to attract with something new. Chanel No. 5 is like a dependable but predictable wife, mother, or even grandmother. Where’s the excitement if you look old and there’s nothing to discover? The need to surprise was behind the marketing of Chanel No. 5’s Eau Première. I was walking through the Bon Marché department store and was struck by an advertising banner for it: “As if it were the first time.” The ad was schizophrenic—it evoked perfume “virginity” at the same time that it was trying to sell the history, reliability, familiarity, and experience of classic No. 5.

I recall a young French friend explaining why she would never wear a fashionable perfume. “You want a perfume with a story, and ideally your story,” she said. “A perfume should be linked with your story forever.”

She wears the same scent every day: Délices de Cartier Eau Fruitée. Its fragrance blends “fruits like iced cherry and zesty bergamot with the spice of pink pepper and feminine floral notes like violet, jasmine, and freesia, finished with warm amber, musk, and sandalwood,” according to the Sephora website. Its style is “luminous, playful, delightful.” My friend smells great.

I heard my favorite perfume story at the International Perfume Museum in Grasse. The director did not turn up for our appointment, so one of her young assistants offered to show me around. I’ll call her Pauline.

First came the tour. In a show-and-smell room, we watched a short film on the sea as the salty scent of seawater was emitted from a small box attached to the wall. In a greenhouse, we studied plants like vanilla and patchouli. The permanent collection was a mishmash, including an Egyptian mummy of a dog (perfumes were used as a preservative), a silver toilette travel case that belonged to Marie Antoinette, a book dated 1168 on the art of preserving beauty, hundreds of perfume bottles, and oddities like tongue graters and bed warmers.