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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  Prologue

  I am sitting in the perfumer’s lab, taking delicate cat-like sniffs of a slender blotting-paper strip dipped in orange blossom absolute. Though the flower has long been worn by brides as a symbol of purity, what I smell on this strip drops more than a hint of the earthier proceedings of the wedding night. In fact, the candid orange blossom, just like her sisters jasmine, gardenia and tuberose, hides quite a whiff of sex under her tiny skirts. No wonder the aphrodisiac essences of white flowers have always held pride of place in the arsenal of French perfumers. They are subtle reminders of the beast lurking within the beauty. Perfume is meant to go on a body; animal notes are what weld the suave scent of floral flesh to ours. Isn’t it a little hot in here?

  * * *

  While the sweet, narcotic orange blossom absolute unfolds its facets, the perfumer talks me through its more unexpected aspects. His words are like conjuring tricks: as he speaks, a snapped peapod, a whiff of hot tar just before a storm, a fatty smear of wax, a dusting of honeyed pollen spring from the strip. Orange blossom absolute is animal, vegetable and mineral all at once; it doesn’t quite smell like the flower it is extracted from. Still, there is enough of its ghost hovering over the blotter to tug at a distant memory. I close my eyes and let the fragrance seep into my mind, until it overwhelms all the other smells in the lab, bringing me back to the first time I ever breathed it in …

  It had another, more poetic name for me then, bequeathed by the Moors to the Spanish language: azahar.

  * * *

  I am in Seville, standing under a bitter orange tree in full bloom in the arms of Román, the black-clad Spanish boy who is not yet my lover. Since sundown, we’ve been watching the religious brotherhoods in their pointed caps and habits thread their way across the old Moorish town in the wake of gilded wood floats bearing statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary. This is the Madrugada, the longest night of Holy Week, and the whole city has poured into the streets: the processions will go on until the dawn sky is streaked with hunting swallows. In the tiny whitewashed plaza in front of the church, wafts of lavender cologne rise from the tightly pressed bodies. As altar boys swing their censers, throat-stinging clouds of sizzling resins – humanity’s millennia-old message to the gods – cut through the fatty honeyed smell of the penitents’ beeswax candles.

  Under the silver-embroidered velvet of her dais, the Madonna, crystal tears on her cheek, tilts her head towards the spicy white lilies and carnations tumbling from her float. She is being carried into the golden whorls of a baroque chapel, smoothly manoeuvred in and out, in and out, in and out – they say the bearers get erections as they do this – while Román’s hand runs down my black lace shift and up my thigh to tangle with my garter-belt straps. His breath on my neck smells of blond tobacco and the manzanilla wine we’ve been drinking all night – here in Seville, Holy Week is a pagan celebration: resurrection is a foregone conclusion and there is no need to mourn or repent. As the crowd shifts to catch a last sight of the float before the chapel doors shut behind it, the church exhales a cold old-stone gust. I am in the pulsing, molten-gold heart of Seville, thrust into her fragrant flesh, and there is no need for Román to take me to bed at dawn: he’s already given me the night.

  * * *

  Bertrand Duchaufour is leaning towards me with the rapt gaze of a child listening to a fairy tale. He removes his glasses and wipes them, nodding, before his lips curl into a boyish grin.

  ‘All those smells … it’s all there! Now that would make a very good perfume.’

  I’ve just been leading one of the world’s best perfumers by the nose.

  1

  I’d have never imagined that some day I’d be telling Bertrand Duchaufour about my nights in Seville. When we first met in a radio studio in May 2008, I hadn’t even liked him much.

  I’d only been writing about fragrance in earnest for a year at that point and I’d been very much looking forward to meeting Duchaufour. His off-beat, deeply personal compositions for edgy fashion labels like Comme des Garçons or the pioneer niche house L’Artisan Parfumeur had earned him star status among perfume aficionados as well as a reputation for artistic integrity. He was one of the people who’d eased fragrance out of its traditional set of references as projections of feminine or masculine personae: many of his compositions were olfactory sketches capturing the spirit of the places to which he’d travelled: Sienna in winter; a seduction ritual in Mali; a Buddhist temple in Bhutan; the Panamanian rainforest; a church in Avignon …

  With his rectangular glasses, shaven pate and forthright demeanour, the forty-something perfumer certainly looked more like one of my artist friends than the sibylline master of a secret craft, and I was sure we’d get on fine. I was mistaken. Throughout the broadcast, Duchaufour was gruff and snappy. The host’s faux-naïve questions seemed to irk him; he let on that self-styled critics like myself or our fellow guest, the perfume historian Octavian Coifan, had better leave the thinking to the pros. It turned out he had good reason to be annoyed. He’d been led to believe he’d been invited to speak about his work. Minutes before going on the air, he was told that the topics of the day would be the high price of perfume and the absence of proper fragrance reviews. I understood why he was disgruntled and respected the fact that he didn’t try to ingratiate himself with us or the public, but I was disappointed just the same. Clearly, we weren’t going to be buddies. Still, the man made great perfumes and that was all that mattered. I didn’t have to like him personally to appreciate his work, and I certainly didn’t need him to like me.

  So when I spotted him the following November at the raw materials exhibition organized by the Société Française des Parfumeurs where I had just been accepted as a member, I wondered whether I should even bother to say hello. But since we’d met, I’d managed to slip a foot in the door of a few labs: some of his colleagues seemed to think I was worth talking to. And more significantly, I’d fallen in love with his recent work. I felt he was shifting towards a more sensuous style I could actually connect with, and I’d just written a review of his latest fragrance, Al Oudh, an ode to Arabian perfumery pungent with se
xy animal notes. ‘I love it when a man plays that kind of dirty trick on me,’ I’d concluded teasingly. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would ever read those words.

  Duchaufour recognized me as I walked by: I was somewhat conspicuous with my apple-green coat and silver bob. Much to my surprise, he grinned and kissed me on both cheeks before congratulating me on the accuracy of my review. I hadn’t written it to please him, but I wasn’t about to let such an opportunity pass me by, so I instantly improvised a white lie. I was teaching a perfume appreciation course at the London College of Fashion in a month’s time, I told him (which was the truth), and I intended to discuss his work (also the truth, as of one second ago). It was the very first time I was to teach the course, which I’d been offered on the strength of my writing and talks I’d given to students in Paris. At first, I’d felt pretty confident I could swing it, but as the time to shut myself inside a classroom for three days with fifteen eager perfume lovers drew nearer, I was feeling a little jittery. I kept that to myself, but I did tell Duchaufour I’d appreciate his input (if anything, I’m a quick learner). Much to my relief, he nodded, still grinning:

  ‘You’re ready to learn more. Come over to the lab whenever you want!’

  * * *

  I wrote to him the very next day to take him up on his offer. After we’d exchanged a couple of emails, he suggested the use of the more familiar French form of address, tu, slyly adding, ‘It sounds more serious.’ So here I am, six months after our first, inauspicious encounter, perched on a chair in his tiny lab above L’Artisan Parfumeur’s flagship store and very ready indeed to learn more. The staid sandstone façade of the Louvre looms across the street; the searchlights of a bateau-mouche sweep from the Seine over the Pont des Arts. A three-tiered array of neatly labelled phials, each containing one of the hundreds of raw materials of the perfumer’s palette, throws amber, topaz and emerald glints under the desk lamp. A paper sheet lies next to a small electronic scale: the forty handwritten lines of the formula he is currently working on. At his feet, three shopping bags bulge with dozens of discarded phials – less than one per cent of his work, he says, ever makes it to the shop shelves. I’ve just tucked into my handbag a tiny atomizer of a scent of his due to be launched next spring, a tuberose perfume whose working title is ‘Belle de Nuit’. Though it was conceived long before we met, it feels like a sign: the tuberose resonates deeply with my life and loves, though he can’t possibly know it …

  The churlish man who’d snubbed me has turned out to be warm, friendly and almost disconcertingly straight-talking; an intensely focused listener given to boyish bursts of enthusiasm. About the story of Seville I’ve just told him, for instance. He loves it, he says it would make a good perfume, but I don’t know him well enough to ascertain whether he’s the type to follow through or if this is just a perfumer’s version of a chat-up line. And certainly not well enough to ask him straight out if he’ll do it. Why would he bother with what must be, for him, just one of a hundred different ideas? On the other hand, why wouldn’t he? His ideas do have to come from somewhere. I didn’t tell him my story because I thought it would inspire him. It just came up as we were swapping tales of far-flung journeys. But now this idea is hovering between us and I realize I want this perfume to happen more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. Why couldn’t I be a perfumer’s muse? I’ve come such a long way in the realm of scent, Bertrand, you couldn’t ever know … In fact, I was never really meant to poke my nose into it.

  2

  My father couldn’t stand perfume. My mother only found out after they got married: she’d never been able to afford fragrance until then. Her first bottle of Chanel N°5 exited their flat soon after she’d brought it home. After that, she never wafted anything stronger than our doctor-recommended Ivory Soap.

  As an added excuse for the ban, I was diagnosed with a slew of allergies: cat dander, dust mites, assorted pollens and … fragrance. But though I grew up on a continent where allergies are a way of life, my parents decided I would continue to be exposed to allergens until I built up a resistance to them. Our tabby still curled up wherever she pleased, tucking her squirming litters in my dad’s king-sized Kleenex boxes. Perfume was the only item on the doctor’s list to remain strictly verboten. I was six years old, and didn’t care. A childhood deprived of N°5 doesn’t quite register as abusive, and as long as we kept the cat, I was content.

  So I don’t come equipped with the perfume lover’s standard-issue Proustian paraphernalia. No fond memories of dabbing myself with the crystal stopper of Mommy’s precious Miss Dior or kissing Daddy after he’d slapped his cheeks with Old Spice; no tales of lovingly collected perfume miniatures. Nothing but a trail of crumpled-up tissues strewn in an antihistamine-induced daze. I sometimes sneezed so hard I could’ve propelled myself downtown had I been on roller skates, and my allergies pretty much left me nose-blind. Anyway, in the Plastic Sixties, the suburbs of Montreal didn’t give off much more than the smell of burning leaves in fall and fresh-mown lawns in spring and summer – but at the first buzz of a lawnmower, I was sent indoors with my microscope, books and Barbie dolls, lest my bronchial tubes start shutting down. Scented memories of childhood? Access denied.

  * * *

  Bertrand Duchaufour frowns.

  ‘Really? Nothing?’

  Could he help me kick-start my memory again? After all, it worked with the orange blossom last week … I’ve just dropped by to take my second informal lesson and we’ve been zipping through some of the raw materials he’s used in recent scents. I’m on familiar ground until he mentions something called yara-yara. Yara-yara? Sounds like I ought to start swaying my hips to it.

  Out comes a blotter and into the phial it goes. He waves it under my nose. Diluted, yara-yara smells of orange blossom. At this concentration: penetrating, narcotic, with a side helping of mothballs. And somehow familiar.

  ‘This reminds me of the wintergreen top notes in tuberose.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so … Here, I’ll show you the difference.’

  He snatches another phial from the refrigerator and we repeat the blotter ceremony.

  Ah … This I know. In fact, I feel like I’ve always known it …

  * * *

  As it turns out, I do have scented memories. But mine come courtesy of Big Pharma. Not only because antihistamines allowed me actually to breathe through the nose every once in a while, but because my father was a pharmacologist.

  My visits to his lab as a little girl were thrilling and slightly scary events. The emergency chemical showers in the hallways hinted at the permanent risk of toxic splashes and horrible burns. My dad obviously did a dangerous, heroic job and his lab was one of the most glamorous places in the world to me. It was a smelly place too, permeated with the reek of disinfectants, the salty musky odour of guinea pigs and horsy effluvia – the lab manufactured an oestrogen extracted from the urine of pregnant mares, and we had to drive by the stables to park at the back of the building where my father worked.

  Is that why I’m so happy to hang around perfume labs? And why I tend to be drawn to the weird notes that make people blurt out ‘Yuck, why would anybody want to smell of that?’ The animal and medicinal zones of the olfactory map attract me. For instance, the nostril-searing aroma of Antiphlogistine, an analgesic pomade found in every Canadian household since 1919, which was one of the few smells strong enough to burrow its way through my stuffy sinuses …

  My growing pains may well have been one of the reasons why I fell in love with the fragrance aptly named Tubéreuse Criminelle for the way it assaults the nostrils when first applied. I am so addicted to it that, some days, I’ll spray myself time and again just to catch its venomous minty-camphoraceous blast before the scent subsides in creamy floral headiness. As it turns out, it’s also a blast from the past since tuberose and Antiphlogistine have one thing in common: the ice-green burn of a molecule called methyl salicylate.

  * * *

  I know. Those chemical n
ames are a bitch. You don’t need to learn them to appreciate perfume, but it helps if you want to make sense of it. Odorant molecules are the building blocks of perfumery. A natural essence may contain hundreds of them. The ones that contribute the most to its smell can be isolated and synthesized. Each will yield a distinct facet of the original essence – of several, in fact, since the same odorants keep popping up all over nature. These molecules can then be assembled to conjure an olfactory illusion in a few broad strokes: when your fragrance has a jasmine note, there’s a good chance it comes from a combination of the chemicals naturally found in jasmine rather than its actual essence, of which there might only be a few drops just so the advertising copy doesn’t lie. Taken separately, those molecules won’t actually smell of jasmine. But if you blend benzyl acetate (floral, apple, banana, nail polish), hedione (green, citrusy, airy), jasmolactone (buttery, fruity, coconut, peach) and indole (mothballs, tooth decay), you’ll get a decent impression of the flower that’s a lot cheaper to produce than the real stuff. Aromatic materials, natural and synthetic, can also be combined to reproduce the scent of a flower whose essence can’t be extracted, such as gardenia, lily-of-the-valley or lilac. And that’s not even mentioning the synthetics that smell entirely manmade … You didn’t think the musk in your Narciso Rodriguez for Her grew on bushes, did you?

  Despite the breathless sales pitches, if fifteen per cent of what’s in your bottle comes from a thing that was alive at some point, you’re doing well. Any more would cut into profit margins. Natural materials are not always more expensive than synthetics, but they’re harder to source. A drought, a flood, a war will make prices shoot up. Crops don’t smell exactly the same from one year to another, so that you may have to mix essences from different sources to achieve the same effect in every batch of perfume, a practice called the communelle. With synthetics, on the other hand, you can produce batch after batch without worrying about Nature’s tantrums or geopolitical flare-ups.