THE NOSE THAT KNOWS.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON PERFUME.

Some pictures are worth a thousand words but it’s unusual when one evokes a smell. Cruising a street market last weekend, we came on a heap of documents and photographs dating back to the ‘twenties. This one, uncaptioned, immediately caught our attention. What’s happening? Where and when? Who is the woman with the silk stockings, the cloche hat and what used to be called “a rosebud mouth”?

And who are the chaps next to her, each with a wide grin, a moustache and a somewhat aggressive boutonniere?

The clue is the sign over the door. “Cheramy” – pidgin French for “cher ami” : dear friend – was a brand invented by an American company to exploit the fame of French perfume. In 1926, they opened a Paris store on Rue St Honoré with their logo prominently displayed over the door. This photo seems to have been taken at the gala launch.

Nothing about the shop looks particularly American, and most people in France, my wife included, thought the brand was French. At the time, a spokesman said defensively “We have endeavoured to surround our products with the French atmosphere and feeling with containers, packages, labels and advertising, yet in no manner attempting to hide the fact that ours are American products made in America.” Hmmm.

Coco Chanel said “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future” but it’s a point I’m not competent to argue, since I have the olfactory equivalent of a tin ear and can barely distinguish Guerlain from Palmolive. Many men have the some problem but learn to fake it. If a girl held out a wrist on which she’d just dabbed something and asked “What do you think?” only an idiot said “Nice. Are you ready?” “Mmmm…. interesting. Is it French?” worked most of the time. I’d also had some success with “It’s lovely – but is it you?”

This deficiency is one I regret, since one of the things I find most attractive in women is their ability to dress up; heels, hairdo – and perfume. Louis Aragon, the most sexually ambivalent of the Surrealists - his taste for white leather trousers gave him away - drew a somewhat patronising comparison with gardens. “Your very contours, your artless abandon, the gentle curves of your rises and hollows, the soft murmur of your streams, all make you the feminine element of the human spirit, often silly and wayward, but always pure intoxication, pure illusion.”

Louis Aragon in white leather trousers.

The capital of perfume has to be Fragonard in Grasse. One enters from the street, then, since it’s built on a cliff, descends level by level, past its offices, its museum, its workshop, to the lowest, and a shop where the very air seems to have been entirely replaced by perfume. As the vendeuses let me sniff the various products I’d promised to buy for wife and daughter, I can only think of the fortunate husbands and lovers to whom these women go home. Do the fragrances they sell penetrate their very cells? Under different circumstances, I would happily have devoted a few days to finding out. Or more like years, perhaps?