I BECAME THE PERFUME critic of The Times in 2006 owing to a series of coincidences. No one was more surprised than I was. I’d studied in China and worked in Japan and gotten a master’s in international economics and Japanese political economy, then—credit the haphazardness of life—became a science journalist for The Atlantic. This led me, after a chance encounter in the Gare du Nord train station in Paris with a biophysicist and perfume genius, to write a book called The Emperor of Scent about the creation of a new, radical theory of olfaction. I’d been talking to The New Yorker about possible projects—I’d proposed articles on Chinese and Indian economic development, Japanese politics—and one day they counterproposed, to (a bit) my consternation. They were interested in my writing a piece on the creation of a perfume. Its development, from the first instant to the launch. Behind the scenes, real time, full access.
I’d never considered such a project. As a journalist, I was an Asianist, and I’d happened to do a book that touched on perfume; I assumed that that was finished. But OK, I said, I’d take a look.
I started going to houses. Not one of them would do it. I proposed the idea to an American designer. I had a meeting in a midtown skyscraper with the designer’s PR person. “We’d love to have six thousand words in The New Yorker,” she said straightforwardly, then after assessing me for an instant added, “but it would contradict our entire public strategy, the myth that he makes his own scents.” She said no. They all turned me down—Givenchy, Estée Lauder, Kenneth Cole, Dior, Jo Malone. The Burberry PR rep, baffled, whined repeatedly into his cell phone, “I don’t understand, you want to watch them make a perfume? …” Then, his neurons overtaxed, he simply hung up. Chanel considered the project seriously but then, radio silence. Guerlain reacted with shocked horror; it was unthinkable. Armani passed. Ralph Lauren’s PR person never even bothered to respond.
At one point someone mentioned Hermès. I dismissed the idea. The house struck me as far too constricted. Two months later, with little expectation, I took the project to Francesca Leoni, then the head of communications for Hermès in the United States. Francesca immediately said, “This is a good project; we’ll do it.”
And then she presented it to Paris.
I don’t know everything they discussed, but I know that JeanClaude was an advocate, that Hélène Dubrule, the company’s international-marketing director, and Stéphane Wargnier, director of international communications, were cautiously favorable, and that Véronique Gautier was the primary opponent. I say this without the slightest resentment; Gautier was protecting the house and its people. It was her job. Here was some journalist, some American. She knew I spoke French—Francesca had strategically placed us together at a cocktail reception for a photography show at the Hermès boutique on Madison Avenue, and we’d begun a conversation—but she didn’t know me. And I wanted total access, for a year. I know that in Paris they were having discussions, and more discussions, and arguments pro and con. Those in favor smoothed feathers and quietly addressed concerns and explained what was this magazine The New Yorker—some of them knew it, others didn’t; “That’s the American equivalent of l’Express, non?” one of them asked me once (uh, not exactly). They (once again) went over the project’s concept and (once again) who I was. And with an expert touch from those in favor, we were all guided to a place where we could see it happening.
Véronique said yes.
Ellena lives near the place in the South of France where, on April 7, 1947, he was born.
His family lived in Grasse. His father was a perfumer. “He had talent,” Ellena would say later with affection, “but he was a dabbler.” He himself had learned his craft from the craft itself, said Ellena, and from the place. As a small boy, he would leave the house at dawn with his grandmother to pick jasmine flowers. Sometimes the women who were harvesting would sit him on a wall and demand that he sing for them. He smelled the combination of jasmine—a flesh-scented flower—and sweat. Cumin smells like human sweat.
At age sixteen Ellena began working in the factory of l’Etablissement Antoine Chiris in Grasse, one of the oldest perfume houses in the world. Then at twenty-one, he left Grasse—it was 1968—for Geneva to enter his formal training to become a perfumer at the Givaudan perfume school.
The daily schedule of the students—committing to memory the smells of synthetic and natural materials, classifying scents, botany, chemistry, learning how to build a jasmine scent, a hyacinth, a rose—he found all of it rather boring. So instead he asked Givaudan master perfumer Maurice Thiboud to give him some real work to do. Thiboud entrusted him with the job of re-creating, from smell, a perfume that was on the market. (It was a common task at the time, a sort of reverse engineering, taking some Dior perfume, say, and copying it, like young artists studiously reproducing Mona Lisas.) Ellena did it. Thiboud gave the young man a second perfume. Ellena re-created that one. (To amuse himself, he also deconstructed it, removing materials, simplifying the scent into its elemental form.) A third, a fourth. After nine months of observing him, Thiboud told Ellena, “I’m taking you out of the school. You’re going to become a junior Givaudan perfumer under me.”
The first perfume he made was a small thing, of orange and patchouli, destined for the African market.
Ellena had not gone to Geneva alone. When he’d been eighteen a few days and she was still seventeen, he had met Susannah Cusak, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She had grown up in Grasse but spoke English with a quick, sharp Irish accent mixed with touches of French. Her family were artist-intellectuals. Her father, Ralph Cusak, was a painter. Her great-uncle was Samuel Beckett. Both were Irishmen who preferred French soil. “I immediately felt comfortable in this universe,” Ellena said. “Susannah liked rational argument. She taught me how to structure myself.” He married her, in 1967, when he was twenty.
It was she who, as he put it, gave him the virus for reading. He read Baudelaire, Laborit. His favorite was Jean Giono. “His books give a sense to life in affirming that life has no logic,” said Ellena. “Like Giono, I believe in the necessity of a spirituality without religion. I don’t bother God, I count on myself, and I believe in people.” He read art books, and in particular he read books on painting. Whatever would feed his developing ideas of perfume. (He got a taste for painting watercolors, something he still does.)
Susannah hadn’t known anyone in the perfume business. “I didn’t know this world,” she said. “It’s part of Jean-Claude, so it’s part of my life. I enjoy Jean-Claude so I enjoyed the perfume.”
In 1966 his father had given Ellena, who was nineteen years old, a perfume industry magazine with an article by Edmond Roudnitska. Roudnitska was a legendary perfumer who single-handedly built much of Dior’s estimable collection: Diorama (1949), Diorissimo (1956), Eau Sauvage (1966), and Diorella (1972). The piece Ellena came across was titled “Advice to a Young Perfumer.” It had changed him. Years later, at age thirty, Ellena went to visit the master in a small town called Cabris, near Grasse. Roudnitska sent him away. “You smell of synthetic musks,” he said. “Come back when you don’t smell of anything.” Ellena returned the next morning, and the two started to talk, and Ellena spent the day in awe.
Jean-Claude and Susannah had a house built in Spéracèdes, a small town of paradigmatic Côte d’Azur idyllic loveliness, and in that house—with a one-year exile in New York for his work with Givaudan—raised two children, a daughter, Céline, who became a perfumer, and a son, Hervé, an architect. The couple still live there. There was no garden by the house, so they created one. So as not to make any aesthetic mistakes, they planted only blue or white flowers. Then they added olive trees, fruit trees—cherry, apricot. Bernard Ellena, Jean-Claude’s brother—also a perfumer—lives nearby. Susannah’s brother lives in the house next door and has a small vineyard. Every year they harvest the grapes and make wine, which is ready by the holidays. At Christmas there are thirty of them.
Hermès had made the decision to take Ellena as the house’s perfumer either very rapidly or very slowly. It depended on what day you asked him.
When the family started discussing Ellena, he was unaware of their interest. They, however, were well aware of him. He had—as an external perfumer at one of the anonymous scent makers called Symrise—just made them a scent.
The creation of a perfume begins with “the brief,” the conceptual road map of the perfume that the designers and luxury houses and the creatives give the perfumers. Basically, the brief is the description of the new scent that they have in their minds. They may convey it to the perfumer in a single sentence. They may write pages. Givenchy created a brief composed of images; the concept of Acqua di Ciò was Armani asking for the smells of Pantelleria in the Sicilian islands, where he has a home. For J’adore, the creatives at Parfums Dior simply told the perfumer Calice Becker to create a fragrance “as sexy as a stiletto and as comfortable as a pair of Tod’s.” (Becker created a multimillion-dollar hit.) The creative team responsible for the perfume Vera Wang saw a giant bouquet of white flowers in her store. The brief they gave the perfumer Harry Frémont was, essentially, to recreate it in a bottle. Briefs can be videotapes, songs, paintings.
Hermès’s briefs were highly determined by a peculiarity of the house. Each year, Jean-Louis Dumas came up with a theme to guide the house. If Hermès launched a perfume that year, like all Hermès products it somehow followed that theme. In 2002, Dumas had chosen the Mediterranean, and Gautier, newly installed, had created her perfume brief from that. She had discovered that the Tunisian-French woman who designed the window displays in Hermès’s boutiques had a garden on the beach not far from Tunis. The brief she sent out to the perfumers at the various Big Boy scent makers (among them Ellena) dictated, “Make me a perfume that smells of the scents found in this Tunisian garden.” Ellena had thought and mixed things and agonized a bit and changed the mix and sent in his submission with those of his competitors. He wound up winning the brief and creating Un Jardin en Méditerranée. A Garden in the Mediterranean. It was Véronique Gautier’s first perfume for Hermès, Ellena’s second. He’d done the delectable, sparkling Amazone for the house in 1989.
Without his knowledge, this had put him on the family’s map.
With the launch of Un Jardin en Méditerranée in early 2002 they started talking internally about him and the possible perfumer’s position. In Paris, Ellena met Jean-Louis Dumas-Hermès, and they chatted. Ellena’s wife, Susannah, was with him, and she remembers Dumas making some typically elegant comments to her: “I like your husband; he’s subtle and intelligent, and it’s nice to work with him.” Ellena was flattered and thought, That’s nice, and then thought nothing more about it. Later he heard (he doesn’t remember how) that Dumas had said to Gautier, “You should go see Ellena; maybe we can do something with him,” and the expression struck him. What could it mean. Probably another commission for an Hermès perfume. Which was great.
“I’d learned,” he would say much later, “that everything at Hermès is slow. Which I like, because I’m slow too. I don’t like fast things. I’d had a few conversations with [Dumas] of a few minutes each. The man looks you right in the eyes like a child, ready to be delighted. He poses pertinent questions, with just a little control on your points as you speak. They never, ever told me they were considering me as in-house perfumer; it simply happened like a level of oxygen rising very slowly in a room, and it’s a tortuous system because you become completely seduced by them and at any moment the bottom can drop out from under you. And at the same time you’re not even sure you want it. Or that they’re even thinking about it. Until they tell you they are.”
In February 2004, Véronique Gautier called him. Not a formal offer. Not yet. Just an idea. Very quiet. Still, she was extremely excited. “Qu’est-ce tu en penses?” So what do you think? He was still caught extremely surprised. “I can be sort of cold in my reactions,” said Ellena, “which is to say that I don’t jump around. It was interiorized.”
Ellena said, We have to see each other. Gautier got on a plane with Stéphane Wargnier to the Côte d’Azur. Wargnier has huge longish curly hair and a presence as large as Gautier’s; they tend to make each other expand with exclamations and observations. Wargnier always appears to have secrets and to be on the excited verge of maybe sharing them with you. Where she dresses with rich sobriety, he tends toward brilliant sapphire blue shirts and touches of exuberant Cuban reds and hot pinks mixed with expensive jackets and strange, exotic shoes. Wargnier’s style is seventh-arrondissement chic with a nod to Rio de Janeiro.
Wargnier had operated at the top of the French luxury goods game for a while and was known in those circles. He had both supporters (for his control and style) and detractors (who found his particular flamboyance less than appealing). He also had, both sides acknowledged, the complete confidence of Jean-Louis Dumas-Hermès.
They met Ellena in a restaurant, La Bastide Saint Antoine. “Jacques Chibois,” said Ellena (referring to the chef), and then added not entirely as an afterthought, “deux étoiles.” Two stars. They talked at dinner about the possibilities. He found it a grave responsibility and was cautiously elated and cautiously unnerved. To be the parfumeur d’Hermès, to represent Hermès. He found them very positive about this role—yes, they said, he’d be used this way, put before the public as an Hermès creator “mais de manière trés soft.” But very gently.
Ellena admired the house, though he wasn’t a consumer of Hermès products. “La mode ne m’intéresse pas,” he said. Fashion doesn’t interest me. (Ellena has a very precise style, about which he is fastidious, a specific equilibrium of formal and informal that could be described as Ralph Lauren in London after pheasant hunting at a corporate retreat. It sounds fussy but actually isn’t at all. It’s mostly the corporate retreat part. Relaxed country slacks, obviously expensive. He never wears a suit or tie but usually a blazer and always a white shirt. Years ago he decided to, as he put it, “show himself in public” in white shirts almost exclusively. “No doubt the purified aspect.”) “I like luxury,” said Ellena once, “although I have no use for signs of status.” He considered this statement, turned it over in his head. Then he recast the proposition. “I’m not interested in luxury, but I’m interested in the quality of life that is led by people who are interested in luxury.” This was much more precise and, thus, pleased him.
The name Ellena means “the Greek,” and though as far as he knows he isn’t, he certainly looks like he carries the genetics of the Aegean. He is neither tall nor short. He possesses thick, slightly wavy Mediterranean black hair, which is becoming chalked, and the confidence of a man who is conscious of being handsome. Ellena, people said to each other, never had trouble pleasing women. Ellena n’a jamais de problème pour séduire les femmes. Sartre once explained why he preferred the company of women: “First of all, there is the physical element. There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty.”
They drank a bottle of local white with a smokey-woody taste, and Wargnier ordered a rouge de Loire, much riper and fuller. To Ellena’s mind, Gautier and Wargnier made it clear he’d have the right to go in whatever direction he wanted with the position of perfumer.
They didn’t, according to Ellena, talk at dinner about JeanMichel Duriez, the in-house perfumer at the house of Jean Patou, and they didn’t talk about Jean-Paul Guerlain “because he wasn’t really present anymore.” They talked about Chanel, about Jacques Polge, but Chanel was not, they decided, the model they wanted to follow. “I know nothing of Polge himself,” said Ellena. “All I know are the products, and I find them creative and reasonable. C’est pas du délire. It’s not crazy brilliance. He is of his time. But they’re good. They’re good. What he makes, what he puts out, it’s …” He applauded with a silent look, then said, “Je n’ai rien à dire.” Nothing more to say.
They asked him how he perceived Hermès. He said he found the products generous in the Mediterranean style, and pure and sophisticated in the Japanese manner. They said, smiling, “On se retrouve.” We’ve got a match. He agreed. He told them that his perfumes were constructed like that, and what he would make for them would be generous, no intrigue, no labyrinth. You had to say, “Ah, that smells good!” That’s Mediterranean. And the way you created them, that had to be methodical. A perfume must be completely thought through, Ellena told them, you had to think every angle, and then you started building. Impeccable materials. No matter the cost. Thought applied to the most sublime materials. Wargnier ordered coffee, and they talked into the night.
At the end of April they sent the contract.
Ellena thought about all the future commissions he would not have from Gucci and Givenchy and all the other luxury houses. Then he thought about Hermès. He said yes. It was the Annunciation of the luxury world.
The announcement of Ellena’s appointment was made by Hermès on May 5, 2004, to go into effect June 7. Everyone in Paris had a comment (New York noted it and went back to its business lunches), though since it was Paris all the comments were off the record and many were tinged, overtly or not, with venom. “It’s excellent to take Jean-Claude,” said one young perfumer, who cleared his throat, squinted at the sky, and added primly, “I’m almost jealous.”
They were openly admiring (“They couldn’t do better than Jean-Claude,” the perfumer Calice Becker said, “an excellent perfumer passionate about his métier and uncompromising on materials”). They were acid (“How nice that Jean-Claude will get to do even more of his favorite thing: talking to reporters”). They were envious (“Can you imagine the freedom?”). They were thoughtful, analytical (“Jean-Louis was very smart about this, and you watch, they’re going to start increasing market share”).
The young hotshot perfumer Francis Kurkdjian commented: “For his career it’s really une belle consécration de travail”—a beautiful acknowledgment of his work. “And a house like Hermès. Well. A true perfumer has an expertise bigger than smelling. He does everything. You think about François Coty; he decided it all, the perfume, the bottle, the ads. Jean-Claude will be able to create a true aesthetic for the house. To know their history and tell their stories in scent.”
The industry discussed his putative salary in the way the French always discuss salaries: as if the KGB were listening. A huge rainmaker perfumer at the Geneva-based Big Boy Firmenich like Alberto Morillas, who landed the biggest commissions from the biggest houses, who sold tons of Firmenich’s expensive captive molecules and brought in millions, must be making €300,000 a year. Surely Jean-Louis was paying at least that. It was universally agreed that Hermès’s taking someone in-house was Good for the Industry. But Ellena? He was a star, like Jacques Cavallier (who had created the lovely Chic, the monster hit L’Eau d’Issey, the monster miss but utterly brilliant Le Feu d’Issey). Or Kurkdjian (Armani Mania, Le Male). Or Becker (J’adore, Beyond Paradise). And he had a star’s usual partisans and critics and detractors. All this was intensified with Ellena because he was a darling of the media, with whom he was famous for having a discours de parfum. Reporters could talk to him. He could talk back. To the degree to which this was rare, in part it was the perfumers, who were not groomed for microphones, and in part the paranoid, control-freak designers, whose dogma was maintaining the official fiction that they created their own scents. They liked perfumers to be kept in cages in dark rooms. This was why some perfumers liked the fact that Ellena spoke.
Naturally there was also bitter commentary—vindictive jealousy is, like beurre blanc, a French speciality—usually punctuated, after a careful glance over the shoulder, with the stab of a hot cigarette. “I don’t think he’s the best perfumer in the world,” said a competitor, “but he’s one who has a thinking about perfumery. He presents himself as the heir of Edmond Roudnitska.” Yes, the competitor acknowledged, Ellena had worked under the master. A frown, a moment’s distraction while jabbing the cigarette briskly over an ashtray. “Roudnitska’s son did that thing recently. For Frédéric Malle? You’ve smelled it? Yes, yes, pretty much without interest.” Back to the subject: “Now Roudnitska, he spoke about perfume creation, and few perfumers talk about what they do. Or are even capable of it. Jean-Claude can. So. You know.” He took a drag, exhaled a filthy cloud. “Bravo. Or whatever.”
There was derision. “I don’t have a big appreciation for him actually,” the creator of several legendary perfumes sniffed. “His behavior is not greatly appreciated by many people.” His behavior? “Ellena has a good reputation with important people but not with people in the perfume industry. He’s a version of a celebrity chef, a media whore, which everyone tries to become today because the world is now based on the media whereas autrefois the perfumer simply focused on his work and le plan créatif.”
It was the standard critique. The Japanese may have evolved the expression “The protruding nail gets hammered down,” but it is as profoundly French as pessimism. “I won’t discuss Ellena,” one dowager of the French industry and creator of several classic perfumes sniffed. “He’s a showman.”
But others took a more philosophical approach. “Grasse is a complicated tribe,” said a middle-aged perfumer. “There’s a real mafia grassoise. You need to understand, for example, that Françoise Caron is the sister of Olivier Cresp, and Françoise is also the ex-wife of Pierre Bourdon.” (Caron is the creator of Eau d’Orange Verte for Hermès, Ungaro’s Apparition, and Armani’s Acqua di Ciò, Cresp made Dune Pour Homme for Dior and Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue, and Bourdon authored Iris Poudre for Frédéric Malle, Dior’s Dolce Vita, and Cool Water, Davidoff’s blockbuster. All three are among the most important perfumers in the industry.) “Henri Robert, Chanel’s second in-house perfumer and author of the brilliant Chanel 19, is the uncle of Guy Robert, creator of Dioressence and Calèche, who is father of François Robert of Lanvin Vetyver. Bernard Ellena, the brother, authored many of the Benetton perfumes, and Céline Ellena, the daughter, is a perfumer as well. These are things you know if you know that tribe.
“And the mothers there! Putain! ‘My son got a Dior commission.’ ‘Well, my son got the new Cerruti.’ ‘Mine won the latest Yves Saint Laurent and drives a BMW.’ Et cetera. Grasse is a tiny little town, and the kids leave for Paris to seek their fortunes. Jean-Claude is grassois, and so they all know him, and when you understand that, you understand everything. Jean-Claude knows how to talk about perfume, and the press is desperate for that, and I’m sorry, but if other perfumers are jealous it’s because very few perfumers can talk about perfume. ‘I put jasmine in rose.’ Well, OK, so what the fuck does that mean. Nothing! And someone comes and explains it, and suddenly he’s a media whore? Please.”
There had been, Ellena said later, two things that really made up his mind, one before he said yes, one after.
The first was something he hadn’t told Gautier and Wargnier at their dinner, but he’d been turning it over in his head. “One of the perfumes I’m obsessed with is Eau d’Hermès, which was created by Edmond Roudnitska, with whom I worked. We must be about forty people in all of France who love it, and that’s including me. I had gone on a television show and spoken about the huge admiration I have for it, the love I have for this scent. A week later I received a package from Hermès. Inside was a bottle of Eau d’Hermès and a note that said, very simply, ‘Thank you.’ And that had really registered in my head. It had marked me. I’d spoken about Guerlain’s Après l’Ondée and a number of other scents. Not … imagining, of course, getting anything from it. It was a TV show! And at Hermès, someone had seen me and noted it.”
The second thing was that in late May, just before the announcement, he’d gone, slightly nervous, to Pantin and approached the hôtesse at the reception desk. She had broken into a big smile and said to him, “Ah, Monsieur Ellena! We’re just so thrilled you’re among us now!” He found it utterly lovely. He thought, And she’s the hôtesse! He told her, “Hermès can thank you for this welcome.”
For 2005, Ellena’s debut year, Dumas chose the house’s annual theme: rivers.
Gautier had decided that Hermès would be creating a collection of fragrances called the Jardins, and so she had spent some tense hours turning it over with Hélène Dubrule, the head of marketing for Parfums Hermès. The two of them formed the core team. Gautier was more Latin and emotional, intensely certain and didactic in the most French of ways: Here was what she believed, here were the reasons, one, two, three, logically and rationally, and then, on top of that, feeling it and explaining it. She wore rich clothing, layers, and one was very conscious of her presence. Dubrule was a counterbalance, with a brisk, professional approach, systematic and analytic. She had the look, the attitude of a manager in an architectural firm in Stockholm and without sharp edges could cut through a situation or a room or a problem, give it a brief assessment, and dispatch it. If Gautier always seemed to be leaning forward into the question before them, daring it to make a move, Dubrule seemed to be coolly inclined away from it, taking its measure, all the better to pinpoint the weaknesses. She could dominate in a chosen instant, make a point that held the room and penetrated, and then let things go on until the next time that she had something to say.
They worked together hand in glove, Gautier theorizing, Dubrule directing the logistics. How, for example, to create the perfume brief out of this theme of Dumas. They put the question before themselves and paced around it, each in her way. What was the most evocative river? The Amazon? said Dubrule. Mm … no. The Ganges. Gautier proposed the Yangtze. The Seine? (This, they dismissed. The Seine is romantic unless you actually live in Paris, in which case it is a combination of a Disney World Main Street in summer, a sewer in winter, and year-round a Parisian version of the Long Island Expressway.)
How about the Nile. They considered this and liked it. And, said Gautier, the perfume’s name: Un Jardin sur le Nil. That was it. Their somewhat relentlessly brief brief was done: The smell of a garden on the Nile. There you went.
Dubrule got to work and ascertained the existence of a large Victorian garden in Aswan called Kitchener. Great, perfect; they decided they’d all go, experience these smells together. Ellena would confirm his concepts, all the materials he’d put together in his imagined garden in his imagined Saharan Egypt. From that, he’d craft Nil.
They left Paris on Egyptian Airlines, economy class, a six-hour flight, on May 10, 2004.
The plane was a spotless new Airbus. Crisp blue seats, white interior, quietly humming. Ellena, Gautier, Dubrule, Stéphane Wargnier, and their team. Gautier had added Quentin Bertoux, a freelance photographer who often worked with Hermès. This quiet, gentle, goateed man in his forties was the documentarian, recorder of the experience, and he loved their little exploratory expedition, loved that they “left all together, like nineteenth-century scientists who would have an archaeologist, a botanist, a guide, an illustrator,” said Bertoux enthusiastically. “The French and English did that a lot. They came back with paintings and statues. The statues they stole. Well,” he added quickly, “we French, we only took back the sketches we made of the things we saw.”
If Bertoux’s job was to observe Ellena, Ellena would have loved, at that particular moment, invisibility. “When I am in the process of creation,” said Ellena, “I never know when things will start. So when they say to me, ‘You’re coming with us up the Nile,’ I find that agonizing. Very, very hard.” He paused, looking intensely at nothing while he thought. “Very hard because right there, they’re delimiting my space”—he made a motion with his hands in the air that described a creative space in front of him, the materials he could use to create the perfume; the materials were his ammunition—”and I experience it as a loss. It’s not necessarily bad, it has to happen, but I experience it as a loss.” He paused, laughed at the irony: “And as a freedom, because in that space, I can do anything.” He shrugged. Here on the plane, he was scared. Would he find the thing, the scent (whatever it was)? “And when they give you a name like this, just hand that to you”—he made a shoving gesture—”and say, ‘Bon, tu viens’ … and you go. It’s good for you to get shaken up. Though terrifying, of course.”
Ellena thought about it for a moment. “The choice imposes itself naturally,” he said grandly, and then added, “although not really. Far from it.” He sighed. “One has the impression that it imposes itself naturally, but in fact I’m biased by my head, my background, my history.”
Véronique Gautier, on the other hand, had no such doubts. This was a woman who evinced certainty in picking up a fork. She had the ironclad opinions of a dreadnought and complete confidence in Ellena. The two were well synced professionally and, personally, connected. In 1998 as director of marketing at Cartier, she had chosen his submission for Cartier’s perfume Déclaration, and he still appreciated her courage in taking what he’d offered, a concept of Russian tea: smoke with woods and cold, not hot, spices. (There are, says Ellena, hot spices and cold spices. Hot is cinnamon. Cold is cardamom.) And she’d taken it even though the focus group had gone slightly against it. So they had bonded over that. The problem was, as both were painfully aware, that this would be his first perfume as Hermès’s in-house perfumer, and the scent they produced would go under an intense public scrutiny, and the stakes were much higher in just about every way. Gautier’s way of dealing with it was to call him on the phone and remind him, in a Cartesian logical manner, that he had done it in the past, “and you’ll do it again.”
Nothing, he replied grimly, is certain.
He’d already built the perfume in his head in France. He’d gone through it step by step: Egypt, therefore heavy smells, therefore some thick jasmine, some pastel orange flowers, plus incense, just do the equation. Had to be. That was the theory. On the other hand, he couldn’t help noticing that here they were on a plane to the real thing.
The Hermès group naturally checked into the legend of Aswan luxury, the Old Cataract Hotel. It is a place that summons visions of Lawrence of Arabia dining with King Fuad, or Trollope taking tea. Sullen Nubian houseboys prowled its vast cool dim white hallways, adding to the Old Cataract’s faded glamour. The travelers stood on its elegant wood porches scented with Kipling, lay on the beds, exhausted from the trip, in its slightly shabby rooms. The rooms had tall, tall ceilings and equally tall French doors that you threw open to let in the Sahara, which sat, menacingly, on the eastern side of the Nile. The Sahara was a gigantic wall of sand ten stories tall. It looked like a wave suspended momentarily, ready at any instant to crash across the river and smash the hotel into splinters.
Ellena sniffed the air of the Sahara, inhaled Aswan’s beautifully dry ancient air, the smell of dust and Exodus with traces of mold and car exhaust, but he found no depth, no thickness, no pastels. He smelled the wind, but it gave him nothing. He felt he couldn’t get his bearings. He was so tense he didn’t sleep for the first two nights. He felt, he said, like he had folded into himself.
Breakfasting from silver trays the houseboys brought—strong dark tea and thick cream, toast like roofing tiles, and rich potted fruit jams—the Hermès team looked out from their wood balconies across the Nile to pale cliffs crowned with massive dusty cakes of ancient stone, now toppled in ruins, some minor Ozymandias lit for convenient tourist viewing from 8:00 P.M. to midnight.
Gautier had also brought a film crew, who were busily making a movie to mark the creation of the perfume, though, as was painfully obvious to everyone, nothing had been created yet. Ellena felt the filmmakers’ presence constantly, like an irritation on the back of the neck, conscious of the void that they were filming. He felt responsible, like a playwright who has promised actors a play while not actually being able to deliver the script. Everyone was very gentle with him, however, didn’t pressure him. He appreciated that. They pretended the tension that was building didn’t exist.
They got up one morning and went to Kitchener—Gautier, Dubrule, Ellena, Wargnier, the film crew, their equipment. They found surprisingly few flowers, a scattering of indigenous species already exhausted by the desert in the dry, dusty garden—was this it? They put on brave faces and started smelling. They tried a plant called la capucine, which has a green sort of anodyne watercress smell (Ellena ate some in front of them), and la lantana, which smells (rather limply) of banana and passion fruit. Kitchener was a formal, ordered garden, the kind Ellena didn’t like. They weren’t talking much, but it was dawning on them that perhaps someone might have done a bit more homework. Ellena smelled fleurs d’acacia, a tree with a soft, sweet, frangipani-like smell, but said to Gautier, “No, this is not our story.” She smelled it and agreed, dismissing it in her decisive manner.
“When I’m en brief situ, I walk around,” he said. “I look, and I watch very closely the actions of the people with me. If someone smells something several times, that means it smells good.” But he saw them smell things once and move away. They went back to the Old Cataract and sat in their rooms before the tall windows and stared out at the giant cresting wave of desert.
The perfume Ellena had built in his head disintegrated and blew away, and now he had nothing.
They walked around Aswan. The sun was so violent they felt assaulted by it. Any exposed skin burned almost instantly. The heat surged over them. They went boating, and Ellena explained a bit to Bertoux about how perfumery worked, talked about ancient Egyptian perfumes, which Bertoux found interesting. “They’re difficult to reproduce, you know,” he said afterward, “because the formulae are not clear.” Ellena watched Bertoux taking pictures, and they talked about photography. Bertoux had to place himself exactly on the edge of the Nile’s water to find interesting images. La limite entre l’eau et la terre. The line between the water and the earth. The smell of the Nile struck him in that its water smelled more like a sea than a river. He thought that was strange.
One night they went to a Nubian restaurant, which they found magnificent, a sort of maison d’hôte, like going to someone’s house.
Another evening, they went to the night markets, the streets full of people and light and food and noise. Ellena wanted to buy some spices in the Aswan souk to bring back to France, and a seller said, “Smell, smell!” and held out dried lotus roots. They were extremely ugly, like the withered hands of old men cut from ancient arms and piled on the stand. He inhaled them and found they had almost no smell, but then he noticed that the seller had macerated some of the roots in simple water in a terra-cotta jar. He smelled the water, and it gave a faint scent halfway between peony and hyacinth. (The ancient Egyptians, Ellena told them, used to do this same maceration of the root in water in these same terra-cotta jars. Today, companies like Firmenich extract lotus root in stainless steel industrial canisters.)
The seller said, “Buy, buy!” so he bought some of the withered roots, though without particular excitement. He jotted it down in a small orange notebook he always carried—the lotus, its scent—and put the notebook back in his pocket.
He took the notebook out again and noted the magnolia trees, their heavy, clammy smell. Magnolias smell like lilies that have been stored, just a few hours too long, in a damp concrete basement. They also smell a bit like sperm.
He found some jasmin sambac, full of molecules called indoles, which smell animalic and overwhelming. Shit is full of indoles, he explained to them, and so are decomposing human bodies—the decay creates indoles; they’re the molecules you smell when you smell a corpse. It’s a feminine scent, the smell of death. A perfume chemist once spoke to me of “the dusty sweet rotting smell of dead bodies.” Calvin Klein’s Eternity, crafted by the legendary perfumer Sophia Grojsman of IFF, is one of the most heavily indolic perfumes around. Ironic, Ellena said to them, that they called it Eternity. He took the orange notebook out of his pocket again and sketched out the bottle for them. But indoles were not their story. They still had no story.
The cameramen were getting up at 6:00 A.M. to film, and one morning they went out on the Nile and came back and mentioned a small island they’d found: very pretty, very cool, a little island in the river. So, nothing else to do, everyone got into a felucca, an ancient four-meter Egyptian sailboat with a little motor and a swooping dagger sail like a hawk’s wing, and Ellena, who loves to sail, steered them up the Nile beneath the ancient ruins under the rock cliffs. “They’re big boats, so you have to have huge arm strength,” he recalled.
The Nile is black, an opalescent black that, when shallow, clears to complete transparency. The party motored past the river’s curves and shallows where wild grasses grew, ornamented with African kingfishers. Falcons veered from bank to bank, water buffalo soaked, nosing the muck beneath towering, soaring walls of dark yellow sand twenty stories tall that dwarfed the little boat. White herons glared at them from under date palms. The Nile was very low, and they could see the pre-dam level in dark bands in the rocks. Boats with Egyptian families cruised by, the kids shouted “Hello! Hello!” and Dubrule waved back.
They got out on the island and walked down the little street to the Nubian village. The cameraman was filming, the sound guy was miking Ellena, and the Nubians were watching it all, a bit surprised, and that was when they saw lining that street, hanging low and very dense in the large trees planted there for shade, the green mangoes.
Green mango is one of the most astonishing smells in the world. It is, in fact, almost shockingly beautiful. To come upon the mango trees in Java or Grenada or Cebu and lean close to the fruit, an inch away, and inhale this ethereal, potent, luscious odor is like injecting a drug. It is complex yet somehow of a piece, somehow rich and fresh simultaneously, which makes it among scents excruciatingly rare. It is a smell authentically exotic and mesmerizing, at once calming and exciting, possibly more even than the ineffable smell ginger flower petals give the instant you slice them open with a fingernail. It is also heartbreakingly evanescent: The scent is exuded by the fruit only when it is on the stem. The instant you pick it, the smell begins to deteriorate with a swiftness that shows the speed at which a living thing can begin to die. Within sixty seconds, it is essentially gone.
When they returned to the Old Cataract Hotel, Ellena went quickly to his room and took out the orange notebook. Not allowing himself to think too hard about it, he scribbled down a rough formula of thirteen ingredients, some naturals, some synthetics. They were not things he’d found in Aswan. These were thirteen perfume raw materials in his lab that he would use to re-create the feelings and emotions of what he’d found in Aswan. He specified a natural essence of bitter orange to give the freshness of green mango and a synthetic grapefruit for the mango’s pungent acidity and sharp freshness. (Perfumers are wary of natural grapefruit because it has a large number of sulfur atoms, which disintegrate to form malodors; the synthetic also has higher persistence, which is to say, it lasts on the skin, whereas the naturals disappear, another way in which synthetics are superior materials.) Next to each material he jotted down a guess at the percentage of the formula it would occupy. This was the rough first formula for the perfume. He referred to the perfume, as everyone in the industry does, as le jus. The juice.
On the island, Bertoux had been looking down at the water, then glanced over and followed Ellena’s gaze upward. “Once you notice them, suddenly you see them everywhere,” he said. Bertoux immediately started taking photos of mangoes. “They were small as cell phones. The mangoes were a real joy because the scent was so strong, such a beautiful smell.” He paused. Frowned. Said a little warily, “An … amazing smell, really …”
Ellena didn’t tell Dubrule and Gautier he’d created an olfactory green mango in his head. He said nothing, kept it in his head.
Ellena refined the formula for the juice in his seat on the flight from Aswan, connecting in Cairo to Paris. He frowned at the notebook in the cool quiet of the Airbus cabin, took out two ingredients, added in incense for richness and depth, then colophane, the resin you put on violin bows, for cold.
He got a flight from Paris home to Grasse. There he went to his old lab at Symrise.
At some point Hermès would be fitting him out with his own, new lab; he would have to scout out Grasse real estate, but he didn’t have time to think about that now. The Symrise perfume lab was the classic configuration with a slightly industrial feel to it. It has been years since perfumers inhabited the same rooms as their raw materials. That was the nineteenth century. Today, they sit at desks in offices that, except for the stacks of blotters and the constantly shifting lines of small glass vials on the desktops, could be inhabited by lawyers or accountants. Ellena’s had large glass windows looking out on Grasse’s hills. The central piece of equipment in the perfumer’s office is not the pipette; it is the computer, which lists the raw materials (and their all-important, secret prices) and on which they compose their formulae. These formulae are e-mailed to lab technicians down hallways who, themselves, sit before the materials, jars upon jars stacked neatly and systematically on row after row of glass and metal shelves. The materials are carefully protected from light and heat. The technicians put together the formulae and send samples of the fragrances back to the perfumers. If a formula is simple, it may be put together by a robot.
Ellena sat down at his desk, and assembled the materials—still thirteen of them—on the standard formula sheet, each material accompanied by its product code, the precise amount in milliliters, and the price per one thousand milliliters. This formula he sent electronically to his lab tech, who assembled and mixed the ingredients and brought him the resulting draft. He smelled the draft. Then he started changing it.
Of the thirteen materials, he again tossed two: a synthetic opoponax (opoponax is a resinoid, sometimes called sweet myrrh), which he’d been counting on for a resinous smell but which, as it turned out, produced mushroom; and ß-ionone, a synthetic molecule he’d bet might create his green mango’s gourmand fruitiness illusion but which interacted with the other materials to give apricot. He tried subbing in another extract, and it worked. This gave him his initial perfume.
Ellena thought about this for a while. Put it on his skin, smelled it, thought about it some more. What did it feel like. When he was satisfied, he started to make different iterations of the basic formula, to give the design team a choice and show possibilities. “I never submit just one,” said Ellena. “With one, you cut off the dialogue. Perfumery isn’t just you sitting at your desk deciding between the touches. It’s people communicating. Talking. Tearing things apart.”
He wanted ideas from different parts of Aswan. He thought of the fresh cool inky black water of the Nile and the ancient wood of the Old Cataract Hotel, and he made the first iteration a very fresh green mango with a woody angle.
On his desk in the lab he had put one of the withered lotus root hands, and he picked it up and smelled it. He quickly sketched out a mix of synthetics that gave the scent of lotus. (Unlike roses or jasmine, it is technically impossible to extract any usable perfumery material—any smell—of lotus from lotus flower or root, so every lotus scent in the world is a re-creation, a mix of molecules, naturals and synthetics, that give you that smell.) He added his created lotus scent to his green mango.
And he did a magnolia riff, remembering the magnolia trees in Egypt. Magnolia smells heavy and clammy, but it also smells of grapefruit. He had three variations on his theme.
He picked up the phone and called Gautier’s and Dubrule’s offices to check their schedules. He booked a flight to Paris. He took a breath and thought, Here we go.