THE MORNING OF September 24. Ellena’s formula for Nil was in the process of manufacture, but this meant that now they had an entirely new deadline, the press launch of the perfume on November 14. The perfume was done, but they now had to deal with the logistics surrounding it, plan and deploy its entry into the market.
Dubrule went to the coffee room and got a tiny plastic cup of coffee from the vending machine. The coffee room was next to the smoking room, French workplace institutions that, by around 10:00 A.M., faithfully re-create throughout the country thousands of filthy little Dachau gas chambers. Leaving with her coffee, Dubrule ran into Gilles Coupat, the head of Hermès in France and Belgium. “Where are we?” she asked him immediately.
Coupat was negotiating with the new Galeries Lafayette, the primordial Paris department store just above the Opéra, which was in the midst of creating what it calls the largest perfumery in the world. He reported to her that Galeries wanted to put Hermès’s stand (the industry term in both French and English) next to Mugler and Gaultier, which was fine, but also next to Serge Lutens, which was in a sense even finer—Lutens’s stuff is niche luxury. The problem was that all four would find themselves in slightly out-of-the-way territory. Coupat wasn’t quite happy. Dubrule pursed her lips. “I’m quite happy for them to present us as haut de gamme, top of the line, but there has to be traffic.” Coupat replied, “We’re working on it.”
He changed the subject. The word was going around the office that there was some sort of delay with the juice, apparently. A problem at the factory? Dubrule replied that she had had a few brief conversations with people, but no one had spoken either with Ellena or Bernard Bourgeois at the Hermès factory in Normandy. Maybe the rumor was incorrect.
In any case, added Dubrule, she was dealing with a more fundamental problem. They had been aiming at mid-June to lock in the formula, they’d wound up doing it mid-September, and they had (she said this to Coupat with a grimace) been smelling it, and A* still wasn’t diffusing exactly as they wanted. Also there was a bit of acidity, of aigreur, in the top of the scent, and in the bottom it still needed more tenue, hold. She and Gautier had had a slightly tense telephone conversation about it with Ellena, who’d said it was a matter of enfinialant, fine-tuning, the thing. At least, Dubrule told Coupat with a sigh, they’d finished the video of the trip to Aswan, the book was done and printed, and after laboring over two proposed directions for the dossier de presse, the materials they’d be giving the media, they’d chosen one and were quite advanced on it. If the juice would just behave now.
Coupat went left to his office, and Dubrule headed right back to hers with the tiny plastic cup of coffee. In the corridor she ran into Anne-Lise Clément, who had some news. The communications giant Publicis et Nous was creating the launch’s visuals, the images that would appear in Hermès’s spring 2005 ad campaign—taking the photos, doing the layouts; Dubrule had fully briefed its staff on Nil, told them the whole story. The problem was that the visuals weren’t ready. Dubrule absorbed the information, making a very terse roll of the eyes. “Well,” she said. She visibly added it to her mental list.
She and Clément went into her office and directly into a meeting on the PLVs (publicités sur les lieux de ventes), the counter displays, window displays, and podium materials. Virginie Lamejer, Hermès’s head of packaging, was there, and a few other Hermès people. They were meeting with Franck-Alexandre Basset, the very tall, energetic young director of creation for Carré Basset Associés, the consulting group on the project, who was sporting a chic haven’t-shaved-in-two-days look and presenting several visual options for the PLVs, which were plexiglass displays that would showcase the perfume.
PLVs are a necessary evil, created to draw the shopper’s fickle attention in other people’s stores like Galeries Lafayette, where Hermès had little control over its products and was one more tiny plot of land (its stand), its perfumes competing in a vast sea of glass and chrome with the latest Guccis, Fendis, and Revlons. They’re also used in the consumption halls of airport duty-free zones, where everything from whiskey to watches was shouting. “It’s a sensory game,” said Basset, playing with plexiglass display. (Hermès would never allow these things in its own stores. Hermès stores use discreet, simple decoration, and of course the products are 100 percent Hermès.)
Basset presented them with several visual options, clear plexiglass tubes and a triple-layer plexi shelf with multiple layers of paper lotus leaves; the shelf would hold the bottle in front of a photo of the Nile—he had used one with the details ghosted, another in sharper relief. They talked about which would produce more enchantment. He tried two leaves between layers of plexiglass. Dubrule warned, “Two is not a good number in general.” Basset: “Ah, but it’s two on the first level.” He played with it. She got up and started shifting leaves here and there, standing back and looking. “The idea,” said Basset, “is to have the bottle floating above the lotus leaves. Where does the Hermès ribbon go, this way? No, put the bottle here.”
He wanted the plexiglass to overshoot the base by a half inch, but that would make the thing more fragile, and Clément reminded them that store environments can be rather violent. “It has to create enchantment,” said Basset. He turned the image sideways. “Perhaps this is more enchanting.” (People in the luxury world, with no apparent irony, take quite seriously the idea that one can create “enchantment” with pieces of plexiglass and some glue.)
“There’s still a problem with the thickness of the plexi plaques,” said Dubrule.
Basset: “We can eliminate one.” He talked about glue, on the plaques’ surfaces, on the side that says “Hermès,” and Dubrule asked if they could put metal tubes through the triple-layer lotus-imbedded shelf. Basset put the Hermès ribbon on the leading edge, and no one liked it. “C’est dommage,” said Dubrule, clicking her tongue with disapproval, and Clément agreed that it obscured the shadows of the lotus leaves on the white base.
They played with centimeters, centering elements, offcentering them, and Lamejer said, “Plexiglass is superexpensive,” and Dubrule replied, “We’ll look at our budgetary choices,” but part of their calculation was actually the value of making it more, not less, expensive; for the brands that bring the most money into the store, Galéries puts their PLVs at eye level in the center of the store. The more money you put into advertising, the more the store does for you.
Dubrule stared critically at the PLV. “The stores only give us thirty-two centimeters on the counters.”
Basset (sighing): “And this is thirty-five … OK.” He looked at it. “It’s the first time we’ve done it with so few images, but I think it’s very pure.” He brightened. “For the question of the expense, we can perhaps simply double them in the window.”
Lamejer (critically): “We want the same thing on the counter and the window?” She looked around the room. No, apparently they did not.
Basset moved the layers of plexiglass. Dubrule made a delicate face. “Ehh … un peu trop de symétrique.” A bit too symmetrical. He moved it back, and they stared at it, searching for their next move.
When that meeting ended, at 11:30 A.M., Dubrule and Clément immediately began another with Ellena, who had come up from Grasse. Clément began with a bright, if exhausted, smile. “The concentrée is going to be delivered today!” Dubrule let out the breath she was holding. Ellena looked a bit pensive. Clément was searching through papers, saying, “It matures in one week according to what JeanClaude recommends, we put it in alcohol, we … um … let it macerate fifteen days, so the juice will be ready”—she looks up from the papers—”the fourteenth of October.” Then bottling and shipping, so the initial delivery to them would be around October 21 or 22.
They each made some rapid mental calculations. “The eighteenth we have the duty-free presentations,” said Clément, “which start in Cannes, and Rosanna [Rubino, who trained all Hermès sellers around the world in selling each new perfume and thus lived on airplanes] is going to start the training for the sellers. The press launch is November.”
“So,” said Ellena, thinking it through out loud, “maceration the fifteenth of October and available the twenty-first or twenty-second of October.” It was clear he considered this short, though workable.
Dubrule: “Which means press samples available early November.”
They were having timing problems, were behind schedule. Neither Bourgeois nor Ellena was happy with the limited time for letting the stuff macerate, the materials soaking together, balancing and integrating. They discussed this, the words slightly tense, the ends of a few sentences stepped on now. If they worked it right, there should be just enough time. Clément found a conversational gap and proposed that for the press launch, instead of giving journalists real bottles of Un Jardin sur le Nil, they could use factices, bottles filled with colored water. They’d send them the real thing later.
In a pinch, added Ellena, who really didn’t like the idea.
Clément registered his look. “On fait une toute petite macération,” she said, trying to soften it. We’ll just do a very small maceration. “Four liters. We’re jammed on the timing.” She moved to a question about the pump. “We’re going to test several kinds for reliability. The change of concentration could give us a little problem with the eau de toilette. We’re really at the limit.” She gave various alcohol percentages, how they’d manage things. “We’ll do what we did with Eau des Merveilles.” She looked up at Ellena.
“It’s the genièvre [juniper] incense I used,” said Ellena briefly. “It doesn’t dissolve well in alcohol.” These are the things that cause problems, because it’s beautiful stuff, but it can create hell in the manufacturing.
Dubrule was looking at him. “Seriously?” she said. “There’s incense in the perfume?”
Ellena: “Not a lot, but yes.”
Dubrule realized, eyes widened: “The incense! …”
The maker had just sent the sticks of Nil incense that would go into the coffret box set. She got them, and they lit an incense stick, let it burn, inhaling the rich scent, slightly thicker than its liquid counterpart, filling the conference room. They watched the opalescent smoke curl upward.
By October 4, Ellena was installed in his new lab. He’d spent the summer scouting for it. Gautier had given him free rein and deep pockets. He chose a 1960s starkly modernist concrete James Bond—style house, utopian Corbusier architecture, all glass walls and cool ninety-degree angles like a modern artwork you lived in, just down the hill from the medieval town of Cabris, about five kilometers from Grasse. The house sat in a clean pine forest. He walked from the car to the front door through the scent of the jasmine growing beside the steps, and on clear, beautiful fall days like this one could look from the living room—which was where he’d placed his desk, a smallish simple wood table, at an angle to the walls—down to the Mediterranean laying itself against the Côte d’Azur. The chairs were real ostrich skin. Outside, the gardeners maintained things; he was going to have them put in orange irises, the Hermès orange. He could slide open the immense glass walls and let the fresh air sweep through. It had taken time—he’d skipped his summer vacation—but by late September Gautier had flown down from Paris, beheld what he had created, and pronounced it very good.
In the lab, Ellena had installed around 220 ingredients. He’d placed the lab in one of the house’s bedrooms, though in any case the modernist architecture made all the bedrooms, and the living and dining rooms, feel like labs. He had:
Kephalis: a synthetic that smells like brown butter plus shag carpeting.
Left carvone: a synthetic that smells of chewing gum.
Cyclamen Aldehyde: the smell of cold.
Manzanate: compote of slightly overripe Fuji apple.
Leaf Acetal: a drop-dead gorgeous smell: marine plus green peas.
A synthetic that smells richly of olive oil. (It’s actually a flavor.)
A mixture of synthetics sold together as a truffle scent. (Truffle smells mostly of a molecule naturally created in the fungus called dimethyl sulfide.)
A base (a mixture of synthetics) called Lait Concentré, Concentrated Milk. Mix this with Aldehyde C-18, and you get daiquiri.
Sigaride: a synthetic that smells like Fire Island Pines, the ocean/pine/sand smell of island plus the warm, slightly sweaty richness of the smell of the men. A mesmerizing scent. (The problem with the molecule is that it has very little tenacity.)
Decalactone Gamma: a synthetic that smells of milk without cream.
Geraniol Super: a wonderfully interplanetary rosy geranium. (The only thing that smells on a geranium is the leaves; the flowers smell of nothing.)
The average perfumer, said Ellena, would have a collection of around 1,000 materials, “but I don’t even use the 220. Maybe 120. The others are there because …” He shrugged. “Peut-être. Maybe. One day. Like a word in a dictionary. You have it at hand. I have a tiny dictionary. I use few words.”
Why.
“Why …” He thought about it. “I want to master what I’m doing. Mastering means that for each word, every material in the formula I know why it’s there, and I control the formula. And behind that there is also the desire to show that the perfume is not the result of some chance but a reflection of a reasoned process.” He made a very definite series of stepping motions with his hand, squinting at a target. “It’s intellectual work. When you start out, it’s more about your passions. At the end, it’s intellectual. Un Jardin sur le Nil. It is, it has to be said, both this green mango, this fruit that I pick, and, in the same instant, all the images that sets off. That, that’s passion. And from that moment, I ask myself: How can I transform that into a perfume? Can I tell a story there? This is a scent spun into a story. And after, there’s a décodage, a synthesis, and after that, I have fun. Putting this and that in. The melon. The grapefruit.”
He paused. “Today, as far as I’m concerned, Un Jardin sur le Nil is finished. I’m just tweaking a few things, just for the pleasure of doing it.” Just to see what happened. He thought about it. “At Hermès, I’d like in the future when you go to Pantin that there would be an olfactory curiosity cabinet. That guests I meet there would be able to smell not only what I’ve done for Hermès but things that will never be finished. Just for the pleasure of it.”
He and Gautier were leaving in a few weeks for Aswan for the press launch at the Old Cataract Hotel.
They left Paris on Egyptian Airlines, a six-hour flight, on November 13. The start of winter. The last time Ellena had been in Aswan, it had been spring. Now much had transpired, and he was sitting with Gautier, Dubrule, and Olivier Monteil. This journey would pave the way for press trips to come, many launches of important perfumes. The juice was done, the bottle, the book, the packaging. The captions for the photographs were approved. After landing, they checked into the Old Cataract Hotel, and Ellena walked down the corridors again, soft and dry with age, and felt at home. Out the large windows, the Nile lay black and gleaming and glass-still, a black shiny cobra sunk into the desert sand. The ruins that were still lit every night for the viewing pleasure of guests.
On November 15, the first group of journalists arrived, European and North American press, escorted in by Francesca Leoni, the head of Hermès’s North America communications. Four Italian journalists, a fashion writer from Madrid, Eva Chen from Elle in New York, and a few others. Everyone would sail up the Nile to a lunch on the island where they’d discovered the green mangoes. Monteil, the press handler, had arranged everything. He was executive producer of this show, and he had worked out the details, done all the blocking and produced the scenes.
The journalists came down the next morning, blinking in the light, for the first piece of the production. They wore dark sunglasses with designer names on them. Monteil and the Egyptian sailors guided them from the dock into a wooden boat—not a felucca but an ordinary wooden transport with a motor and a roof to shield them from the sun—and they set off. They passed the Nile’s biblical reeds, moving gently in the cool black water. They gazed at the giant cakes of stone and towering dunes of sand frozen in on-rushing motion. They passed the Club Med. Boats full of Egyptian families cruised by, the kids shouting “Hello! Hello!” The journalists waved back desultorily.
The Italian writers wore immaculate white cotton shirts and slacks and held their Chanel bags and smoked and gazed at the backdrop of the book of Exodus. Eva Chen was fresh and pert, looking around with interest. Leoni was wearing a $1,200 pair of Hermès sandals and head-to-toe ethereal white linen. The Spanish fashion journalist, an obese woman with a mustache, wore huge, jetblack sunglasses with the word GUCCI written in gigantic letters on both sides. She smoked one cigarette after another. As she finished each one, without any indication of giving a thought to it she casually threw the spent, tar-stained butt on the surface of the pristine Nile, where it floated, a white/gray speck of trash, toward the reeds and the herons’ nests, and lit another, inhaling the filth deep into her lungs. Her thick yellowish skin stank of charred cigarette.
The Egyptians pulled the boat up in a tiny cove on a tiny island. The journalists looked up, and Ellena was already waiting for them on the island, sitting in his chinos and white button-down, on a rock, like Rodin’s Thinker. “We looked for an island with just one mango tree,” he said, turning around to gaze at it for a moment, “and we found it!” (They’d scouted for days, Monteil scouring the islands in the river.) Hermès had told the journalists nothing about the perfume. Ellena gave them a few words about the tree, the fruit, the scent. It was not mango season now, and there was no fruit on the tree this time. Imagine, he said, and began to tell them. By the time he was done, they were thinking of Aswan in the spring, the hot sun and, on the lower branches, round globes of dark green fruit. There was a sound behind them, and they turned around. The transport had disappeared, and in its place magically was an orange, green, and white Egyptian felucca, its white sails luffing in the breeze.
They boarded. Ellena sat in the middle beside a cooler of drinks Monteil had carefully filled. The journalists selected cold waters, Cokes, lemonades. They glided downstream and listened to him.
Ellena: “Before coming here, I had already finished the perfume in my head. It was based on all my preconceptions of Egypt and the desert and the Nile, and when I arrived I realized I was completely wrong. I was imagining orange flowers and jasmine, heavy smells. I didn’t find them in the air here at all. Wrong. So I spent two white nights, truly, deux nuits blanches, and it was difficult to throw away my idea, my preconceptions. Throwing them away was a lot of work.”
He was interrupted by his cell phone. Everyone laughed. The Egyptian sailors peered in to see what the sound was. He struggled to turn it off, finally succeeded. Rolled his eyes and stuck it back in his pocket.
“I smelled cassie, hibiscus, lotus—and then mango.” A desert falcon veered wonderfully from bank to bank, and everyone including Ellena watched its trajectory, holding their breath. The wind filled the sails, dry, warm, and lovely. Ellena took out the touches. Carrot, said Ellena, handing out the scent, and they smelled, wordless. Fruit, he said, passing around another touche. Green. The lotus he got from the souk (someone dug into the cooler, and he shifted for a moment), where the sellers put the root in water and, he said, get a smell halfway between peony and hyacinth.
He showed them the small orange notebook he used to take notes, opened the pages and held it up to them so they could see his original formula (though he made no move whatsoever to actually hand it to them; he closed it back up and carefully put it away). “I don’t use head space,” he said, the registering of complex natural scents that are then reproduced meticulously in a lab to re-create exactly the same mix of molecules. “That’s fact. It’s literal.” He shrugged off the literalistic approach. “I use imagination, which is much faster than any machine. There are three to four hundred molecules in the smell created naturally by mango. I use four. I believe the illusion of mango is stronger than the reality. This is a matter of commercial seduction. I use your own memory to induce a reaction from you, triggering your desires and pleasures and thus associating them with the perfume. For the perfume things go very slowly. We spent four days in our felucca just catching smells. The difficulty is in choosing good from bad.”
An Italian journalist asked him if the perfume, which they still had not smelled, was a unisex. “I don’t like the word ‘unisex,’”said Ellena. “That’s no sex.” She thought about it. He watched her, sought to explain his point of view. “For me, if you write a book, it’s not for a man or a woman. It’s a book.” She nodded. “For anyone who loves to read. I can wear Shalimar. If I like it, I wear it.”
And then it was time. He took out the finalized, fully macerated perfume and sprayed the touches and handed them out. The journalists took them in the way that fashion journalists do, as if it was their right, and with guarded looks. They smelled. They gave away nothing. They glanced at each other behind the sunglasses. They sent brief appreciative looks at Ellena, but really they were playing their cards close. No one said anything. No one asked to wear the scent on skin. The Spanish journalist alternated sniffs of her touche with deep drags on her cigarette. Her thunderheads of gray smoke drifted over the Nile’s dark, clear water and curled around the touche she clutched, drowning Ellena’s perfume.
“Classical perfumery,” Ellena said to them as they held the touches, “is too perfumey for today’s sensibility. It’s like reading Balzac. This is a new way to write it.” He told them how in First he’d put in four different jasmines, three roses, two lilacs. Redundance, he said, complex and obvious. “I like Ravel, Debussy,” he said. “Matisse.” He couldn’t do First anymore, he explained. In Nil he knew that he meant to put his paintbrush here, and here. Not here. He glanced at the glass bottle of Nil, the classic Hermès shape so precisely colored in greens and blues, and they followed his gaze.
Evening. Dinner in the Old Cataract’s Presidential Suite, an elaborate meal. Hermès had flown in a Frenchwoman named Véronique, a stout, pleasant woman, just to create the table decoration. Everyone was received on the terrace overlooking the pool below, the giant palms bathed in electric illumination below that, and the Nile below that. Véronique was worried that the Saharan wind would blow out the candles, which it did. As journalists entered past the hotel’s Egyptian waiters, they saw for the first time the bottles and the coffret prestige, the book of Ellena’s text and Bertoux’s photos, and the packaging Dubrule had created. There were four leaves on the cover. The 100ml and 50ml bottles. Gautier and Ellena engaged in a rehearsed and wincingly awkward exercise in which Gautier asked questions and Ellena and Bertoux responded, all in English, although Gautier’s substitution of French words in English—”So, during this voyage, this—promenade in Aswan …”—found the Italians staring off over the Nile or ordering coffee at length from the waiters. (Gautier to the journalists: “What is your favorite photo?” The journalists glanced around disinterestedly at the enlarged copies of Bertoux’s photography, which Hermès had so carefully created and installed all around the table, then picked at their desserts.)
While everyone was eating, Monteil got the keys from the front desk and delivered to each journalist’s room, placing it with care on the bed so it would be the first thing their eye caught on coming up from dinner, the coffret: a 100ml flacon of the fully macerated A* (in the Saint Gobain bottle with the blue-green-yellow glass vernis and the silk-printed Hermès exactly nineteen millimeters from the bottom), the book (Rencontre, au fil du Nil, text Jean-Claude Ellena, images Quentin Bertoux), and the sticks of Japanese incense (fully intact). On a small green paper lotus leaf were written, in gold ink, the words Un Jardin sur le Nil. The bottles of perfume were laid on the laundered, pressed, cool thick cotton sheets of the beds.
The Hermès team did more press, and still more. Three waves of journalists, different media markets, a group flown in from Asia, and Ellena had already said everything, told the story so many times. Presented his creation.
They flew back to Paris after it was all over. Ellena wondered on the flight if he’d said everything right. He wondered if he’d put everything into the perfume that he should have. He considered it a perfect perfume. He considered it desperately flawed. He could have done it better with more time. He couldn’t have done it better, not with all the time in the world. He smelled it in his head.
When he got home to Grasse, exhausted, Ellena slept, got up the next morning, and went to his lab in the modern house. In March, Un Jardin sur le Nil would be in stores. At his desk, he sat and looked out at the Côte d’Azur below him, then started to work. He had the beginnings of several possible Hermèssences. And he was working on some other ideas. One was the smell of a leather bathing suit emerging from a swimming pool. And there was a leather sprinkled with sugar. He wasn’t worried. For the moment he was floating, smelling, looking for something. Maybe the answer was already there.