27

Three bottles of Habanita are now sitting on the shelf above Bertrand’s desk. The first contains the umber dregs of an extrait I bought in the 80s. The second is a black glass bottle of eau de toilette with a Lalique frieze of nymphs, the one with the tobacco note Bertrand loved so much. The third was sent by an American friend who stumbled on a stash of vintage perfumes in a second-hand shop near Austin, Texas. Miraculously, this particular bottle of Habanita came with its date of purchase: a page of the 2 July 1948 issue of Le Monde had been wrapped around it so that it wouldn’t be jostled in its box. Now yellowed and brittle, it announces the adjournment of the Frankfurt conference convened to give West Germany its constitution and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc: news of a bygone world in the throes of post-Yalta reconstruction, on the day the tiny bottle started on its journey from Grasse to Austin. And now, over half a century later, the crystal time capsule has made its way back to France. I brought it to Bertrand two weeks ago, a couple of days after our momentous ‘coup de théâtre’ session.

He has drawn his inspiration from all three bottles to compose different ‘Habanita bases’ on an accord of tobacco, oak moss and cistus, a resin with amber and aromatic facets. He’s also put in vanilla and coumarin, which has almond, hay and tobacco effects: they are two of the main notes of Habanita.

I lean towards the blotter dipped in base 2 and find myself on the verge of the Moan for the first time since I smelled Duende 5. It is a balsamic caress: sweet, powdery wafts wrapping the richest tobacco. In this concentrated form, one you’d practically want to lick off the blotter, it smells like Bertrand’s Vanille on steroids, unsurprisingly, since the two formulas have several materials in common.

But as soon as I have a whiff of base 3, I do let out a little gasp. I know this. Of course, I know rationally that Bertrand has based the formula on Habanita, but this grabs me at another level: I’ve lived here, inside those notes. The sense of familiarity is even more vivid than when I smelled my old bottles after pulling them out of the closet where they’d been banished. It’s as though by paring the structure down to its load-bearing walls, Bertrand had managed to display Habanita’s quintessential beauty, to make it more legible.

Base 3 is a perfume in and of itself, though Bertrand says he’s only added three materials to the formula of base 2: musk ketone, methyl-ionone (a molecule that smells of iris, violet, wood and tobacco, with a powdery effect) and aldehyde C11, which smells of snuffed candle. Because these materials became ubiquitous after the success of Chanel N°5, base 3 conjures half of my vintage perfume collection: it is the backbone of classic-era perfumery.

As Bertrand had said he would the last time we saw each other, he’s concentrated on building up the tobacco and orange blossom accords separately. In the latter, he’s added beeswax, I’m happy to note. We’d discussed it last spring and then it got lost in the fray, though it is a major element of the story: the candles carried by the penitents and illuminating the floats bearing the statues of the Virgin and Christ. The beeswax is also logical in purely olfactory terms: it acts as a bridge between the orange blossom and the tobacco because it has tobacco facets, while tobacco, though it’s more acidic, has slightly waxy effects.

On the other hand, he’s scrapped the banana by eliminating the ylang-ylang and cutting down on the jasmine absolute. That’s good, since it didn’t belong in the story, but he had his reasons for including it in the first place: the fruitiness was meant to cover up the blood and raw meat facets of the incense, so that he could work a higher dose of it back in. I can detect the incense, but not as much as I’d like. Bertrand says that, when he adds the wood base, plus the resins and tobacco of Habanita, that little bit of incense will be boosted.

The new orange blossom comes off as quite metallic since Bertrand has kept the rose oxide from mods 15 and 16 to conjure the blood accord, but there’s also something that makes me wonder whether he’s skipped a shower. I’m about to drop my pen to the floor so I can lean towards him and have a surreptitious sniff when he informs me he’s upped the costus.

‘Oh, and here I was thinking it was you!’

Now I’m getting a pretty animalic note from the Habanita base 3 as well … Bertrand’s mouth curls into a sly little smile.

‘I put in African Stone.’

I let out a delighted hoot. When I’d given the African Stone to Bertrand, I’d asked him whether it would suit Duende and he’d agreed to try it out. Next thing I knew, he’d used it in another project. I was happy to have fed his inspiration, but slightly cross that someone else would reap the benefits of my little gift. As it turns out, Olivier Maure from Art et Parfum, with whom I’d discussed the possibility of using such a material when I’d gone to visit him, sent Bertrand a sample from a different source. He retrieves it from his refrigerator, unscrews the lid and hands it to me gingerly.

‘It’s phenomenally powerful … don’t spill any on yourself!’

‘Or I’ll be followed by all sorts of animals, including the human kind…’

The late-afternoon November gloom is falling over Paris: time to move on to mods 17, 18 and 19, which combine different proportions of the new orange blossom base and the Habanita base 3. I’m squirming with anticipation on my swivel stool.

My smile fades when I smell mod 17. The aldehydes in the two bases have ganged up on the other notes and taken over in a huge blast of hot iron steam. Bertrand shakes his head.

‘OK, forget 17. It’s too old-fashioned, too Habanita.’

I guess he had to rebuild it to understand it from the inside.

‘Of course,’ Bertrand says, ‘but it’s really interesting to integrate this base into our story. It’s part of it. That’s why I went back to it last time.’

Aren’t we rewriting history a bit here? I brought it back. But never mind.

‘And what about N°5?’ I ask him. ‘I’m really hooked on it.’

His gaze softens.

‘You like it. Good … that’s good,’ he says almost tenderly. ‘We’ll get back to it.’

*   *   *

When you smell formulas that have a lot of common ingredients, it’s what’s different that sticks out, as though your brain blocks out the identical bits. In this case, in contrast with mods 18 and 19, mod 16 comes off as banana jam, which it wouldn’t on its own. But the new stuff isn’t working out either: the Habanita base, like a hungry enzyme, gobbles up the orange blossom even in mod 19, which has the smallest proportion of it, one fifth. Clearly, classic-era forms like the one Bertrand rebuilt are incredibly powerful, especially Habanita – it was marketed as the most tenacious perfume in the world. This is because there are only base notes in the formula, he explains.

‘It’s the base notes that give the direction, no matter what they say. You’d almost have to work on the base notes first to know exactly what a perfume’s going to become.’

That must be why people who are used to wearing classic perfumes don’t find contemporary ones strong enough. As soon as you stick in the stuff that’s in the Habanita base, it crushes everything. But the experiment is interesting, because it helps me understand what perfumery used to be like.

‘First and foremost, you worked on the base notes,’ Bertrand repeats. ‘What you put into the heart and top notes was almost solvent. That’s actually what Jacques Guerlain used to say: that he used bergamot as a solvent, in sufficient quantity to finish his formula. That’s why there’s as much as thirty per cent bergamot in Shalimar. To him, it didn’t mean anything. His perfume was done. Still, his bloody bergamot did something. It had an action. But it wasn’t part of the formula.’

I love it when Bertrand talks about the lore of the industry. Like couture, perfumery is a trade where oral tradition is part of the learning process; when he was an apprentice, anecdotes about historical figures were swapped in the labs by people who’d actually known them. Bertrand’s mentor was Jean-Louis Sieuzac, who started out at Roure before going to work for Florasynth, the company that took Bertrand on as a trainee when he first came to Grasse. Roure had its own school of perfumery, where the pedagogical methods devised by the head perfumer Jean Charles were used to train several generations of perfumers, including Bertrand, indirectly, via Sieuzac. And, as a beginner, he had to reproduce ‘by nose’ a great many classics, something student perfumers still do, so that of course he knows classic structures inside out.

It just so happens that the same friend who found my 1948 Habanita sent me the English translations of some articles by Jean Carles, written for an industry magazine between 1961 and 1963 and published in William I. Kaufman’s 1974 Perfume. When I mention this to Bertrand, he tells me that this very book was one of the things that made him want to become a perfumer, though when he first read it in 1982 it had become so rare he was never able to buy his own copy. So it makes perfect sense that Bertrand is echoing Jean Carles: ‘As indicated by their name,’ the latter wrote, ‘the base notes will serve to determine the chief characteristic of the perfume, the scent of which will last for hours on end and will essentially be responsible for the success of the perfume, if any.’ To Carles, the heart notes were just ‘modifiers’ meant to cover up the unpleasant facets base note materials gave off initially. Top notes were designed to draw in the customer, ‘with or without reason, as in no case can the top note be the characteristic note of the perfume.’

Today, top notes are what perfumers focus on, at least in the mainstream, in a complete reversal of the Jean Carles method. As consumers seldom take the time to test a fragrance throughout its entire development or even to try it on skin before buying it, perfumers compose things that give off a seductive blast in the top notes and that smell good on cardboard. Little effort or budget is wasted on the base notes, which is why they often end up smelling so nondescript and generic, a mishmash of woody notes smothered in laundry musk.

For the time being though, our problem is just the opposite one: base notes so strong they take on a life of their own.

‘OK, let me try out just one last thing before we wrap up,’ says Bertrand.

This time he adds only one tenth of the Habanita base to the orange blossom. As soon as he’s shaken the little phial, he dips in the blotters. The blend is likely to be a bit of a mess: to really judge a perfume you’d need to let it macerate at least one week after you’ve added alcohol to the oil, though one month would be better. But it’ll have to do.

This time, the orange blossom, incense and blood accord stands its ground.

‘Still, even if we play with the two bases we’ll have to add other products. We’re only up to thirty, thirty-five materials, so the formula won’t be getting out of hand. There’s something to go on here!’ Bertrand concludes.

*   *   *

Of course I can’t wait one week to try out Duende 20 on skin. The next morning I spray it on my wrists, hair and chest. Sticking my nose inside my sweater is a good way of getting a concentrated blast, so it’s more effective to assess the form of the fragrance than gluing the wrist to the nose: a bit like stepping back from a large painting to see the composition rather than the fine details.

But however I smell it, Duende 20 is going all over the map. When it’s just moving out of the top notes, the aldehydes tend to stick out, which makes it smell like a candle. When the orange blossom struggles out I find it a bit too soapy. And then the mineral effect literally explodes, giving off a slightly burnt-hair stench. But when I sniff my wrist, I don’t get that note at all: it’s all sweet tobacco, musk and vanilla. It seems a monster has shambled out of Dr Duchaufour’s lab … And then an email pops into my inbox.

Denyse, I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel our appointment tomorrow. The mods I made after you left are crap … I’m even starting to wonder whether the orange blossom and incense accord is really relevant. I’m down in the dumps.

B.

I call Bertrand back immediately. He’s not picking up so I leave a message.

The train is rumbling into Daumesnil station when the Farfisa organ of ‘Ninety-six Tears’ tinkles from my bag half an hour later. I can barely make out Bertrand’s voice in the station, so I run back up the stairs into the icy dusk of the place Daumesnil to huddle on a bench. I’m sick at the idea of having tampered with Bertrand’s creative process, yet oddly calm. We can’t both be freaking out. I shift into crisis-control mode.

The new ideas aren’t working out, he says, and he’s tired of running round in circles. The Habanita accord smells too old-fashioned. He tested Duende 20 on his skin the day after our last appointment and it was awful. Then he tried adding the woody, spicy lily and it didn’t work out either. He hates the costus. Maybe there shouldn’t even be actual incense in it. Maybe he should substitute other materials.

OK, if the Habanita accord is too invasive, I say, we’ll ditch it. It had to be tried out. Don’t worry. There’s time. Let’s get together soon and just sit down and smell everything again quietly, you don’t have to come up with anything new, we’ll just take stock, think things over, now that I’m more of a partner, take advantage of that, rely on me.

By the end of the conversation Bertrand is considering solutions, such as streamlining the formula of Duende 20 to remove the old-fashioned elements; I suggest trying out the orange blossom accord with Duende 5 but without the Habanita effect. What I want is the sensuousness of it. It needn’t be literal. I’m still convinced we needed to shake things up.

Of course that’s also the problem, I think as I hang up and make my way back to the station, still rattled. I’ve become more of a partner but I’m also more intrusive than any client of his ever is. I am derailing the process. Possibly asking for what can’t be done. Things that won’t work together within his style or won’t work together, full stop. I’ve never realized until now how tough it must be to pull off this project. Bertrand is working under a triple constraint: interpreting my story as faithfully as possible; not repeating himself within a body of work of nearly fifty perfumes, several of which feature an incense note, and one of which is an orange blossom soliflore; coming up with an accord that’s different from everything else on the market, all the while juggling rich, complex materials that sometimes interact in unexpected ways, despite his in-depth knowledge of them.

Still, I can’t help thinking some good might come out of this creative snag, frustrating as it is at the moment, if only because I’ve found out how much he cares about the project. That he trusts me in moments of doubt. And that I trust him now more than I ever have, precisely because of this moment of doubt.

Bertrand, when you had the intuition about the orange blossom and incense accord, it was immediate, obvious. I have absolute trust in that intuition, that of a great perfumer. And in the accord, because it exists in reality. You’ll get there, and your perfume will be heartbreakingly beautiful. Actually, you know what? Même pas peur.

D.