This was the other reason behind Louis XIV’s marketing operation. Fashion would radiate from his royal person to his court, from the court to Paris, and from Paris to the entire world, which would draw much-needed currency into the kingdom. His minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert therefore set out to build up the French luxury industry, sending spies abroad to steal trade secrets and poach skilled artisans, and finding out which professional corporations were likely to become economic forces for France. Colbert made a deal with the guilds: they would be granted privileges and exempted from certain taxes provided they came up with the best and the most beautiful products. ‘The château of Versailles became, quite literally, a showroom designed to display the know-how of French craftsmen to foreign monarchs and dignitaries. There was an order book when you came out!’ chuckles Elisabeth de Feydeau. Paris, with its fancy shops staffed by well-turned-out young women, glittering cafés and public gardens, became an extension of that Versailles showroom, spurring on further demand for made-in-France luxury items, which in turn spurred on creativity, as perfumers refined their art to meet the exacting tastes of their snobbish clientele.
The perfume and cosmetics industry was one of those encouraged by Colbert. He boosted its profitability by setting up the Company of the Eastern Indies to ensure the supply of exotic ingredients while plantations were developed in Grasse. Again, Louis XIV provided the best possible celebrity endorsement: his orange blossom water, which came from the trees in the Versailles orangery, was exported all over the world. It was the only perfume the Sun King tolerated in his later years: in the last decade of his reign, perfumes gave him migraines and fainting spells which may have been psychosomatic, or due to allergies. ‘No man ever loved scents as much, or feared them as much after having abused of them’, wrote the memoirist Saint-Simon.
In fact, the royal scent-phobia just about killed the industry. A Sicilian traveller noted that ‘foreigners enjoy in Paris all the pleasures which can flatter the senses, except smell. As the king does not like scents, everyone feels obliged to hate them; ladies affect to faint at the sight of a flower.’ And indeed, though Versailles and Paris reverted to their old fragrant ways under the gallant reign of Louis XV, one of the most groundbreaking products in the history of the industry came not from Grasse, Montpellier or Paris, but from Italy via Cologne, Germany, where Johann Maria Farina launched his Aqua Mirabilis. The ‘Miraculous Water’, a light, bracing blend of citrus, aromatic herbs and floral notes in an alcoholic solution, is known to this day as ‘eau de Cologne’. This new style of perfumery, a departure from the heavy, animal notes used by Louis XV’s libertine court, was well in tune with the tentative progress of personal hygiene practices and the tremendously fashionable back-to-nature philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Noses and sentiments were becoming more delicate …
As Rousseauism swept through Europe, clothing, interiors, gardens and fragrances took on the tender floral tones that most flattered the fresh complexion of the kingdom’s premier fashionista, Queen Marie-Antoinette. It was under her reign that Paris consolidated its status as the trend-setting capital of the world. By the time her husband Louis XVI was crowned in 1774, the rigid etiquette of Versailles set up by the Sun King had lapsed and, as a consequence, the status of the aristocracy was rather less exalted than it had been. To stay ahead of the rising bourgeois class, the ladies of the court, led by Marie-Antoinette, resorted to the only thing that could keep them one step ahead of the commoners, however wealthy they were: fashion. In fact, this is how fashion as we know it – the latest trend adopted by a happy few for a season before trickling down to the middle classes – came into existence. Marie-Antoinette plotted the newest styles with her ‘Minister of Fashion’, Rose Bertin. She and her entourage would retain exclusivity for a set period, after which the item could be sold in Bertin’s Paris shop, Le Grand Mogol, and every woman who could afford it could dress herself ‘à la reine’. This, in itself, was a revolutionary move. As Elisabeth de Feydeau explains it, etiquette demanded that the Queen use Versailles suppliers. But Marie-Antoinette wanted her suppliers to go on living in Paris to sniff out the zeitgeist. Louis XIV had established the prestige of the French luxury trades, ‘but that little twist you can only find in Paris, that je ne sais quoi that makes Parisian women incomparable – and this comes out very clearly in the writings of foreign visitors of the period – emerges in the 18th century. There is a word that sums this up: elegance.’
With her gracious manners and lively laugh, Elisabeth herself is the very type of Parisienne foreign visitors have admired since Marie-Antoinette’s day. Even the dishevelled garden where we converse has just a touch of the négligence étudiée that distinguishes chic Parisian women from their fiercely put-together New Yorker or Milanese counterparts. I can easily envision Madame de Feydeau in one of the supple white muslin gowns the queen made fashionable in the 1770s, presiding over an assembly of philosophers and artists with whom she could match wits. Because this is what Paris gave to the world, through the learned, elegant women who led its social life and were deemed worthy intellectual sparring partners by the brightest men of the age: wit rather than pedantry; a way of thinking of life’s pleasures with the finely honed weapons of philosophy. You’ve always wondered why the French appreciate smart women? Why women don’t drop off the radar after the age of forty? There you have it. Where the art de vivre is a serious pursuit, the women who have turned it into an art form are valued indeed. And this, we owe to the 18th century.
Thus, it isn’t surprising that Elisabeth turned her attention to that very period with A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie-Antoinette’s Perfumer. Jean-Louis Fargeon rose to the top of his profession just as perfumery was severing its ties with tannery and glove-making to become a fully fledged trade – another turning point in the history of the industry. If he left his native Montpellier, it was because he knew that he could only succeed if he breathed in the incomparable esprit de Paris. And if he nabbed the world’s most prestigious customer, it was because he was incomparably skilled at composing the delicate floral blends that reflected the era’s craving for a simpler, more natural life … Fargeon’s status as the queen’s perfumer almost cost him his head during the French Revolution: he escaped the guillotine by a hair’s breadth simply because, as he was rotting in jail, Robespierre was executed, thus ending the Terror that cost the lives of over forty thousand people, a full third of whom were craftsmen. And the Revolution did, in fact, almost kill off the French perfume industry, not only because it dissolved the guild of perfumers, which reeked of aristocratic privilege, but because most of its clients were either beheaded or exiled. By the time a new court was formed around the Emperor Napoleon, tastes had changed. Though the Empress Josephine was inordinately fond of musk, he preferred her natural aroma, famously asking her not to wash for several days because he was returning from a military campaign. And he loathed perfume apart from eau de Cologne, which he carried everywhere with him, literally showered with and even consumed by dunking lumps of sugar in it. After his fall, the French luxury trades declined while the English industry gained ascendancy.
‘Then, in 1830, French perfumers came up with the phrase “Invent or perish”,’ reveals Elisabeth. ‘They realized that the world had changed, that the perfumery of the old regime was no longer possible, and from 1840 onwards, French perfumery started rebuilding itself.’
But the period was dominated by bourgeois, puritanical values, and vehemently rejected the wastefulness and deceit of cosmetics and fragrances. ‘Perfumes are no longer fashionable,’ sniffed a French Emily Post in 1838. ‘They were unhealthy and unsuitable for women for they attracted attention.’ At most, a virtuous woman could smell of flowers, and not just any flowers: heliotrope, lilac, carnations or the whitest possible roses. Master perfumers like the Guerlains – the house was founded in 1828 – undoubtedly made lovely blends for their wealthy customers, but the bulk of scents were mainly used as personal hygiene products in an era when most homes didn’t have running water. Fragrance was no longer a luxury: it was just a way of smelling nice, of removing bad smells.
Paris,