32

When Bertrand and I came to this café before Christmas, we’d had the whole banquette to ourselves. Now we’re stuck between the window and the railing of the staircase leading down to the cellar, an icy draft rides up my skirt each time the door opens and a dozen people are howling over the screeching coffee machine. But Bertrand’s got a new trainee and there’s no space for the three of us in the lab, so we’ll have to make do with this set-up.

Nine phials are lined up on our tiny round table. Guess the new trainee is helping. It’s been a month since we last met. I came back from Canada with a bad case of flu and stayed curled up in a foetal position in a puddle of sweat for a week. When I emerged, as I had had no news from Bertrand, I figured he was swamped with work and gave him a breather; I’d wait and see if he contacted me of his own accord. I broke down first – there was no earthly reason why I should be following the wait-for-the-guy-to-call rule with him – and found out he thought I’d been giving him the silent treatment. So he’d gone ahead and showed the latest mods to the team from L’Artisan Parfumeur. He only told me about the meeting after the fact. They loved it and they’re considering launching it next year.

Well, Mr D., I’m not popping the cork off the bottle of Moët yet. I’m delighted the team loved it. But, for the time being, the only thing that matters to me is what we want Duende to become, I tell Bertrand once we’ve settled in front of our hot chocolates. I don’t want anyone else interfering with the process. Not even the client.

Bertrand seems a little taken aback by my reaction. I’m surprised myself at how territorial I’m feeling, though to be perfectly honest I’m probably just irked at having been kept out of the loop – but where’s my place in that loop? ‘Muse’ isn’t a position on organizational charts. He explains that it was just a quick meeting and that he only showed them two mods, the one I’d left with before Christmas and the latest one, but none of the intermediary versions. There are things he’ll want to go back to.

‘You’ll see. You tell me.’

Now that was a deft bit of defusing … So while Bertrand finishes numbering the blotters, I tell him how I made my parents smell Duende on the day I left Canada. He asks me if I’ve ever figured out why my father was so intolerant of perfume.

‘Maybe he’s really hyperosmic, who knows? Or maybe he’s just a control freak.’

‘I guess a lot of old-school scientists were like that,’ Bertrand muses. ‘Like my dad. Everything had to be controlled; everything had to be rational. Now that I think of it, I’d never realized this before but my father never wore fragrance either.’

Bertrand’s father was a pedologist. At first I think it’s got to do with feet, but no, that’s podology. Pedology is a branch of geology, the science of soils. The late Dr Duchaufour was one of the leading authorities in the field.

Swapping childhood memories always does the trick, doesn’t it? Once Bertrand and I have performed our bonding ritual, we can resume plotting the progress of Duende. There aren’t nine mods but seven: N°29 is just a base and N°34 has gone AWOL. All are tweaks on N°28 and running through them is like watching the scent morph as the different materials twist, blow up or tamp down its accords.

In mods 30 and 31, the incense note is produced by new materials (incense absolute instead of the essential oil, and the synthetic molecule cedramber); mods 32 and 33 have an added tobacco note produced by cistus. Bertrand hasn’t smelled them for three weeks and he’s pleasantly surprised by the way they’ve evolved after macerating. Like all resinous materials, cistus has the effect of a lacquer, smoothing out and polishing the other notes. This is where we wanted to go: darker, deeper inside the chapel.

Mod 35: the diesel fumes of rose oxide suck the life out of the orange blossom. Interesting, but not the story. Scrap it.

Mod 36: powder puff. Musk, trailing its usual partner-in-crime: vanilla. He quite likes it. I don’t. It smells too old-fashioned and, besides, I tell him, he should be giving musk and vanilla a break. He’s been using them a lot lately. Scrap it.

Mod 37: ‘Black pepper, pink pepper, incense: boom, boom!’ Bertrand says about his new take on the top notes. The two peppers pull the incense upwards. The pink one adds sparkle with a natural feel, brightness without resorting to zesty notes. But even though there’s only one per cent of the synthetic musk muscenone in the formula, we both find it annoyingly invasive. ‘That baby-skin effect bugs me,’ Bertrand grumbles.

We settle on a combination of 37 for its more incensey top notes and 33 for its darker base. Duende shouldn’t be too dark but, still, a lot more should be happening in the base notes. Whatever became of the African Stone, for instance? No problem, Bertrand says, we can work it back in. There’s a rusty, old-penny facet that’ll go towards conjuring the blood note.

‘And then there’s also that old church incense formula you brought me … I keep going back to it. It’s a perfume in itself!’

In early December, when Bertrand was struggling with the incense note, I’d done an internet search on Catholic incense and come up with a formula from 1834, a blend of several resins and balsams, sandalwood, cloves, cardamom and, surprisingly, lavender.

I’m really getting the hang of this muse business, aren’t I? Still, we aren’t there yet. At the rate we’re going, and taking into account Bertrand’s punishing workload, we agree Duende won’t reach its final form for another two months at the earliest.

So: February … March … April. 22 April. One year to the day after our first session. In 2011, 22 April falls on Good Friday. Duende must be done on time for the Madrugada.

*   *   *

‘What if I took you to Seville for Easter, then?’

I’ve been updating Monsieur on Duende’s progress. We pause to breathe in the briny, nutty aroma of our steamed scallops in seaweed. The chef of Le 21, Paul Minchelli, is a temperamental Corsican and you can’t get a table at his hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the rue Mazarine unless you know the secret handshake. Several major perfumers do – Jacques Polge and Jean-Claude Ellena are clients – as well as art dealers, writers, movie stars and film directors. And Monsieur.

‘I’d love to! There couldn’t be a better way to end the story.’

As soon as I’ve said the words I wonder which story I had in mind.

Seville was what drew Monsieur to me in the first place twelve years ago: I’d just published an erotic short story set there and its contents were discussed at the dinner party where we met at a mutual friend’s house. After that, I didn’t hear back from Monsieur for six months and then, all of a sudden, he wanted to meet me to discuss the story, which he’d finally got round to reading. Then I met Monsieur all over France and Europe but we never made it to Seville. Going there to measure up Duende against its original inspiration sounds like a plan.

What will happen after that, supposing Monsieur really does take me to Seville, which I’ll only believe once I’m aboard the airplane? I can’t see past the moment when Bertrand and I will say, Stop, we’re done, the perfume has become what it asked to become … For a year, what’s been driving me is the thrill of meandering in the labyrinth. Now that L’Artisan Parfumeur has peered down into it, I realize I’ll soon be airlifted out. Duende will no longer be the thread of my journey. Seville’s heart-rending beauty could be the knife I use to cut loose.

But why bother to go to Seville? Won’t Duende take me there instantly once it’s done?

Short answer: no. In fact, the next time someone brings up the perfume-as-instant-flashback cliché, I may scream. Along with asking me whether I’ve read Patrick Süskind’s Perfume or seen the film, it’s the first thing anyone mentions when I say I write about fragrance. How it brings back memories. And then, unfailingly, the most overworked piece of pastry in the history of literature splashes into the teacup: ‘I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…’

In France, any object that carries you back to your past is dubbed ma madeleine de Proust, ‘my Proustian madeleine’: it is probably the only thing most people know about the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time. So when the word ‘madeleine’ comes up in a conversation about fragrance, it is some vague notion of the Proustian epiphany that is referenced rather than the patron saint of perfumers (the small scallop-shaped sponge cake was actually named after the maid of the Marquise Perrotin de Baumont, Madeleine Paulmier, who invented it in 1755). The madeleine, still commonly served at breakfast or tea, has transmogrified into a master key to involuntary memories.

But is the ‘madeleine effect’ verifiable? Are olfactory memories really more emotion-laden, more indelible, more immediate and more accurate than those conjured by the other senses, as most people seem to believe? In What the Nose Knows, the sensory psychologist Avery Gilbert sums up four decades of research into odour-evoked memories and concludes they aren’t: ‘rates of forgetting [are] the same as for sights and sounds’. Memories of odours are ‘subject to fading, distortion and misinterpretation’, just like any other. In that respect, smell has no special status. According to Dr Gilbert, the element of surprise may be what makes olfactory memories so striking: ‘Because odor memories accumulate automatically, outside of awareness, they cover their own tracks. We don’t remember remembering them. The sense of wonder that comes with the experience is, like all magic, an illusion based on misdirection.’ In Éloge de l’odorat (‘In Praise of the sense of smell’), Dr André Holley, a neuroscientist at the Université Claude Bernard in Lyons, puts it another way: what’s so striking is ‘the contrast between the immateriality of the cause and the emotional strength of the effect’. Whereas the ‘visual creatures we are’ can summon images from the past more readily, the encounter with a smell is ‘rare, more unexpected and therefore more precious’.

I can’t deny the evocative powers of smells, and I won’t. It may well be that my relationship to perfume has been perverted by my approach to it, or that after years spent alongside Parisian intellectuals I’ve caught their bent for taking the opposite view of anything that sounds like received wisdom. The fact is that the cliché of perfume-as-petite-madeleine riles me because it demotes its object to the rank of smell and reduces it to being the instrument of an emotional experience. What has been bypassed is intelligence: the madeleine school of scent appreciation isn’t meant to make you think, but feel, which costs a lot less effort. But the perception of perfume is not a purely emotional experience. Fragrance is a cultural, artistic construct, with its own rules and history. As a product caught up in history, it adds new scents to the catalogue of memories; as an artistic product, it plays on cultural memories and connotations as well as on the personal experiences of the perfumer or the wearer. ‘Wouldn’t a radically new smell be threatened with a protracted purgatory in the register of bad smells, because it’s not in accordance with memorized sensations?’ writes Dr Holley. ‘It is only through a subtle association of the known and the novel that new olfactory forms can be adopted.’

Memories are the ingredients of perfume-making, but the end result shifts them, inserts them within a new form, much as the madeleine leads not back to Marcel Proust’s past but ahead, towards In Search of Lost Time: ‘Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.’

Proust could have stayed at home spreading cake crumbs on his bed while mawkishly reminiscing about his childhood. Instead, he fished out his soggy madeleine and went on to raise ‘the vast structure of recollection’. It was his future as a writer he was seeing in that teacup.

I’m not asking that much from Duende and, besides, my experience of orange blossom and incense is the very opposite of the Proustian flashback: I was aware of smelling them at the time and I committed them to memory. I can summon the smells mentally and identify them in a fragrance. Perhaps if someone captured the headspace of the Semana Santa, re-created it and plunged me into it unawares, I’d experience the same uncanny déjà-smelled feeling as le petit Marcel and flail helplessly, caught in a temporal short-circuit, as I try to identify the source of my emotion … In fact, it did happen to me once, with the orange trees in Marrakech.

But I know full well that my perpetually mutating chimera won’t actually smell of the Semana Santa or carry me back there. I don’t expect it to. I don’t even want it to. Just as the story I told Bertrand last year is a reinvention so vivid it has crushed my memory of what truly happened on that night in Seville, Duende is not a travel memoir but a piece of fiction writing itself as we go along. It isn’t taking me back in time. It is moving me forward.

Duende is the future memory of what I’m living now.