In the scent, the vanilla acts as the core of a star-shaped structure. Its different facets are picked up and amplified by the other materials, to form a second, phantom vanilla; an olfactory illusion sheathing the real thing; a space in which all the notes resonate.
As Bertrand speaks, I scribble a diagram with vanilla as the ‘sun’ and the other materials as ‘planets’: rum, orange, davana (fruity, boozy), immortelle (walnut, curry, maple syrup, burnt sugar), tonka bean (hay, tobacco, almond, honey) and narcissus (hay, horse, green/wet, floral). Pretty soon Bertrand is scribbling in my notebook too, writing down the effects conjured when the different materials meet. For instance, rum and immortelle emphasize the woody/ambery facets: because rum is aged in oak casks, it already has a vanilla flavour imparted by the oak (vanillin can be synthesized from by-products of the wood industry). It all ties in: the sheer logic of it is limpid.
Bertrand’s compositions are not only impeccably intelligent, but also a reflection on the art of perfumery: in this case, exploring vanilla as though it were a strange new material and deducing its place on the scent-map. The beauty of them is that they also tell a story. Think of vanilla and you’re already in Central America, from where the plant originates. From there it’s only a short slide to the Caribbean islands and two of their chief luxury exports, cigars and rum, both of which share common facets with the vanilla pod. Again: logical.
But if the fragrance is a thinking woman’s (or man’s) vanilla because of the new light it sheds on the genre, it’s also a sultry, Carmen-rolling-cigars-on-her-thighs scent. Is it useful at this point to mention that the very word ‘vanilla’ comes from the Latin for ‘sheath’, vaina? Just add that missing letter – the erotic subtext is part of vanilla’s appeal. Not to mention that, despite what Freud once quipped, a cigar is not necessarily always a cigar …
This is what’s been making Bertrand’s work so interesting of late: the feeling that he has been engaging more sensuously with his materials. His scents used to be fascinatingly weird, dark and austere, as though he were making a point of holding at arm’s length the more pleasing aspects of perfumery. But his latest stuff has been getting hot and bothered, languorous and dirty; it’s growing flesh. He says it’s because, since he’s set up as an independent, he has a more hands-on relationship with his materials – in his old job, he wrote down his formulas and an assistant blended them – but also because he is now allotted larger budgets and can use higher quantities of the better, richer stuff. Yet I’m not quite sure it’s only that. His perfumes still have quirky notes, but they’re … more pleasing. More wearable.
‘More commercial, you mean? Well, maybe now that I’m independent I feel more responsibility …’
That’s not what I mean. To me, it’s as though at this stage of his career, he doesn’t feel as much of a need to go for the weird. As though he can allow himself to play with more outrightly seductive notes without having the feeling he’s selling out …
That stumps him a bit. He knits his bushy eyebrows.
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
He can afford to stray out of his own weird comfort zone, I tell him. After all, he’s one of the best perfumers of his generation. At that, he blushes deeply, cocks his head, mutters the Gallic equivalent of ‘Aw, c’mon’, and gives a little kick to the tip of my boot while staring at his own. Now it’s my turn to squirm on my chair. I’m no Coco Chanel, though I don’t like roses much either. I don’t care about launching another N°5. But, like Chanel, I know what I want, and now’s the time to ask for it.
‘So, remember that story I told you about Seville? You said it would make a good perfume …’ At that point, I’m loath to confess, I consider leaning forward a bit to flash some cleavage – a tactic which, I’ve learned during my years as a journalist, quite efficiently throws male interviewees off their stride. It’s an urge I curb. ‘… does that mean you might want to go ahead and make it?’
He pauses, nods and looks me straight in the eye.
‘OK. I’m game. Let’s do it.’
And that would just about be when I faint.
7
What do Michael Jackson and my mother have in common? They both wore Bal à Versailles, by Jean Desprez. What’s shocking about this piece of information is not that Michael Jackson and my mother had a point in common: in fact, they had two since they both married a Beaulieu, Lisa Marie Presley’s mother, Priscilla, apparently being a cousin of mine to the nth degree. It’s that my mother owned perfume at all. And that the fragrance she picked would be so … pungent. Clearly, when she indulged her rebellious side, she didn’t go for half-measures. In the mid-70s, there were a lot of fragrances that would’ve suited her brisk, no-nonsense personality much better, like Diorella or Chanel N°19. But no: she went for something lush, warm and powdery in the most classic tradition of French perfumery.
I found her secret stash while I was alone in the house, rooting around for her makeup bag. After seven years of frenzied gardening, oil painting and sewing my clothes, hers and my Barbie dolls’, my mother had gone back to work as a nurse at the local hospital the instant I’d started high school. A few months shy of my thirteenth birthday, I wasn’t allowed makeup and the nuns were strict about enforcing that rule. The grey-lipped Sister Jeanne would drag us by the arm into her office to blast off the tiniest trace of lipgloss, just as she made us kneel to measure how far up our thighs our miniskirts rose. So, of course, the forbidden pleasure of makeup was all the more covetable.
My mum must have wised up to my covert raids because one day, the makeup bag disappeared from under the bathroom sink. Her nightstand was the obvious place to look, and there it was, as expected, wedged between two books and a box. I’d just stumbled on my mother’s secret life.
I’d always had full access to the family bookshelves, but these two particular volumes were understandably not meant for a young girl’s eyes: The Sensuous Woman by ‘J’ and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. It’s a wonder my barely pubescent head didn’t explode after reading a sex manual and a feminist essay hot on its heels. There was ‘J’, explaining ‘how to drive a man to ecstasy’ with ‘the Butterfly Flick’ and ‘the Silken Swirl’ (I practised them on an ice-cream cone), all the better to catch a male and keep him. And there was Greer, thundering that learning to catch a male and keep him, as girls were trained to do from an early age, led straight to the frustration, rage and alienation of the suburban housewife. ‘J’ advocated games, disguises and elaborate sexual scenarios – the scene in which a wife re-does the connubial bedroom with mirrored ceiling and leopard-print bed-sheets was seared in my mind for ever, and may explain the pattern of the cushions on my couch. ‘I’m sick of the masquerade,’ raged Greer. ‘I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex … I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.’
Though they couldn’t have been more different, both books were pure products of the sexual and feminist revolution of the 60s, and they did have one message in common: women had sexual desires and wanting to fulfil them didn’t mean you were ‘bad’. I was still a few years away from putting the Silken Twirl into practice, and nowhere near renouncing feminine adornment since I barely had access to it. In fact, I was still young enough to remember the fun of dressing up in my mother’s cast-offs and Geneviève’s fripperies. But I did learn a lesson from Greer: the trappings of femininity to which I so aspired were just that, trappings. You could put them on and take them off. You didn’t have to be them. It could be a game, like playing dressing-up, rather than an obligation. Somehow, the rich, ripe Bal à Versailles I kept sniffing while I read the forbidden books became enmeshed with those lessons. Perfume, at least in my household, was as subversive as sex or feminism: a claim laid to a world beyond Ivory Soap and lawnmowers, as well as my mother’s personal manifesto against bedsores and bedpans. At the Lakeshore General Hospital, she dealt daily with the human body in its most inglorious states. Nature she knew, and she was doing her best to stop it from doing its stinking, miserable worst. But she also wanted an option