Читать книгу The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent - Denyse Beaulieu - Страница 10

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 on artifice; she wanted Versailles and the useless, futile, sinful beauty of it; she wanted to go to the ball.

My father was far from alone in his indictment of perfume: though his aversion was probably due to his hyper-sensitivity rather than to moral or philosophical reasons, he was in fact only following in the footsteps of a long line of male authority figures. Philosophers, priests and physicians had been railing for centuries against it, cursing women for snatching it from the altars of the gods and diverting it for erotic purposes.

The Ancient Greeks were the first to sound the alarm on fragrant substance abuse. Perfume was the potent lure used by the enchantress Circe to ensnare the wily Ulysses while she turned his companions into swine, and by the courtesans who diverted the fruitful union of man and woman in their sterile embraces … A measured, reasonable use of scent could stimulate desire, the wise men granted, hence its use in wedding rituals, but the operational word was ‘measured’. In The Republic, Plato warns against ‘clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life’ that turn ‘the sting of desire’ into madness. Man must not be led by lust and, though a drop of sweet-smelling stuff might promote marital harmony, an excessive use of it disrupted the balance between mind and body. Though the very nature of perfume was divine because all beauty springs from the divine, explains the historian Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Gardens of Adonis, ‘in erotic seduction it is diverted, led astray, directed towards a pretence of the divine, a misleading appearance of beauty concealing a very different reality: feminine bestiality.’

But it was for its wastefulness rather than its immorality that the hard-nosed Roman empire condemned it. ‘Perfumes form the objects of a luxury which may be looked upon as being the most superfluous of any, for pearls and jewels, after all, do pass to a man’s representative, and garments have some durability, but unguents lose their odour in an instant, and die away the very hour they are used,’ grumbles Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. ‘The very highest recommendation of them is, that when a female passes by, the odour which proceeds from her may possibly attract the attention of those even who till then are intent upon something else.’ Talk about damning with faint praise.

As for the Old Testament, it is lush with fragrance – ‘My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts,’ says the ‘dark but comely’ bride of the Song of Songs. And the New Testament does feature two fragrant episodes: in the first, an unnamed sinner washes Jesus’ feet with her tears before anointing them with precious oils. In the second, it is Mary of Bethany who pours costly spikenard on his head in anticipation of his funeral rites. Even then, there’s male grumbling, since Judas considers the money would have been better spent on helping the poor. But as a rule, Christianity dealt much more harshly with scents. They were part of pagan rituals, especially the highly popular imported Asian religions which competed with the new Christian cult in the Late empire; worse still, they could induce men to sin. Not only did Christian women need to distinguish themselves from the pagans who marinated themselves in scent, but they should strive to make themselves ugly so they wouldn’t arouse lust, urged Tertullian in the 2nd century. Woman was ‘the gateway of the Devil’ and by adorning herself, she not only led fellow Christians astray: she defaced the work of God. The body was contemptible and so were bodily pleasures. The only sweet smell was that of a spotless soul. Sin stank.

For the Church, saints were the only beings whose corpses didn’t exhale the stench of corruption which was the destiny of all living creatures. Their mortal remains were said to give off suave effluvia years or even centuries after their death: the odour of sanctity. Conversely, the strongest stench was raised by the ultimate sinner, the heiress of the temptress Eve whose wiles caused humanity to be cast from the Garden of Eden: the whore.

The etymology of many Latin language words for ‘whore’ (pute in French) is derived from putere, ‘to stink’. Prostitutes, it was believed, wore fragrance both to attract their prey and to cover up the emanations of the male secretions festering inside their bodies, venom they spread from lover to lover. When the olfactory-obsessed Émile Zola writes about the courtesan Nana in the eponymous book, he calls her ‘that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odour ruined the world’, even though, when he does mention her favourite scent, it is the mawkish violet. But her streetwalking counterparts would have wafted headier aromas such as musk or patchouli as olfactory advertisement for their wares.

The association between the putrid puta and her fragrance abuse is embedded in the subconscious perception of perfume, but in 1932, the owner of the Spanish perfume house of Dana went straight to the point when he asked Jean Carles to compose a perfume de puta, a ‘whore’s perfume’ – surely the raunchiest brief in history. He called the orange blossom, carnation and patchouli blend Tabu, the ‘forbidden’ perfume, after Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

Think of it the next time you spritz on a juice called Obsession, Addict, Poison or Aromatics Elixir. You’re not just doing it to smell good: you’re perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that’s been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia.