A NOSE IS A NOSE IS A NOSE
DO THE FRENCH SMELL? SHOCK FINDINGS.
Fields of lavender near Grasse.
“I am coming,” Napoléon Bonaparte messaged Joséphine from the battlefield. “Don’t wash!”
He wasn’t alone in finding olfactory stimulation as inflaming as that offered by other senses.
Which invites the question: why are there no love songs about the sense of smell? Is “I just smelled a girl named Maria” any less romantic than the original? How about “I’ll be smelling you, always?” or “Let’s sniff the odours and dance”? “Odorable you”?
These thoughts came to mind after a correspondent asked where she might begin her research into the history of perfume in France.
I recommended Grasse. Cascading down a Provençal hillside in a tumble of ochre plaster and red tile, it’s not only one of the most scenic cities in France but, as the perfume industry’s traditional home, one of the best-smelling.
Fragonard, among the country’s biggest parfumiers, began there, turning a former tannery into a factory for distilling fragrances from flowers: (a considerable feat: 200 kilos of lavender produces one kilo of oil.) The factory is now the corporate headquarters. It’s built on a hillside, so one enters at the equivalent of the attic and descends through workshops, offices and a museum of perfume to a shop selling Fragonard products.
I invariably arrive in Grasse with a shopping list provided by my wife and daughter, but it’s a chore I’m happy to perform. One can’t help fantasizing about the vendeuses. What must they smell like, spending their days immersed in a miasma of scent? It’s all I can do not to seize a hand and satisfy my curiosity.
To do so, however, would be to miss the point of French perfume, since it owes its supremacy not to the quality but the way it’s packaged.
Louis’s bath at Versailles.
Louis XIV was, exceptionally for the time, a keen bather. He had a large bath/wading pool at Versailles and often rubbed spirits or alcohol on his body, as well as changing his linen three times a day. Not so his courtiers, however, who dabbed on water saturated with essence of roses, and left it at that. Courtesans used one of the heavy perfumes based in animal excretions – civet, or ambergris, a pungent waxy material thrown up by whales. Rather than obscuring natural odours, these concoctions amplified them, inflaming lovers as Joséphine’s aromas excited Napoleon.
It was never anticipated that the use of perfume would filter down to ordinary people. To them, natural was always to be preferred. Even a little rouge or lipstick was shunned as “painting”.
That fragrances became part of the daily toilette is down to the bottles that contained them. Traditionally, perfume resided in glass flacons, often enameled or gilded to reflect the value of their contents. Once chemists synthesised vanilin and jasmine, making it possible to produce perfumes at low prices, parfumiers faced a dilemma. How to maintain the illusion of rarity that would allow them to keep prices high?
Lalique in glass and paper.
Credit for the solution went to François Coty, an aggressive Corsican who invaded the market in 1904 with a fragrance called La Rose Jacqueminot. Hawking it around Paris, he had little success until – accidentally? - he dropped a bottle in the perfume department of one of the largest department stores. As it wafted through the store, women converged on the source, eager to buy.
For his greatest success, L’Origan -Oregano -, Coty Commissioned master glassmaker René Lalique to create a flacon as luxurious in appearance as those used by the courtesans of Versailles. Lalique based it on the flowers of wild marjoram, part of the oregano family. It decorated the tiny bottles which contained the pure, expensive essence. But the same design appeared on the labels and packaging of the soaps, powders and eaux de toilette with which Coty invaded the mass market.
As Janet Flanner says, “Coty perceived perfume as something in a lovely bottle rather than as something lovely in a bottle. He presented scent as a luxury necessary to everybody.” In the words of the old advertising dictum, he sold the sizzle, not the steak.
Speaking of steak, the Holy Grail of parfumiers has long been a fragrance guaranteed to attract men. In the ‘thirties, Elizabeth Arden tried something woodsy and rural, but it didn’t take. Recently, however, perfume historians Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez proposed the most convincing answer yet. “After years of intense research,” they announced, “we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.”