39

‘Come on … concentrate! You’re hopeless … Hey, will you just concentrate?’

Bertrand, Pascale and I are sitting at a round table, looking for all the world as though we are gearing up for a poker game. Bertrand’s been dealing the blotters. He’s teasing me because I keep getting them mixed up or dropping them as I try to put them in the right order and spread them out in a fan.

‘That’s because I don’t play cards. I hate losing too much.’

‘Listen to her … She hates losing. What’ll we hear next?’ he chuckles.

I give him a little kick.

‘Hey, I may be hopeless with blotters, but as soon as it’s hot enough, I’ll show you I know how to handle a real fan. It’s not for sissies.’

Maybe he’s had a really nice weekend, maybe he’s happy with the way Duende is going or maybe he’s just happy to see me. For whatever reason, Bertrand is in a particularly cheerful mood today. So am I, for that matter. It’s only been a week since our last session, and it’s exhilarating to be moving forward so quickly again. I’m not even cross at him for being half an hour late. It gave me the chance to have a chat with Pascale. It was the first time I could discuss my work with Bertrand with someone who is part of the process. Pascale is the one who’s been weighing the formulas of the successive mods for the past six months; she’s lived behind the scene and seen how Bertrand deals with other projects and clients … Since my conversations with Mathilde Bijaoui and Antoine Lie, who both said how important it had been for them to have been trusted by their ‘muses’, I’ve been worried about being too much of a pain for Bertrand. About not trusting him enough; about sticking my nose too far into what was essentially his business. But Pascale said we were doing just fine as far as she could tell. I knew what I wanted, was all. She hadn’t heard any complaints. I could have hugged her then; and again when she told me total strangers had been asking her what she was wearing when she tested N°90. So I was in a pretty buoyant mood myself when Bertrand showed up, boasting he’d swum two kilometres that morning ‘with his fingers in his nose’ – the French equivalent of ‘without breaking a sweat’, but it conjured a particularly vivid picture of Le Nez flapping his elbows in the municipal swimming pool …

*   *   *

I’ve finally managed to spread out my blotter fan to compare N°90 to mods 96 to 101. In some of the new mods, the waxy effect is more sharply defined in the top notes: Bertrand has introduced aldehyde C12 lauric, which will also help with the diffusive power. And, as promised, he’s tried out two different animal materials, African Stone, which brings out the woody incense notes, and civet, which is smoother and rounder.

Duende has evolved into a strange, unclassifiable creature Bertrand calls an ‘oriental cologne’, which sounds like an olfactory oxymoron. But in fact, it does seem to cut through the full spectrum of fragrance families: fougère, green floral, white floral, oriental, woody incense … Just about everything but chypre.

‘It’s even got masculine, aromatic effects! That doesn’t bother you, I hope?’ jokes Bertrand.

‘Certainly not. But what’ll Michael Edwards say?’

‘He’d call it a floriental.’

Michael Edwards is the author of Fragrances of the World, a classification designed to assist marketing and sales staff, based on a ‘fragrance wheel’ comprising fourteen different families defined by a set of dominant notes. The ‘floral oriental’ family, ‘soft, spicy orange flower [that] melds with piquant aldehydes and sweet spices’ on an ambery base, is descended from the 1905 L’Origan; it includes L’Heure Bleue, Bal à Versailles and Poison.

‘Mind you, it’s a floriental because I wanted it to be a floriental!’

I stare at him blankly. Meaning?

Bertrand is pulling a typically Duchaufourian face at me: the cocky, slightly defiant look of the mischievous kid who’s fooled the grown-ups.

‘I’ve taken the easy road by putting in vanilla. I wanted to give it twice as many chances of being successful, of living on … So … Allez, hop! I orientalized it.’

True, I have been after him to take it easy on the musk and vanilla; I am concerned that the combo will nudge Duende too close to some of Bertrand’s other compositions, and make it a little too commercial if the balance isn’t just right. But I’ve got to acknowledge that we did need the musk to make the floral note hold longer: I’ve been testing N°90 on skin and it’s definitely an improvement. Still, I don’t see why he’s cocking his head on his shoulder, looking as though he’s about to stick chewing gum into my hair.

‘Why are you looking at me like that? Come on, spit it out!’

‘Well, vanilla wasn’t necessarily part of the story.’

Tsk, tsk … Once more, Mr D. is ever so slightly rewriting history.

‘Oh, please! It was totally part of the story from the moment I brought in Habanita!’

‘True. You’re right’, he nods.

‘Come on, concentrate!’ I tease him.

*   *   *

While Pascale is weighing a couple of new mods, we go down to the café next door, pick a table in the sun and order cheeseburgers – they’ll be vile, but the health-food lunch bar doesn’t have a terrace – still excitedly discussing Duende. I tell Bertrand that while wearing N°90, images of gardens and flowers kept flitting through my mind; memories of sucking nectar out of flowers …

‘Exactly! Nectar! That’s very important. Nectar makes you think of honey, which makes you think of beeswax – bees adore orange blossom.’

He explains that he works with words as much as he does with smells. Words echo other words, colours, and colours turn into odours, situations, places …

‘… like that plaza full of orange trees in full blossom buzzing with drunken bees. From there you go to beeswax candles, from candles to incense.’

It all comes back to what we were discussing almost a year ago on this very terrace: the ‘remote and accurate’ connections that underlie poetic images. How you intuitively grasp the connections between the smells in a story to create a form, even before becoming aware of all those connections. How, once you become aware of them, you develop the consistency between the olfactory and the narrative, and strengthen the connections so that they are subconsciously perceptible to the wearers.

I remember the email I sent to Bertrand after he’d almost given up on Duende: I’d told him that the orange blossom and incense accord was good because it existed in reality. It’s not a matter of copying reality, but of deciphering the secret harmonies of smells that have existed together for mankind over the centuries. How long has incense been burned in countries where orange trees grow? How long have beeswax candles been lit at the same time as incense? This is what we were telling each other about oud, incense and smoke the other day: that they connect us with smells we’ve lost and sometimes don’t even remember losing. Perfumes rouse those unconscious, age-old memories. They connect the remotest past to our deepest soul, our soul to the body, and our body to the world. What are those connections between the smells of our bodies and, say, the fattiness of aldehydes or beeswax, the lactones and indolic notes in white flowers, the animalic whiff of civet or African Stone, if not ways of reaffirming the continuum between ourselves and the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms?

Modern civilization has ripped us out of that continuum: perfumers, if their work is true and free, restore us to it. But to do so, they must seek out that truth in their own stories: for Duende, the beautiful memories of church incense that allowed Bertrand to transcend the hardships of a strict Catholic upbringing. When I told him my story, those memories connected with mine: with the voluptuousness of Catholic rites transcended into the glory of a spring night in the south of Spain. What is most intimate is what will speak to others. Perfumers build the labyrinth in which we lose ourselves out of all those secret harmonies and connections. They bring out its beauty: reinvent it so that it can be felt by all. ‘The poetic act’, the French poet Mallarmé wrote at the turn of the century, ‘consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.’

Now that we’ve found the rhymes, the thread that would guide us into the labyrinth and out, I ask Bertrand whether this is how he envisioned the fragrance when we first set out.

‘Well, yes, pretty much. What’s incredible is that it’s all in there. All the elements we started out with. We just learned to put the puzzle together.’

We pick at our cheeseburgers for a while in silence.

‘Incredible,’ Bertrand finally lets out. ‘C’est ça, un parfum.’

That’s what a perfume is …

So we talk about other things as we finish our lunch; of the way you have to come to terms with the past to move into the future, and first it’s about our lives but then it leads us back to what we do for a living. Bertrand tells me he’s reconsidering things he’d rejected earlier on in his career. He’s starting to break free, he says, working on ‘crazy accords’ he hopes his clients will accept; making his move into new territories.

That’s when I make mine. I hadn’t meant to bring it up today, but all of a sudden it seems like the right moment to ask him whether he’d be game to work with me again on another perfume, if the right project came along.

He would. This time, I don’t faint.