The Perfumer's Secret (35 page)

Should I, really?

I shall be angry if you don’t.

I’ll think on this.

You haven’t heard from Sébastien
, he noted.

Is he with you, Felix?
I asked, with terror in my enquiry.

Dead, you mean?

I couldn’t say it. Felix hesitated, then sighed into my mind.

I do not know
.

A sob, my first in years, escaped from deep in my chest, surprising me with its intensity because I didn’t know I’d been holding that tension so tightly. I lifted a particularly beautiful bloom to my face and felt the cool dawn dampness of its petals. Here it was, my heart note of
Cachette
, clear and sweet at the outset, yet complex and deeply sublime as it lingered. It likely smelled slightly different to each who might behold it but to me I could reel off a dozen – no, two dozen – flavours within this one inhalation of Grasse’s most precious flower.

‘Don’t take him,’ I whispered into the petals that scuffed gently against my lips. ‘Bring him home.’

A shout went up. Women straightened all around me, sighing at the easing of muscles, their spines clicking back satisfyingly into place. We shared a universal stance, one hand on hips, another hand to shade the eyes against the rising sun, bonnets pushed back. The chill of the morning was being chased away; it would be a warm day.

I looked across to Graciela. It was her voice I’d recognised.

‘What is it?’ I called across a few rows.

‘Look who comes!’ she cried, pushing back her huge bonnet and jutting her chin in the direction of the valley.

I was much further away and I squinted now to see a lone figure cresting the hill. I stared for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the light, taking in immediately that it was a man. I could see bandages around his head. He walked tall but his dark clothes hung off a hollow frame. And as he moved I noted his gait had a pronounced limp.

Sébastien!
I screamed in my mind.
Felix, is it him?

Be happy; be in love for all of us, Ettie
, were his final words to me and it was as though the wind of Provence picked up the spirit of my twin that lived within me and carried him away, dislocating us properly from the dead and the living so that his soul could find its home and my heart could find its resting beat alongside Sébastien.

I ducked beneath the band of the sack of flowers that crumpled beside me as I threw it off and I began to run, pulling off the fabric protectors over my sleeves, untying my apron and flinging it aside. I dragged at the tortoiseshell comb that held my hair so that I could feel that lovely homecoming wind blowing through it as I raced towards my love.

I could smell my perfume streaming through my consciousness: all of its notes coming together as Sébastien’s lovely features became more distinct, the perfume completing itself as I threw my arms around him and he lifted me into the air between the corridors of roses and spun me around, laughing and hugging me so close I could barely breathe.

This was the fragrance of
Fleurette
 . . . love in its purest form.

Often the hardest, most intensive, part about writing historical fiction for me is also the most enjoyable part – the research. This period is when I feel the story gathering about me like a cloud, but it’s invisible at this point because there are no words yet. The best way I can describe my research is by suggesting that I’m like a marathon runner warming up on the sidelines. I can sense the long journey ahead, and all of my academic training is starting to come together as a more physical presence. Facts and stories, anecdotes, interviews, articles, images, memories, experiences and especially locations – these aspects all start sharpening in focus. At this point I can honestly say it’s all about my gut instinct; I have a visceral and emotional connection with the era and my main characters who are going to lift the story up onto their shoulders and run that marathon with me. These characters may still be lurking in the distance but I can see their shape and I can hear their voices. Once I visit the locations of where they will move around, the story starts to take on a life of its own.

During my research I don’t make a lot of notes. I shoot plenty of photos. I am a great believer in just watching and listening and that whatever will be important to the story will stick somewhere to me, for my memories to deliver that fragment back when I need it. That’s how I’m wired. Not everyone would approach their research the same way and no two writers are the same. However, this works for me and I don’t analyse it, I just go with it because I’m now thirty novels in and there’s no point in wondering suddenly whether I should change my modus operandi. I completely trust my emotional response to places, people, stories and ideas. The research is a period of immersing myself in a world – whether it’s on location or via books, the internet, conversations – and letting my instincts go to work and clue me and my storytelling. Most of what I read never finds its way into my novels but I certainly feel enriched for reading it all. It is usual for me to read a dozen nonfiction tomes, many of them written with dazzling story power.

Travel is the great educator and visiting all the locations that appear in my stories is my signature, I suppose. Coming from a travel background, it seems natural that all those decades of globetrotting would nourish my stories – and they do, especially my historical drama. For instance, for
The Lavender Keeper
locations include London, Hastings, Eastbourne, Farnborough, Bletchley Park in the UK. In France it involved so many of the towns and villages of the Luberon in Provence, including Gordes, Saignon, Bonnieux, Sault. Also Lyon, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, as well as the Loire Valley, Mont Mouchet . . . and, of course, Paris. Its sequel kept me just as busy – back to many of those destinations again but widening my reach to Strasbourg in eastern France, Marseille in the south, then moving into Austria to Vienna, Switzerland to Lausanne, into Bavaria in Germany and ultimately to Poland, to Kraków and to Auschwitz.

Getting the locations bedded down takes up a lot of my headspace, physical energy and time in finding the right places that not only work seamlessly for the storytelling but also provide intriguing locales for the reader to visit during their time with the book.

There’s always a seed to a novel and sometimes that seed can be buried deep, only emerging from the depths years on. This was certainly the case for
The Perfumer’s Secret
, which has its roots in
The Lavender Keeper
, written back in 2010.

Researching and writing
The Lavender Keeper
focused my attention on plants and it was learning about the uses of the wild and beautiful
Lavandula angustifolia
that immersed me in fragrance. I also spent many months buried deep in books about lavender and other fragrant plants of yesteryear, World War Two and particularly the period of the occupation of France and its liberation a few years later. I learned a great deal about the famous maquisards of southern France, where the notion of freedom fighting began in that nation and perhaps the most fearless guerilla warfare was waged.

But throughout all that historical research it was the lavender that kept scenting my thoughts, and my credit card took a walloping as I ordered countless books about lavender . . . its cultivation, its myth, its uses, its botanical importance and so on.

Fiona McIntosh in fields of lavender, Tasmania

No doubt because I spent a block of time in Provence for
The Lavender Keeper
and its sequel,
The French Promise
, it was my experiences back then that began to squirrel themselves away deep in my mind. And here they are re-emerging again now. I am a firm believer that back of brain takes care of business, so when Penguin asked me in 2014 what might be coming next, it was from those stored memories of southern France and especially my visit to a perfume school in Forcalquier in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence that a new idea erupted in a cloud of fragrance in my mind.

I wanted to write about perfume. At first I thought it might be a follow-on novel to
The Lavender Keeper
and
The French Promise
. That seemed logical and the characters had even conveniently arranged themselves so that I could easily move them into perfume manufacturing in a third instalment of their story. Except this time I had an entirely new character calling to me from the distance. I learned her name to be Fleurette, a gifted perfume maker who resisted being the property of her family to be married off strategically to enhance their wealth. She belonged to one of the great perfume families of the early twentieth century and she possessed the near ethereal skill of being a ‘nose’ but, as she was a woman, it meant that her rare talent would be effectively overlooked.

Fleurette was all but giving me a story, but she was born before 1900. Decisions, decisions! When I forced myself to choose between this young, frustrated woman of the early twentieth century or Luc Bonet’s daughter in the 1960s, I felt myself drifting easily back to 1914. I wanted to stay with Fleurette. So, when I set off on this adventure, I was convinced I was writing about Fleurette’s struggle to be recognised as a perfume maker – but the keyboard refused to obey, and Fleurette wouldn’t oblige either! I discovered I was writing about a young woman in complete crisis.

Fleurette was being forced to marry against her will to a man she loathed – the head of the pre-eminent French perfume manufacturer – and on her wedding day her beloved France announced war with Germany. With all of the men in her life marching off to the battlefields of northern France, she is left to juggle both families’ empires. In their absence she discovers a most terrible secret that threatens to implode those wealthy empires from within. I simply had to sigh and let Fleurette take us by the hand and lead us through her tribulations.

Perfume weaves its fragrant miasma through all the pages of this novel and I realised I didn’t have to be writing about an actual perfume to enjoy the crafting of this tale. Perfume became the theme of the story and thus demanded I research it thoroughly, which pleased me no end.

While researching
The Last Dance
, the novel I wrote before
The Perfumer’s Secret
, I visited Marrakech in Morocco. Here I became even more embedded in learning about exotic extracts and their uses – from argon oil to frankincense, sandalwood and jasmine. I was in training for the next marathon novel! A few months after my trip to Morocco a timely visit to Grasse in southern France snapped me into full focus for the potential for this novel. I realised that I had to base it there, in what is accepted as the perfume capital of the world.

This town in the Côte d’Azur, fifteen kilometres from Cannes and even closer to Nice, might as well be a world away from the bustling cities, nestled as it is in the hills with forests, valleys and rivers surrounding it. The Grasse of today spills down the hillsides that were once a clutter of patchwork fields of the most extraordinary roses and jasmine. Like its more glitzy neighbours, Grasse too has been a tourist drawcard for centuries. Favoured for its fragrant plantations, the altitude of up to 400 metres ensures clear air and cooler climes in the hot summers of southern France. Queen Victoria spent several enjoyable winters in Grasse and Emperor Napoleon’s sister recuperated in the town after an illness.

Back in the early Middle Ages, Grasse was a centre for leather. It smelled a whole lot different then, because tanneries stink. One of the most important and lauded tanners in Grasse was Galimard. It made a gift of a pair of beautiful leather gloves to Catherine de Medici and was inspired to perfume those gloves to ease the ugly smell when presented to the Queen of France. The story goes that the Queen was seduced, utterly, and Galimard grew into one of the prominent perfumers of the town as a result, especially as the leather industry faded. Emperor Napoleon visited in 1815 and was showered with violets, his favourite flower because his lover, Josephine, adored the fragrance. He covered her grave in violets and wore a locket containing the tiny flowers that later flourished around her grave. Grasse is now famous for violet and, incidentally at the time of writing
The Perfumer’s Secret
, that fragrance is making a comeback.

I wanted my story set in my favourite era of World War One. This is pre-Chanel No.5, by the way. Chanel No.5 came into being in 1921 by Ernest Beaux for Gabrielle Chanel, a forward-thinking couturier. Legend has it the famous fragrance was achieved through an error of quantities of essential oil. The jasmine and tuberoses are still sourced exclusively from a fifty-acre field in Grasse that is guarded zealously. A tiny bottle (30ml) of the perfume is said to contain 1000 jasmine flowers and twelve of the exquisite May roses from these fields, which are of the highest quality in the world. I wanted my story to begin before the development of Chanel No.5 as I was writing about the creation of a fragrance. As it turned out, the era suited the story that strayed from its original arc.

At this time perfume had begun to take off around Europe but also in Britain and America, mostly with lavender, violets and roses as the key elements. It was the perfumers of Grasse, however, who looked further afield for new ingredients and began importing the spices, seeds, nuts, plants, leaves and even animal products that would provide fresh essential oils and aromas to mix innovative, daring perfumes for a hungry, modern society.

After reading every relevant reference book I could lay my hands on, I settled in to the town of Grasse in Provence during the summer of 2014 and began to inhale the history, its scents, its stories and its lifestyle. I interviewed perfumers, I visited museums, I walked its fields, explored all the narrow lanes, shopped in its weekend market, gorged on its local treats, worshipped in its grand church with locals and generally allowed a story to shape itself around me. As I’ve mentioned, I never plot a novel; so long as I have a couple of characters demanding their role in the tale, I leave it up to them to take the story where it needs to go. Essentially, though,
The Perfumer’s Secret
was to be all about the smells of Grasse and I knew everything else would fall into place if I could get that right.

When I returned to Grasse that northern summer to write
The Perfumer’s Secret
, I snapped numerous photographs to remind me of the sun-drenched streets. It helped enormously that a few days before shifting to Grasse I had spent a full week in Haute Provence inhaling the lavender in full blue roar as I took twenty-four Australians around the region to walk in the footsteps of my characters from
The Lavender Keeper
and
The French Promise
. We’d already had a week together in Paris but it was this colourful, scented, mesmerising week in the south of France that put me into the right frame of mind to absorb all the detail and texture that would layer itself six months later into the story of
The Perfumer’s Secret
.

My final task in the research, I believed, was to learn how to make perfume and although I moved through a simplified, fast-tracked version, my days at Galimard – yes, the same firm – with a perfumer were enriching. I couldn’t quite believe what a tense experience it was to sit before the vast perfume organ and to combine base, heart and top notes from dozens of choices, knowing that by mixing two oils, they would be irrevocably changed from the first drop. And then to add a third, a fourth, a fifth . . . and so on. Hours were lost in concentrated smelling and daredevil decisions, but I would urge anyone to give it a go.

Contemporary perfume organ in Galimard, Grasse