How France makes sense of scents

By Caroline Wyatt
BBC News, Paris

Dustin Hoffman (left) plays the troubled perfumer Baldini in the film

The film of Patrick Suskind's best-selling novel Perfume opens in the UK this week.

Its plot - about a Parisian perfume creator who turns to the dark side to create the ultimate scent - has proved a hit in France, spiritual home of the world's highly profitable perfume industry.

However, the country's greatest "noses" or perfume creators have been rather dismissive of their evil fictional counterpart, Perfume's anti-hero Grenouille, though they understand his obsession with smell.

The British have always been rather sniffy about the French attitude to personal hygiene. Think of how the French smell, and our national imagination tends to conjure up garlic and onions, a bouquet of Gauloises, and perhaps some top notes of stale red wine.

Yet no Parisienne worth the name would dream of leaving home without a dab of scent. Often, not so much a dab as an overwhelming thunder cloud of fragrance, which enters the room long before she does.

Sniffing out a story

I sometimes wonder, as my nose is assaulted by another over-scented neighbour on the metro, whether it's a form of territorial marker, a human version of how Parisian dogs use lamp-posts or my doorstep: to mark out their patch with their smell.

Parisian noses are tickled by a bewildering variety of scents

That curiosity led me to a small laboratory in northern Paris this week, where two women sat surrounded by hundreds of tiny bottles, sniffing and weighing their contents on scales, until they could agree on the exact odour they were seeking.

Isabelle Doyen, the older of the two, is a "nose" - a perfume expert who has devoted her life to creating new fragrances, and who possesses a suitably imperious Gallic conk.

But she says it's not so much her nose that creates the scents, but her memory - trained to recognise thousands of ingredients, and summon them up as she desires, with all the emotions and memories they provoke.

Childhood memories

As she bends over a jar to sniff, Isabelle mimics pulling open an imaginary drawer in her mind.

"Each smell is so evocative, so redolent with memory, that when you want to create a fragrance you go into your mind and take out the right ingredients."

Her personal obsession with odour began in her grandmother's garden, with a rose and the taste of an apple that smelled like a pear. When she met the perfumer Annick Goutal many years later, she discovered they shared the same idiosyncratic wish to recreate that fragrance, and a lifelong collaboration was born.

Marie-Antoinette first imported the idea of clean, sweet-smelling skin to the French court - from England

I pick up one of the scented candles on her bookshelf, and take a deep sniff. It's an indefinable odour - musty, not unpleasant, with the hint of old scent and worn leather, old-fashioned face-powder and lipstick.

I look at the label: "Scent of my mother's handbag". And as I close my eyes to inhale again, it takes me straight back to my own childhood.

Suddenly I am seven years old, sitting in my mother's bedroom, playing with her handbag as she gets ready to go out, disappearing to a dinner party in a sweet-smelling cloud of Carven's Ma Griffe, an effect only slightly spoiled by my father's aura of eau de nicotine and mothballs.

Maternal influence

"Perfume is all about our mothers," Isabelle insists, "what they wore and what it meant to us".

Marie-Antoinette's rich scent has been recreated

Her colleague, Annick's daughter Camille, is not so sure. She did learn about perfume from her mother, whose shops are a favourite destination for chic Parisiennes.

But, Camille says with a smile, choosing a perfume is more like falling in love, or choosing a boyfriend. "When you find the right one, you just know it."

In my Proustian moment with the handbag, I was not alone. Generations of writers have rejoiced in the sense of smell.

In her recent book, A Nosegay: A Literary Journey from the Fragrant to the Foetid, Lara Feigel cites the poet Charles Baudelaire on scent.

He extolled the virtues of everything, from the odour of cats to the olfactory satisfaction of endless kisses.

The philosopher Rousseau called smell "the sense of the imagination", and Diderot praised it as the most voluptuous of the senses.

The ancient Egyptians used to burn incense in their temples, its sweet smoke a rich sacrifice to the gods - hence perfume's name, from the Latin per fuma, or "through the smoke".

But if the first perfume was meant for the gods, it was quickly annexed by earthly kings and queens.

Royal fragrance

It was in the 18th Century that France's flaunting, extravagant queen, Marie-Antoinette, first imported the idea of clean, sweet-smelling skin to the French court - from England.

According to perfume historian Elisabeth de Feydeau, Marie-Antoinette shocked her ladies in waiting by taking up the English habit of a daily bath, commanding her perfumer to create scented salts that turned the water opaque, for modesty's sake, as her courtiers gathered to watch her bathe.

"She was the first woman in France to use perfume not to cover up a bad smell, but for sensual reasons, to attract and arouse," Elisabeth says. No wonder the peasants cut off the queen's head in their evil-smelling revolutionary rage.

But a little bit of Marie-Antoinette has been given new life. Elisabeth holds out a scented stick for me to sniff: Marie-Antoinette's perfume, recreated from the ingredients she loved.

A heady mix of bergamot and cedar, the scent of a long-vanished Versailles fills the air, and with it the glorious idea of a queen who died for the crime of importing personal hygiene to France.