16

‘No matter what the weather, rain or shine, it’s my habit every evening at about five o’clock to take a walk around the Palais Royal,’ writes Denis Diderot in Rameau’s Nephew. ‘I let my spirit roam at will, allowing it to follow the first idea, wise or foolish, which presents itself, just as we see our dissolute young men on Foy’s Walk following in the footsteps of a prostitute with a smiling face, an inviting air, and a turned-up nose, then leaving her for another, going after all of them and sticking to none. For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes.’

It was in the very spot where Diderot had indulged in his intellectual libertinage that I found the scented seraglio that best suited my fancy. The Palais-Royal, a garden in the heart of Paris so secluded it is missed by most tourists, was where I went to speak to the witty, amiable ghosts of the 18th century. It was teeming with them, the rakes and the courtesans, the philosophers and the coquettes, the aristocrats and agitators, floating in the honeyed scent of linden tree blossoms, magnolias and hyacinths.

In 1992, after a long spell away from my favourite haunt, I spotted a new boutique with a purple façade and black windows in the Galerie de Valois that looked as though it had popped out of some wormhole connected to the 1780s. This was the kind of shop Casanova might have opened to trick elderly aristocrats into thinking he was a powerful cabbalist. ‘Shiseido Salons du Palais-Royal’ said the storefront. I pushed the heavy glass door and wandered into the dark, cool shop. Stylized lavender astronomical motifs adorned the deep purple walls; a delicate spiral staircase ascended to the first floor. A sphinx-like sales attendant clad in a purple smock like those worn by the staff of great jewellers stood behind a marble counter, where four bell-shaped glass bottles were set next to a miniature 19th-century lion-footed marble bathtub in the Pompeian style.

If the place hadn’t been so dauntingly quiet, I would have squealed when I learned who was behind this new perfume house: the man whose mysterious, violently geometric pictures of Kabuki-faced women with smoky cat eyes and thin, cruel scarlet lips against half-Japanese, half-Russian Constructivist backgrounds had fascinated me in my French neighbour’s Vogues. His ads for Christian Dior cosmetics had driven me to buy my first red lipstick on my first trip in Paris and when he’d moved to Shiseido, I’d shifted allegiance as well. But somehow, the fact that he made perfumes had passed me by. It was better this way; to discover them as though guided there by my ghosts …

I had just entered the world of Serge Lutens.

*   *   *

Those bell-shaped bottles held liquid emotion. Letting Bois de Violette’s amethyst and umber tones unfurl from my wrist as I wandered under the arcades of the Galerie de Valois, I couldn’t quite decide whether I liked it or not, so unusual was its blend of oily, resinous, leathery woods inlaid with sweet shards of violets and bits of golden dried fruit. But I knew I loved it as you would a stranger who seemed to carry with him the mystery of his own world. And there was a world behind it; there was a story. Just as I, a woman from the snow country, had come alive to scents in Seville, Serge Lutens, born in the northern French city of Lille, had discovered the olfactory realm in Marrakech, where he’d settled in the late 60s.

In an industry choking with too many launches and where fragrance had become a consumer product, the house of Serge Lutens rang out as a protest, a sovereign gesture of defiance: Qui m’aime me suive, whoever loves me shall follow me. It was raised on the foundation of his aesthetics and his persona – his ‘personal legend’, as Paulo Coelho would say, though I suspect he is no more Lutens’ favourite writer than he is mine. The fragrances were only available in a single shop, their discovery a ritual experience. The sophisticated stage Lutens set down revived the mystical couture atmosphere he had discovered when he came to Paris to work for Vogue in 1962.

At the core of Serge Lutens’ stance was a violent rejection of the mainstream in general but more specifically of the streamlined, limpid style established by Edmond Roudnitska, the influential composer of the best-selling Diorissimo, Eau Sauvage and Diorella. Serge Lutens knew these well, since he’d been the artistic director of Christian Dior’s makeup line from 1967 to 1980. ‘With him, it is the start of a cleaned-up perfumery, with neither body nor memory, prim and proper and which awakens nothing in me. Perfumes have to belong to our roots, our sweat, our past and our very decadence,’ he explained to Annick Le Guérer in Le Parfum.

To me, Lutens’ reintroduction of an archaic dimension in perfumery echoed the gesture of the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, unsurprisingly one of his favourite directors. When Pasolini adapted Greek myths and tragedies (Oedipus, Medea) and pre-modern narrative cycles (The Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales), he sought to restore the ‘primitive’ gaze; to show the world as it was seen before Christianity or the Enlightenment. Lutens’ perfumes, with their vibrant palette of oriental aromas, were a similar move towards pre-modern conceptions of the art, albeit with the financial support of the Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido.

In keeping with Lutens’ quest for the ancient roots of perfumery, the house quickly established, though he denies it – ‘they just came’ – its Moroccan-inspired olfactory codes: spices, predominantly cumin, dried fruit and the rich, leathery Atlas cedarwood. But Lutens’ style went beyond an exotic palette. He often asked his perfumers to take on difficult notes that had seldom or never had the starring role in mainstream perfumery, and to exaggerate their characteristics to the point of distortion. Iris Silver Mist, for instance, was the first iris soliflore in decades, namely because orris butter, which takes years to produce, is extravagantly expensive. It is mainly used for its powdery effect, but it also smells of wood, roots, carrots and earth, with cold, metallic effects and fatty whiffs of human flesh. The perfumer Maurice Roucel, egged on by Lutens, boosted those facets and went on to produce one of the most austere perfumes on the market.

Muscs Koublaï Khan lurches in such a different direction you’d think it had been thought up by an entirely different author (and it was, indeed, composed by another perfumer, Christopher Sheldrake). But, in fact, it has the Lutens signature stamped all over it. Just as Iris Silver Mist over-saturates all the facets of iris including the less flattering ones, Muscs Koublai Khan piles layer upon layer of animal notes to achieve a rendition of the legendary Tonkin musk encountered by Marco Polo in the Mongol emperor’s Chinese realm, hence its name. To some, it is one of the fiercest stenches ever to waft from a perfume bottle, and it does feature a cornucopia of feral smells: faecal civet, leather and fur-smelling castoreum, costus with its whiff of dirty hair, armpit-reeking cumin, ambergris with its saline, female notes, patchouli and its dank earth facets, as well as a wide range of synthetic musks. But despite this reverse-laundry list of pungent materials, Muscs Koublaï Khan doesn’t add up to a devil’s brew. In fact, it may be the fragrant equivalent of Ingres’ Turkish Bath as described by Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: ‘In the middle of this whirlpool of carnality is [Ingres’] old symbol of peaceful fulfilment, the back of the Baigneuse de Valpinçon. Without her tranquil form, the whole composition might have made us feel slightly seasick. [But] after a minute we become aware of a design so densely organized that we derive from it the same intellectual satisfaction as is provided by Poussin and Picasso.’ In MKK, the figure of the ‘baigneuse’ is the crystalline rose and ambrette accord: a note of tranquil harmony rising through the animalic arabesques.

*   *   *

From the time I discovered the Salons du Palais-Royal, the bell-shaped bottles lined up on my bedroom mantelpiece, each new scent a yet-undiscovered room in Lutens’ olfactory palace. It would be nearly ten years before I met the man himself – a slender, sloe-eyed sylph with the light step of a dancer and a deep, velvety voice. That day he said:

‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

We hadn’t, I assured him.

‘Somehow, I’m sure I know you.’

‘Well … in another life, then?’