Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes. August 2017. 4 p.m. 18°C. Perfume seems to suffuse the air of this hillside town, the heart of the fragrance industry. The headquarters of parfumiers Fragonard fills a four-story building that drops down a steep hillside from the street. Entering at the top floor, one descends past a museum of perfume into a retail area whose vendeuses swim in a miasma of rose, jasmine, vanilla, cedar, and orange blossom. Perfume must permeate their flesh like a marinade. Lucky the lover who welcomes such a living bouquet to his bed.
FABRE D’ÉGLANTINE WAS BARELY IN HIS GRAVE WHEN BLIGHT FELL on his vision of a metropolitan France ruled in accordance with nature and the seasons.
Its centerpiece had been Floréal, the second month of spring, beginning on April 20 and ending on May 19. As the flower to signify its first day he naturally chose the rose, emblem of his own erratic career.
In doing so, he betrayed an ignorance of botany. Few roses bloom so early in the year, nor survive the often blustery weather. As Shakespeare wrote, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” The season is more appropriately celebrated by Floréal 7, our April 26, a day when traditionally one presents a posy of the modest muguet, or lily of the valley, to a loved one. Sellers with baskets of the flower appear on street corners across France, encouraged by a long-standing convention that any money they make is tax-free.
When Louis Lafitte painted the image representing Floréal for the illustrated edition of the Republican calendar, he knew better than to include a rose. Instead he framed his demure brunette with muguet and another early bloomer, lilac.
His painting is more fashion plate than pinup. The model’s white dress, in the so-called Empire style, falls in soft folds from a band under her breasts. It recalls the shepherdess chemise dress so scandalously worn by Juliette Récamier in the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
To promote Paris as the capital of a new world state as mighty as Greece or Rome, Madame Récamier posed reclining in a faux-Roman interior, wearing a gown similar to the one shown by Lafitte but with her feet shockingly bare. To Britons, these filmy, semitransparent gowns, equivalents of the modern nightdress, were yet more evidence of France’s depravity.
For all the promise of green shoots pushing out of the ground and babies, conceived in the long winter nights, fidgeting to be born, as many factors in May hint at disasters to come. T. S. Eliot would stigmatize April as “the cruellest month,” but May is the better candidate, particularly as far as France is concerned. Historically, politically, culturally, agriculturally, May has traditionally meant bad news.
For those on the land, May was filled with foreboding. What if grain stored since the harvest had become damp and spoiled, as happened in 1787? What if the weather brought hail, a late frost, even a hurricane? Would the young crops survive?
Many seeds that germinate in May are social rather than agricultural. They betray a sense of the month as troubled, portentous with hints of incipient violence. Communists and socialists celebrate May 1, May Day, as a workers’ holiday, a pretext for protests and demonstrations. It has also historically been the month when armies come back to life and old conflicts are reaffirmed. Officers shake out their uniforms and load their weapons, ready to march when the ground thaws. Wives and lovers are sent back to the kitchen. “Silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies,” wrote Shakespeare in Henry V. “Now thrive the armourers.”
A recital of French disasters that took place in May makes sobering reading:
In May 1789 the peasantry and middle class first demanded a voice in government. By July, France was in flames.
In May 1815 Napoléon, having escaped from Elba, raged across Europe in a rampage that ended at Waterloo in June. In May 1821, he would die in exile on Saint Helena.
In May 1871 mass slaughter ended the brief anarchist uprising known as the Paris Commune.
And in May 1968 the students of Paris erupted into the streets.
Would these events have taken place in August or November? Almost certainly not. In May, the blood is hot. Testosterone is in the air. But as the season changes, so does the resolve. Napoléon’s return lasted a mere hundred days, the Commune only twenty-eight. The événements de ’68 began on May 3 but petered out by June 23.
In the half century following the death of Napoléon, liberty, equality, and fraternity were eclipsed by wine, women, and song. Paris became the courtesan of Europe. To illustrate the month of Floréal in a calendar published in the 1880s, the artist Lucien Métivet showed two dandies bantering with a couple of flower girls selling much more than violets. In another almanac image of 1896, a pretty Jacobin shows shapely ankles as she pounds a revolutionary drum.
Even after the Republican calendar was discontinued, echoes remained. Political commentators used the old names for the months to remind those listening of what the English call “the bad old days” and modern Germans, in speaking of the Nazi era, call “in früheren Zeiten” (former times). Historians refer to the coup d’état that brought Napoléon to power by its Republican date, Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799), while because Robespierre was overthrown on Thermidor 9 of Year II (July 27, 1794), any such upheaval within a revolution is called a Thermidorean reaction and its prime movers Thermidoreans.
Yet “Thermidor” survives today mainly as a culinary term. In 1896, chef Auguste Escoffier was in charge of the kitchen at Maison Maire, a restaurant near the newly opened Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. Among his signature dishes was a concoction of lobster in a cream-and-cognac sauce. Since the theater had recently had a success with a revival of Victorien Sardou’s play Thermidor, about the fall of Robespierre, Escoffier renamed the dish lobster thermidor in its honor.
The almanac format could be adapted to even less creditable ends. In 1929 the Paris surrealists, in order to raise money for their embattled Dadaist colleagues in Brussels, published an erotic almanac. Called simply 1929, it included salacious poetry by André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Louis Aragon and was illustrated with four photographs by Man Ray. They show an anonymous but still recognizable Ray and his companion Alice Prin, aka Kiki, engaged in sexual intercourse. Almost all the copies were seized by French Customs, making this one of the most sought-after surrealist items.
And Fabre d’Églantine? He wasn’t entirely erased from history. In 1888 Paris assigned him at least a toehold on immortality. A street in the twelfth arrondissement, near the Picpus convent where so many victims of the Terror lie buried, was named in his honor.