Denyse Beaulieu - The Perfume Lover - A Personal Story of Scent

Bertrand labels his blotters ‘1’ and ‘2’ and dips them into the phials.

‘You’ll find the first one is a lot more austere than the other.’

I breathe in. This is soapy. I can pick out incense … Aldehydes with their characteristic snuffed-candle and citrus … Lavender … Eww, I hate lavender … But I can’t really detect the orange blossom, though Bertrand says he’s boosted its tarry notes with yara-yara, the material I discovered here a while back that reminded me of the medicinal effluvia of my childhood, and indole, a mothball-smelling molecule found in flowers like jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle or narcissi.

‘You’ve got to imagine a street in Seville baked by the sun, with the tar almost melting, just before a storm,’ he explains.

‘You got that from the story?’

‘Absolutely.’

I’m a little disconcerted, not only because I don’t remember mentioning any melting tar, much less storms, but because with its soapy lavender notes, I find N°1 jarringly masculine. N°2 is brighter, almost tart, but also softer and more suave. The orange blossom absolute has been fleshed out with jasmine and aurantiol, a base resulting from the reaction of methyl anthranilate (the main odorant molecule of orange blossom) and hydroxycitronellal (which smells of lily-of-the-valley).

But there’s something else lurking beneath the sweetness. Something a little … beastly? The afternoon is uncharacteristically hot and muggy for the end of April and my body feels slightly damp under my black cotton shirtdress. Has my deodorant let me down?

‘Excuse me, I’m about to do something not very ladylike …’

I lift my collar away from my shoulder and take a quick sniff. Bertrand lets out a mischievous little giggle, like a kid who’s played a neat trick on the grown-ups.

‘I’ve put in some costus, to give skin and female scalp effects.’

Costus smells of fur and dirty hair, he explains: force the dose, and you’ll get badly cured sheepskin. Incense is also tricky to work with, since it can produce repulsive facets of raw flesh and butcher’s stall. So he can’t use a high percentage of it and has to boost it with other materials that have incense-like facets, like aldehydes and pink pepper.

I must look a little disappointed – I guess I somehow expected the magic to work straight off. After a moment’s silence, Bertrand speaks up:

‘These are just first drafts. They’re still pretty austere for the moment. I’ve done them to find out where we set the cursor. But we haven’t necessarily found the accord yet.’

N°1 is definitely too soapy, I tell him. There are soap notes in the story wafting from the crowd, but they should be fleeting impressions. And N°2 is too sunny. In my story, the only light comes from the candles flickering on the gold of the float.

Bertrand frowns, clearly trying to figure out how this translates into olfactory terms. We’ve known each other for nearly five months now, we’ve talked for hours, but this is a new type of conversation and we need to adjust our languages.

‘You mean it’s too floral?’

Well, no, the scent needs to be floral because there are a lot of flowers in this story, with all the lilies spilling out of the float, I venture.

As Bertrand stifles a sigh, I realize I’ve just steered him in a new direction.

‘Would you rather go for a lily than an orange blossom?’

Instead of answering, I blurt out:

‘And there are tons of carnations too …’

Now I’ve done it again, haven’t I? But he nods patiently.

‘Right. Carnation. That’s very spicy. For the moment, I’m not very spicy. I’m indolic.’

Eugenols, the molecules that produce the clove-like smell of carnations, belong to the same chemical class as indoles and phenols, Bertrand explains. But they ‘vibrate’ in different ways: eugenols burn, while indole and yara-yara melt, ‘like tar in the sun’.

As soon as he mentions melting, I’m reminded of beeswax. During the Holy Week, little kids collect it from the penitents, who tilt their candles so that a few drops will fall on the children’s wax balls.

‘OK, we’ll put in beeswax … But all those things are very austere, you know? If that’s what I do for you, it’ll be as dark as the darkest night. You’ll barely be able to make out the gold. We’ve got to find the night lights.’

He’s right. This shouldn’t be austere. I’m in the arms of a boy who’s got a hand under my skirt. That’s what makes the meeting of incense and orange blossom so symbolic, this blend of the sacred and the erotic …

‘It’ll be tough to do something pleasant,’ says Bertrand, ‘because orange blossom and incense are two hard notes. If you want to make them prominent, you’re going for hard on top of hard.’

But the notes shouldn’t be a pretext, he adds, otherwise there’s no point. You can’t say you’re doing an orange blossom and incense fragrance then stick in a couple of drops just so you won’t be an outright fraud, like most perfume companies do nowadays.

I can’t help feeling a little smug. I’ve presented him with a challenge, and I’m starting to know him well enough to understand he thrives on challenges. So I try to help him the only way I know how, by telling him more about Holy Week, hoping that among my words he’ll find something that teases at his own memories, that translates into his own language; something that’ll make this scent as sensuous and seductive as Seville abandoning itself to the religious-pagan fiesta. The exhilaration of a city flowing from street to plaza to get a glimpse of the processions; the bar-hopping instead of the Stations of the Cross, the sea-salt aroma of the blond vino de manzanilla and the bittersweet herbal pungency of joints; the dizziness and flirting and laughter. The dark, thrumming beat of the drums, the solar jarring bursts of the brass bands, the beeswax coating the streets with a silky sheen, feet slipping as the crowd mills about. The darkened plaza where the float appears, blazing like the ocean liner in Fellini’s Amarcord, with the musty whiffs of derelict palaces seeping through shutter windows behind the wrought-iron grilles …

It’s a strange sensation. This man is so open, so willing to be enthralled, that I get the feeling he’s with me in the jostling crowd.

‘Fascinating. This isn’t my world at all, but it could’ve been. I must’ve lived this before, in another life, because it speaks to me so much.’

‘It’s as though I were trying to draw you into my memory.’

‘But I am there. Completely.’

Was that guy following me?

I tried walking faster but my strappy sandals made my steps wobbly and my 40s wraparound dress kept flapping open: I had to slow down to press it shut on my thighs. Paris is practically empty in August as Parisians migrate en masse to the beach, but there they were, the summer bachelors in their suits and ties, wife and children packed away, wandering out of their offices and picking up my trail. Appraising looks at a silhouette that was starting to shape up … Slowing down in front of shop windows when I looked over my shoulder … This was the first time I’d wandered off into Paris without my parents, and it felt as though the whole city was hounding me.

We’d finished paying off the house and the dollar was high, so we could afford our first European holiday. Being French-Canadians, our destination was never even discussed: it would be the old country. Paris, the very place I’d so aspired to come to a mere six years ago. But at seventeen, you didn’t do excited when you were trailing behind your parents, wishing you didn’t look as though you were with them. This was just a scouting expedition. I’d be back on my own some day. By then I might have figured out how to handle the attentions of the older males of the Parisian herd. Who did those guys think I was?