38

It may have been a mistake to leave me alone for so long with Duende 63. It’s been over two months since our last session and now N°63 is Duende for me, despite its technical flaws. But Bertrand finds it too harsh and dry, so he’s been toning down the incense and spices and reconsidering our decision to leave out musk: he feels he needs it to wrap the floral note, smooth it out, give it more amplitude.

But every time I pick out a blotter without looking at the numbers, it’s to find I’ve fallen back on N°63: I can’t wrap my nose around the new mods. Perhaps I’m a little flustered by the set-up. Today, we are not in the lab but in the adjacent office so that Bertrand’s trainee Pascale can sit in. A pharmacist from Marseilles who decided to change careers and attended a perfumery school in Grasse, she is a sweet, considerate person and I feel comfortable with her. But the fact that this work session is not one-to-one gives it a different tone, more focused and technical. It is a normal part of the process as the term of our project draws nearer, but one that is making me feel a little dispossessed. Duende is becoming a product.

Bertrand’s also lobbed a curve ball at me in the form of N°72, a variation on N°63 to which he’s added clary sage and ambroxan, a woody-ambery material present in many masculine fragrances, to boost the tobacco note.

‘It’s not Habanita,’ he explains, ‘but it’s the cigarette the guy is smoking as he feels you up in the crowd. I want to keep that note. It goes with the story.’

Pascale says strangers stopped her to ask her what she was wearing the day she skin-tested N°72, though she’d sprayed it on hours earlier. Bertrand adds he tried it out on skin as well and that it’s got the volume and persistence that are missing from N°63.

I’m torn. I can tell he is very interested in this new direction and I’m tempted to go along with it because, after all, the man knows what he’s doing … but no. Much as I enjoy the tobacco top note, I find the ambroxan too masculine. Besides, it swallows up what I love most about the opening of N°63, that gorgeous ethereal green whoosh that feels so exhilarating when I first apply it. If the idea had come earlier in the game, I might have gone with it, I tell them. At this point, it strays too far from the options we’ve taken. As Frédéric Malle once told me, you can’t kiss every pretty girl you see in the street.

After much discussion and comparative sniffing, we settle on N°90, which seems the best balanced and most radiant of the new mods. I spray it on one arm and N°63 on the other: as I hold them out to Bertrand and Pascale I must look like the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro … N°90 is better rounded, smoother and more diffusive than N°63, and I do find it delicious, even undeniably gorgeous, but I feel it doesn’t have quite as much bite.

Bertrand decides to lay both formulas flat; he’ll copy them down side by side so he can see where he’s at and what’s been lost along the way, in order to readjust dosages and reintegrate materials he’s dropped. Pascale dictates the concentration and quantities, which are expressed in parts per ten thousand; the materials are grouped both according to their effect (citrus, green, floral) and volatility (as top, heart and base notes). This is the first time I see the formula in full detail. Oddly, instead of dispelling the romance of perfume-making, hearing this long, austere list is a disconcertingly emotional experience: as each material appears in turn, the formula conjures the whole history of Duende, as though it were a coded transcription of a year in my life. I remember the day they came up, the mood we were in, the things we told each other …

Beeswax? I mentioned it right after I’d expressed doubts about the first two proposals, when I told Bertrand about the kids who collected the wax from the penitents’ candles to make balls. That day I took him back with me to Seville with my words; he said he felt he’d lived that experience, maybe in another life.

Iso-amyl salicylate? The blood note Bertrand introduced last May after I’d given him Lorca’s book on duende.

Algix and glycolierral? Sitting at a café terrace before the August holidays, a little bored by the names of all those chemicals, and being asked by Bertrand if I knew what I wanted.

Magnolan? Flint and floral. This came up in September just before I went to visit Olivier Maure at Art et Parfum near Grasse, and I feel a flutter in the stomach at the idea that I’ll be going back when the first industrial batch of Duende is weighed.

Tagetes, angelica and cassis? They appeared a year ago in May and made a comeback in October, the day I was cross with Bertrand for being away so much and not listening to me, and I brought in Habanita and N°5, and the scent took a new direction, and almost came to a screeching halt.

African Stone? I made him smell it the day I told him that, in Monsieur’s opinion, the scent wasn’t erotic enough. It was dropped between 63 and 90, though not on purpose – Bertrand just forgot about it. He’ll put it in again, but he’ll also experiment with civet.

Vanilla? The Moan.

Black and pink pepper? They appeared just as I came back from the land of the perfume ban. Who knows, maybe they were a wink from my pepper-addicted father.

Luisieri lavender? The first time I felt true emotion when I smelled Duende, because lavender reminded me of the beginnings of my affair with Monsieur, but also because Duende went from being a project to being a perfume that day.

I’m also meeting the new players. There are two types of synthetic musk: ambrettolide because it’s got the effects of ambrette, a lovely natural material that contains vegetal musk but also smells of Poire William liqueur, and therefore reinforces the rum in the top notes as well as the waxy effects. Globalide for its tobacco and amber facets. He also added styrax to reinforce the waxy, smoky and balsamic ‘candle and chapel’ notes.

Duende is becoming a fairly complex product with its forty-three materials. Each of the groups plays a role in the story. Citrus, green and floral notes for the orange tree. Lavender for the smell of the colognes in the crowd. A tobacco effect for their cigarettes and Habanita. Incense and its boosters, like pink and black pepper, along with beeswax, for the religious procession. And the oriental base with vanilla, benzoin, styrax and tonka bean, again for Habanita.

Bertrand combines the two formulas to get back some of the bite and vibrancy of N°63 while keeping the lushness of N°90. But the new formula won’t be weighed immediately. I’ll have to wait until next week to smell the result. Bertrand suggests grabbing a cup of coffee next door: it’s been a fairly intense session, he needs a break and we haven’t had a chance to catch up in a month.

I miss the long, rambling conversations we had when we started meeting. Since that time, his career has taken a great leap forward. Now he’s so busy he’s wondering whether he won’t have to turn his one-man operation into a proper company. But it’s not just that. His status is shifting. ‘Bertrand Duchaufour’ is becoming a brand, and that brand is starting to get top billing, above his clients’. It might not yet have made him a household name, but that may be changing too. When we met in that radio studio, it was his first live media appearance. Now he’s just taken part in two prime-time television travel pieces. This type of exposure is a fairly new phenomenon: up to now, only the in-house perfumers of luxury brands had crossed over into the mainstream media.

My own position within the perfume world has evolved as well over this past year. With Duende, I’ve taken the leap from the virtual world into the lab. Nothing will ever be more enthralling than the first step I’ve taken through the looking glass, but now that I’ve taken it, I want to go further. Bertrand has taught me so much: he’s trained me to become … what? Étienne de Swardt of État Libre d’Orange calls himself a parolier du parfum, a ‘perfume lyricist’. I could go along with that.

Bertrand shakes his head:

‘No. You’re not a perfume lyricist. You’re a critic.’

Granted. But then, in the sense the writers at the Cahiers du Cinéma were critics in the 50s.

If perfumery is to be compared to an art form, I suggest to Bertrand, I’ve been thinking it should be cinema. Not because they create similar objects but because both have evolved along similar lines. Modern perfumery and movies were born around the same time, in the late 19th century. Both quickly burgeoned into an industry that aimed to draw in the public with appealing, widely available products, in contrast to the other arts, which were just then moving into the avant-garde and its assaults on aesthetic conventions. Both industries developed a system in which the creative forces were studio staff, compelled to express themselves within commercial constraints. And both found keen observers from outside the seraglio. For Hollywood, it happened in France when all the American movies produced during World War II finally made it across the Atlantic at the same time after the war. A group of passionate young critics discovered that directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray had managed to develop and express their personal style and formal language despite working within the strict constraints of Hollywood: they called their stance the politique des auteurs, ‘the politics of the author’.

Perfumery took fifty years to catch up and produce its equivalent of the politique des auteurs; it was certainly harder going since, unlike directors, perfumers only started getting credited over the last decade. But today it has one, of sorts. Just like the Cahiers, perfume critics have singled out auteurs, Bertrand among them, tracked their production from one house to another, and analysed their signature style. And although our work together will not turn me into a perfumer in the way that Godard, Truffaut or Rohmer went from writing about movies to directing them – I have no intention of becoming one and I’m nowhere near comparing myself to these great filmmakers – it does open new possibilities. To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, ‘art and the theory of art, beauty and the secret of beauty’, perfumery and the explanation of perfumery, belong to the same continuum.

Whatever the label – ‘lyricist’, critic, writer – I am a perfume lover trying to think through perfume, both in the sense of thinking the matter through, and in the sense that perfume is one of the languages I use to understand the world. In this new realm I am exploring, a vanilla pod can turn into a cigar and a cigar can grow into a bale of hay; the bale can spit out an almond and the almond turn to poison. The magic is conjured by connecting smells to words. Technical knowledge does not dispel that magic. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The more I learn, the stranger and more magical it gets. This is what perfume is teaching me: that once it is unmoored from the product, the process of thinking through perfume need never stop.