17

As soon as I am ushered up to the private room above the Salons du Palais-Royal, done in saffron and cumin in contrast to the mauve and black of the ground floor, Serge Lutens insists: ‘It’s funny, when I first met you, I thought I knew you. And today, when I saw you, I told myself again I know this person, but I don’t know why.’

This uncanny sense of familiarity was no shortcut to obtaining an audience. When at long last I had been invited to one of his launches, I had introduced myself, gushing in a most un-Parisian fashion that I’d admired him since the age of twelve. He’d looked at me as though he had known me for that long too, and after taking leave of me had doubled back on his steps to tell me that when he said au revoir, it wasn’t a mere manner of speaking: we would see each other again. But when I took him at his word and put in a formal request for an interview, I was asked to forward my questions in writing along with a covering letter. I described myself as he’d seen me: ‘Silver hair, scarlet lips, black trench coat.’ He answered that I defined my silhouette as a battledress meant, perhaps, to protect myself, and that this may have been what had made him come to me intuitively, without a word.

*   *   *

I’d been led to understand that we would elaborate on his written answers over the course of our face-to-face interview but, as it turns out, Serge Lutens isn’t much interested in discussing them. Nor am I, for that matter. I haven’t come for answers. I’ve come to see the Wizard.

A mutual acquaintance had told me that he might enquire about my astrological sign – he himself is Pisces with Leo rising – and he does. If he asks, he explains, it is out of shyness and curiosity, to get to know people a little more quickly. I am Aries with Cancer rising, I tell him, which sets us off on a discussion of the hot Arian temper, which he advises me not to rein in. But I’m not one to display my anger:

‘Anger is very intimate, and sometimes you don’t want that intimacy.’

‘We don’t want to squander our anger on just anyone, do we?’ he quips.

‘So what about you?’

‘I can be very choleric, but ridiculously! I’m completely infantile … I lose it in front of everyone. I’m a disaster. My angers are frankly … irrational. After that, I’m sorry.’

This isn’t an interview, the ritual in which one person extorts as much as she can from another without disclosing anything. Lutens is asking me questions, a sly way of wiggling out of mine about his perfumes, I suspect. He says, once he’s done with them, he’s through. So we speak in circles around them as his assistant pours him tea and he pulls out his round glasses from his pocket without ever putting them on.

From astrology we slide into tarot. His photographs have always seemed to me to be somewhat tarot-like figures, their meaning endlessly reversible. Lutens doesn’t read the tarot. He doesn’t even play cards: ‘I’d be sure to lose.’ But he does know something about the reversibility of signs and sentiments. For instance, he seems to have taken a perverse pleasure in launching a ‘clean laundry’ scent that ran counter to every expectation, L’Eau Serge Lutens. His fandom resonated with cries of treason, I tell him. The word amuses him.

‘Would you enjoy being seen in the same way after twenty years? You tell yourself that you’ll be better understood as time goes by, but also that you’ll disappoint more and more. This can be called treason, but it’s not yourself you’re betraying.’

It’s no wonder Jean Genet, the homoerotic thief who turned treason into the driving principle of his life, is Lutens’ favourite author: ‘Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all,’ Genet writes in The Prisoner of Love.

It is then that, in a way, I commit my own act of treason by telling him about my project with Bertrand, which I’ve never spoken about to anyone in the industry. My disclosure arouses no more than the slight interest one bestows on a mildly interesting piece of gossip, but it’s given me a jolt. I’ve just realized that what I want to learn from Lutens is the secret of the peculiar mind-meld between the one who brings the story and the one who translates it into a perfume formula … Lutens doesn’t compose his scents: ‘I am not a perfumer,’ he says. ‘I make perfumes, or rather, I make them talk, or even confess.’ For the past twenty years, with one exception, the actual composition has been carried out by Christopher Sheldrake.

Is ‘Serge Lutens’ only Lutens, or him and Sheldrake? The two men couldn’t be more different: Sheldrake is a sweet, straightforward family man who, says Lutens, likes food and wine, lives in a light-filled house and dresses in neutral colours. By contrast, ‘I love dark houses, strong perfumes – the ones that leave traces. Black is their colour. Eating and drinking are pointless to me and my solitude is rich.’ Their aesthetics don’t complete or influence each other, he tells me: they ‘listen to each other’.

‘During its gestation, perfume is organic; it moves by itself and within itself, and sometimes leads us to unpredictable and unsuspected paths. If I were to say it leads us by the nose, it wouldn’t be false. Day after day, it explains to me who it is and what it is. Once it’s done, I give it a name and follow it until it has become what it needs to become. Then we part ways, never to see each other again, and I move on to the next one. It’s like a passing fling … almost nymphomania!’

Mr Lutens may come off as an otherworldly sprite, but he’s actually quite a funny man. As we burst out laughing, I find myself nodding vigorously. He hasn’t disclosed a thing about the way he works with his partner-in-perfume, but he’s told me what I need to know: to follow the perfume ‘until it becomes what it needs to become’. Duende must dictate its own terms – the last thing I want is a bespoke perfume. I’ve never seen the point of them. As for Lutens, he thinks they’re a joke: ‘Perfume is made-to-measure by definition if you recognize yourself in it. Perfume is the subject, just as the tiger is the tamer’s subject. Making a perfume for someone? The perfume is forgotten! It’s not itself any more!’

He’s been asked a hundred times to do it, he adds, ‘But I’m not a psychoanalyst! And besides, who’d be able to tell it was a bespoke perfume? You might just as well wear the bottle on a chain around your neck, with a label stating the cost. I am accountable to the perfume, and nothing else.’

Our conversation meanders from his memories of coming to Paris as a young man and discovering the rites and mystique of the great couture houses to the books he is reading – he says his scents are now more inspired by literature than by the smells of Morocco. I pull out a quote by Genet I’d copied down in my notebook: ‘Solitude is not given to me, I earned it. I am led towards it by a concern for beauty. I want to define myself, delineate my contours, escape from confusion, order myself.’ Of course, he knows it. It could be the motto of a man who spends most of his days reading, and who presided for three decades over the unending embellishment of a palace in Marrakech: ‘It was an image I pursued, but I can’t live in it, I need disorder,’ he explains, which conjures visions of the impeccably turned-out Serge in a djellabah, sprawled on piles of cushions, surrounded by open books, perhaps unshaven and tousled-headed …

The palace was shrouded in utmost secrecy as long as it wasn’t completed: since then, Lutens has allowed pictures of some of the rooms to be published by W magazine. I was interested to find out he’d decorated an entire wall with Berber fibulas, etched silver clasps used to fasten traditional garments. It just so happens that I own such a fibula: it is my favourite piece of jewellery and, more than that, my talisman. I’m wearing it today, hung from a slim platinum torque. Its peculiar shape is what attracted me to it: a lozenge ending with a sharp spike, which makes it both a dagger and a shield, a feminine and masculine symbol. It was the first thing Lutens noticed when I came in. Now I tell him how I came to buy it. It was, of course, in Marrakech.

*   *   *

I made it to Lutensian Ground Zero in 1999. I’d gone with the Tomcat to do a story on the last survivors of the Yves Saint Laurent posse, ensconced in the riads they had transformed into One Thousand and One Nights palaces with the help of peerless Moroccan craftsmen. I knew Lutens had been working on his own house and sent out feelers to secure an introduction. But he didn’t participate in the endless round of dinners and fêtes of the expat community, at least not the ones I knew. When I spoke to an architect who’d been consulted on it, he said he was sworn to secrecy. Fair enough. Besides, I had other things on my mind.

From the instant I’d set foot within the pink walls of the old city, its winding alleys that seemed as though they had been secreted by the earth itself giving way to cool inner gardens choked with gaudy-coloured bougainvilleas around cooing fountains, I’d felt at home, my senses in overdrive. It was Seville all over again, as it must’ve been under the reign of the Caliphs. The Koutoubia minaret loomed, identical to that of the cathedral of Seville, over the central plaza of Djema-el-Fnah with its storytellers, charms vendors, teeth-pullers crouching behind piles of yellowed molars, carts of mint pulled by donkeys and pyramids of oranges to be squeezed for fresh juice …

And it was spring. And I caught it with a pang, wafting from a garden, and I tumbled back in time to the woman I’d once been, to Carmen. It had been building up, this need to throw off my shackles. My impatience with the Tomcat, with his expectation that I would set aside my literary ambitions while he wrote ‘the Novel’ or ‘the Script’ … The Neverland of Marrakech, the suspended reality its inhabitants had built for themselves away from the West, had revived an ache to live in beauty all the perfume collections in the world couldn’t have soothed, not even Serge’s alchemical potions.

I stood at the threshold of the garden, abstracted. Then I stepped into the garden and saw the orange trees in blossom. And when I came back, as Leonard Cohen sings in ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, I was nobody’s wife.

*   *   *

Before we part, I ask Serge Lutens one last question. Which of his perfumes he would pick out for me? His verdict is swift:

‘The one that condemns you.’