18

To mark the start of our time together, Monsieur had bought a new watch for himself and one for me. Then he’d asked me to find us each a new fragrance. He’d only specified he wanted something with lavender. It didn’t take me long to unearth the little-known Mouchoir de Monsieur by Guerlain, launched in 1904 and kept in production for Jean-Claude Brialy, a French actor who’d gone from Nouvelle Vague icon to society darling. The epicene notes of the ‘gentleman’s handkerchief’ – flowers and vanilla as a yin counterpoint to the citrus, lavender and civet yang – suited Brialy’s witty, endearing persona, but they also seemed like a good fit for Monsieur, a man whose virile appearance belied the almost feminine delicacy he seldom displayed.

It was this contrast between Monsieur’s hearty self-assurance and his utter sensitivity to the finest nuances of my moods that had drawn me to him; that, and the fact that he was more fun than anyone I’d ever slept with: fun to laugh with, fun to play with. It also helped that he could afford to whisk me off to Rome or Avignon on the trail of Caron’s Farnesiana and the eponymous Comme des Garçons, treat me to the finest restaurants and bed me in four-star hotels: money made everything lighter. It allowed us to improvise our stolen moments. Monsieur was married. I hadn’t divorced yet. We were making the story up as we went along.

Finding my own perfume to herald our clandestine love affair wasn’t much of a quandary either. As soon as he smelled Serge Lutens’ Tubéreuse Criminelle between my breasts, Monsieur whispered ‘Criminelle’ in gloating tones and proceeded to bare them.

Tuberose became the olfactory thread of our six-year romance. Flamboyant, assertive, provocatively feminine, it burst with the self-confidence of a woman wholly desired. Its scent was one I had to live up to, in the same way that, amidst the complications and dissembling of an adulterous affair, I felt an almost ethical – or was that aesthetic? – urge to keep things light and playful. Wasn’t that the whole point of taking a lover? Somehow tuberose embodied this love-as-aesthetic-performance stance: a cold, venomous green bitch-slap subsumed in narcotic, creamy, coconut-white flesh betraying hints of a rubber soul.

*   *   *

The couturier Robert Piguet sussed the diva out perfectly when he dressed up the first best-selling tuberose perfume in black and hot pink. The aptly named Fracas ups the exuberance of the flower until it reaches the shrill peaks of a soprano coloratura: The Magic Flute’s Queen of the Night, with her dramatic entrance and near-hysteric trills. Shades of Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch, Fracas could very well be the perfume equivalent of a Hollywood persona accumulating the signs of femininity on a body that is already feminine (Marilyn Monroe) or not (Ru Paul). Fittingly, Fracas is said to have been the signature fragrance of Madonna (the ultimate manipulator of feminine semiotics), the late fashion editor and muse Isabella Blow and the resplendent beauty whose modelling career she launched, Sophie Dahl: this is nothing if not the scent of divas.

But much as I admire Fracas, it resists me. In fact, it lived up to its name by shattering on my floor as soon as I took my vintage bottle out of its box. It was the weirder Tubéreuse Criminelle that introduced me to the dark side of the flower and set off my addiction.

When Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake decided to tackle tuberose, rather than attempting to tame the jarring medicinal notes of tuberose absolute, they decided to amp them up. The result is the olfactory equivalent of an extreme close-up: the features of the tuberose are so distorted they are barely recognizable, as shocking as the face of a woman in the throes of pleasure seen at kissing distance. But this floral monstrosity fleshes out into an intoxicating potion: the belle-laide awakens sensations that a merely pretty girl could never hope to achieve …

In the language of flowers, the tuberose speaks of dangerous, forbidden pleasures: by taking up the Criminelle as the emblem of my passion, I’d guessed that message in a bottle. Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry, olfactory purloined letters lying right under everyone’s nose … And perfumes themselves have subconscious, twisted molecular secrets sending out subliminal calls of the wild. Don’t accuse perfumers of having a dirty mind, though their peculiar variety of sensual gluttony often does draw them to louche aromas.

Put the blame on Mame, boys.

*   *   *

Tuberose and her sisters jasmine, orange blossom, gardenia, honeysuckle are the vamps of the floral realm, pallid creatures whose hypnotic, diffusive scents are potions for attracting nocturnal pollinating insects – vividly coloured flowers need none to draw bees in the daytime. Their velvety flesh feels like a woman’s skin and, even at their freshest, a hint of corruption wafts up from their sweet fragrances. Stick your nose in them. Go past the pretty. Zero in on the weird. Butter, Camembert, mushrooms, horse manure, bad breath, dirty feet, blood, meat, shit … Despite their tiny size and pristine petals, white flowers bellow Nature’s obscene secret through their outsized fragrance: flowers are sexual organs. And if those sexual organs have ended up grafted David Cronenberg-style onto our skin, it is precisely because they also smell like the human body in all its extreme states, whether pleasure or death.

And therein lies the secret of their sexiness, if we are to believe Dr Paul Jellinek, who wrote The Psychological Basis of Perfumery in 1951. The German chemist and perfumer was convinced that the purpose of perfumery was ‘to create and enhance sexual attraction’, and classified raw materials according to their erotic effect: anti-erogenous (or refreshing), stimulating, narcotic or erogenous. The latter category encompassed ‘perfume materials reminiscent of human body odour’ emanating from the scalp, underarms, pubes, urogenital and anal regions. Though repulsive when smelled out of context, these subtle hints of the naked body were most frequently encountered in the act of love and therefore carried positive connotations, claimed Dr Jellinek. He further classified his erogenous materials based on the smells of blondes (sour-cheesy), redheads (pungent-burnt) and brunettes (sweetish-rancid). One can only wonder at the method he used to collect these observations. I envision rows of naked women sniffed by a formal gentleman in a white lab-coat dictating to an assistant in cat’s-eye glasses, a scene Stanley Kubrick could’ve filmed circa Dr Strangelove … But though the progress of organic chemistry has rendered many of Dr Jellinek’s analyses obsolete, his take on the human facets of raw materials makes for a fascinating read. For instance, costus, the stuff Bertrand thought might be my ‘referent’, ‘is strongly reminiscent of the odour of the scalp region and … of the axillar odour of brunettes.’ Score one for Bertrand, then: though my hair has gone prematurely white, I am a brunette. Incense also has ‘something of the sweet-acrid effect’ of brunette sweat. It seems like we’re really on to something with Duende … As for orange blossom, what makes it so enticing is the indole it shares with other white flowers such as jasmine and tuberose: ‘It is precisely the odour of indole, reminiscent of decay and faeces, that lends [them] that putrid-sweet, sultry-intoxicating nuance which has led to the use of … their extracts as delicate aphrodisiacs.’

I’m quite happy to follow the good doctor’s ghost down that path: I do believe that reminiscences of a not-quite-surgically-scrubbed body can act as subconsciously enticing reminders of our animal nature. But I’m not quite sure the fatal attraction of white flowers boils down to indoles. There must be more to the story, and to find out, Octavian Coifan is the man I turn to.

Fortunately for me, the erudite author of 1000 Fragrances is not only a friend but practically a neighbour. I’ve spent many a Sunday afternoon with Octavian, rows of phials and blotters lined up between us on my dining-room table, parsing raw materials, vintage finds and new products while batting away the cat, who likes to snatch away our blotters. Octavian was the first to walk me through the maze of perfume composition and initiate me into raw materials. When I blurt out ‘Am I crazy, or is there such or such a note in this?’ he’s fond of answering, with a glint in his big green Byzantine eyes, ‘The nose is never crazy,’ which leaves the question of my own sanity open to conjecture …

To find why our skin loves white flowers so much, Octavian takes me on a tour of their chemical plant. Their specifically floral character comes from methyl anthranilate, which basically smells like orange blossom, often associated with benzyl acetate, which bridges the gap between nail polish, banana and jasmine. The spicy notes are eugenols: white flowers share them with cloves, carnations, ylang-ylang and lilies. And then there are the infamous animal notes. Indole, a consequence of the degradation of protein, hence its presence in corpses and faeces, but also paracresol, which is reminiscent of horse manure – unsurprisingly, since horse manure and horse sweat do contain the molecule. This is why narcissus absolute gives off a horsy whiff and why a jasmine bush at a certain distance will make you wonder where the stables are. Tuberose also contains a touch of skatol (as in ‘scatological’) and butyric acid (from the Greek for ‘butter’, but the effect is cheese and feet). Jasmine even contains compounds similar to those found in tobacco, which goes quite a way to explaining why the heady floral perfumes worn by the femme fatales of yore blended so divinely with the blue wisps of their cigarette smoke – picture Bacall growling ‘Anybody got a match?’ to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Her nickname may have been Slim, but when Bogart had a surreptitious sniff of her perfume bottle, it wasn’t wafting some shower-clean anorexic juice.

Smell jasmine, tuberose or gardenia and you’ll also pick up a fatty/buttery smell with coconut, hay and peach facets. These are produced by molecules called lactones, from the Latin for ‘milk’. Gamma-nonalactone, commonly known as aldehyde C18, is what gives Hawaiian Tropic-type tanning products their characteristic coconut fragrance. Another, C14 (gamma-undecalactone) smells of peach. Certain types of musks, such as the ones naturally found in angelica and ambrette (hibiscus seeds), are lactones too. It just so happens that, like flowers, we are lactone factories: they are produced on our scalps when a certain type of bacteria feeds on sebum. Or rather, they would be if we didn’t lather daily. When Charles Baudelaire wrote, ‘In the downy edges of your curling tresses/I ardently get drunk with the mingled odours/Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar’ in a poem aptly entitled ‘Head of Hair’, he was in fact exercising a keenly analytical nose in the midst of erotic rapture.

My particular favourite, tuberose, is the white flower that contains the greatest quantity and variety of lactones, unlike Duende’s orange blossom, which has none: this is one of the reasons why Bertrand told me that it was a ‘hard’ smell. But if natural jasmine oil is most reminiscent of skin, Octavian explains, it is also because of the several dozen molecules that don’t play a prominent role in its smell and therefore aren’t used in synthetic reproductions of the notes. Esters of fatty acids, for instance: jasmine is a member of the Oleaceae family, just like the olive tree, and contains them more abundantly than any other flowers … just like our skin, where those substances are also present.

It is the combination of the decaying smell of indoles with the skin-and-scalp fattiness of lactones and esters of fatty acids that weds the scent of white flowers to flesh and pulls them halfway into the animal kingdom, which Octavian confirms by two counter-examples. Lily-of-the-valley is one of the most indolic flowers but it isn’t perceived as sensual because it has neither lactones nor spicy molecules; the scent of chestnut blossoms is mostly made up of indoles and molecules containing nitrogen, but similarly devoid of lactones.

‘And they smell like sperm!’ I blurt out, recalling the embarrassingly vivid scent that spreads over the neighbouring avenues in spring. ‘Not quite what you’d want to squirt on skin, at least not from a perfume bottle.’

Octavian tells me that in his native country, Romania, this is also what the peasants say. I pull out a short story by the Marquis de Sade bearing on the very same subject: a young girl innocently exclaims she recognizes the smell of chestnut blossoms, much to the embarrassment of her mother and her confessor … Nature definitely has a one-track mind.

When you smell white flowers, ‘you smell notes that are part of human life from birth to death and on to decomposition,’ enthuses Octavian. Even when they start out with a cut-grass smell as cool as a rain-drenched English garden, they’re also perversely giving off whiffs of decay, and it is this contrast that gives them such depth. Smell a honeysuckle hedge at night, when the flowers are not so fresh, and you’ll get the smell of a human presence, of human breath. Even after they are picked, they go on producing their scent. They are dying, not fading: ‘The white flower is a flower that decomposes in sheer beauty!’ my friend concludes.

We stop to ponder the fascinating continuum of Nature, which bathes vegetal and animal flesh in the same odours: perhaps wearing perfume is our way of reaffirming this atavistic bond? Their oddly compelling blend of erotic attraction and death truly does make white flowers the femme fatales of perfumery. It might also explain why they elicit mixed feelings in certain cultures. The Aztecs used to pile them up on their pyramids, where their smell blended with the stench of their sacrificial victim’s blood – there is a bit of a blood note in the tuberose, and that hint of blood is, again, a bond between death and life, human sacrifice and female fertility, Octavian tells me. In Malaysia gardenias are used exclusively for funerals, I recall reading; lilies are not uncommon ornaments in funeral homes in the US, which is why some Americans have an aversion to lily-centred scents. Octavian read in a trade magazine from the late 30s that tuberose was rejected in the US for that very same reason. At a time when embalming techniques weren’t perfect, the flowers’ indoles mixed with the corpses’ and this boosted the scent of the flowers while masking the stench of death. Win-win.

Oddly enough, tuberose fragrances went on to become highly successful in America: you can lay even money that when a brand comes out with one, it is to court the dollars. This brings us to what I’d call the ‘white flower paradox’.

Why were there so few white floral compositions, we wonder, during the intensely creative era spanning from the 1910s to the 1920s, when most of the great templates of perfumery were invented? After all, jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom had been mainstays of the perfumers’ palette for centuries and their smell was just as sexy as those of the leather, vanilla and resins that were so fashionable at the time. It’s not that there weren’t any. Though tuberose perfumes were sparse after the late 19th century, there wasn’t a perfume house that didn’t have a jasmine or a gardenia (the fragrance of gardenia can’t be extracted but that didn’t keep perfumers from approximating it), including the modernist Chanel, though she’d claimed a woman shouldn’t smell like a flower. But none is known as a milestone of perfumery. Was it because, in a period marked by the invention of great abstract fragrances, a plain old floral seemed distinctly unexciting to perfumers and their clientele? Too reminiscent of the naturalistic blends of the 19th century? The reason, Octavian ventures, may have simply been cost: from World War I onwards, French-grown jasmine and tuberose became so expensive that they couldn’t be used in large quantities. But if perfumers had truly wanted to reconstitute the scent of tuberose by using a blend of less costly natural and synthetic materials, they could have. Everything was available in the 20s, and the major white floral bases that were used up to the 80s were indeed invented during that decade. Jean Patou’s Joy, launched in 1929 as a gesture to his American clients when the Wall Street Crash prevented them from crossing the Atlantic to visit his salon, was overdosed with jasmine, but also rose, and therefore not strictly a white floral. But there was a white floral scent that became a best-seller as far back as 1911 I remind Octavian: my old Narcisse Noir.

‘Yes, but on the American market!’ Octavian shoots back.

‘And what about Fracas? That came out in the 40s and it must’ve been a blockbuster since it managed to survive the demise of the house of Piguet and several changes of hand over the decades,’ I insist.

‘On the American market!’

True. Between the both of us, we can’t name another best-selling white floral before the late 70s. Karl Lagerfeld’s Chloé and Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs were the first waves of what would become a bona fide tsunami in the 80s, starting with the gaudy – and American – Giorgio Beverly Hills in 1981, followed by Givenchy’s Ysatis, Guerlain’s Jardins de Bagatelle and Dior’s Poison. None was purely a white floral, but all boosted their tuberose, orange blossom and jasmine notes to unprecedented intensities.

So, what happened between the late 70s and the mid-80s, we muse …

‘The American market?’ I venture.

It makes sense. After Opium, which had raised the stakes both in terms of intensity and planetary success, the perfume industry needed products that felt modern – modern in the 80s being vibrant colours, sequins, quarterback shoulders and helmet hair. Products that smelled as brash as Alexis Carrington making a play for Gordon Gekko. Products that gave out a message loud enough to be heard around the world. The intellectual chypre family epitomized by Diorella or cashmere-and-pearls floral aldehydics like First, both expressions of genres invented half a century earlier, were too complex, too classy, too French to make the cut. Even the perennially best-selling N°5 came off like Grandma’s perfume all of a sudden. Whereas tuberose and her sisters were out there – however I love them, one thing they are not is subtle. They are entrance-making, resistance-is-futile perfumes that’ll tattoo your presence all over a room, not to mention a gentleman’s body. Throw me on that couch and ravage me, or else you’ll be sorry. At least that’s the implication, even though any attempt in that direction would probably trigger a swift, spike-heeled kick in the baubles.

‘So … do you think it’s my North American side that makes me love tuberose so much?’ I ask Octavian a bit anxiously – I pride myself on my sophisticated Parisian tastes.

He gives me one of his draw-your-own-conclusions smiles.

‘Mind you, I never wore any of those perfumes in the 80s.’

‘You love Poison, don’t you?’

‘I do now. Back then, I was too much of a snob to wear something that popular.’

‘Women are so complicated,’ he sighs. ‘See what you missed out on all those years?’

*   *   *

Since then, I’ve caught up with a vengeance. I’m not much of a one for jasmine if it’s not on the bush; orange blossom starts interesting me when it’s a little messed up; gardenia only suits me when it’s as decadent as Tom Ford’s now-discontinued Velvet Gardenia, which exaggerated the smelliest traits of the flower. But I am the Empress of Tuberose, and the perfume that confirmed the addiction sparked off by Tubéreuse Criminelle was the equally aptly named Carnal Flower.

Ironically, just as the Lutens had sounded the opening notes of my love affair with Monsieur, Carnal Flower, unbeknownst to either of us, was its coda. I’d come to one of our lunches in Saint-Germain-des-Prés after dousing myself from the tester. With its eucalyptus and ozonic top notes boosting the tuberose’s minty-camphoraceous bite, Carnal Flower seemed to carry the coolness of the florist’s storage room, just as the blistering air of January was caught in the hairs of my black fur wrap. Its voluptuous creaminess and musk expressed the warmth of the flesh under the fur. Smelling it was like diving in slow motion into the flower, every nuance magnified as though it had been dissected, analysed and reassembled in different proportions by an artist-engineer who’d second-guessed Nature … Monsieur adored both the scent and the name. After lunch, he dropped me off in front of the shop on the rue de Grenelle, practically opposite the Christian Louboutin boutique I’d so often pillaged in his company, clutching a two-hundred-euro banknote – he couldn’t find a parking space and he was late for his next appointment so, if I didn’t mind, I’d have to make the purchase myself.

I’d told Monsieur from the start I wouldn’t be his mistress for more than five or six years. In the meantime I’d divorced, though not for Monsieur: I’d already decided to leave the Tomcat when Monsieur and I met. He hadn’t. I’d never asked him to. And all of a sudden, it was time to end it. I’d made Monsieur happy and that happiness had made him more successful than ever in his profession; success meant he was no longer free to abscond with me for a few days. There were more lunches and fewer trips. Like a tuberose, our affair was fading beautifully, but I wasn’t going to wait for it to turn into compost. So whenever he called I wouldn’t be available and sometimes it was true.

But I didn’t know that Monsieur would never get to smell Carnal Flower on me again when I pushed the door of the red and black shop, banknote crumpled in an elbow-length black leather glove, giddy with champagne and a little wobbly on my Louboutins. I’d found an alternative to Tubéreuse Criminelle, a new incarnation of the flower, and the perspective of a tryst fired me up.

I’d started cheating on Serge, you see. I had been for quite some time – in fact, just about when I’d started cheating on my husband. His name was Frédéric Malle.