Encore Provence (13 page)

Where does one look? It’s relatively easy to spot outstanding ability in almost everything from football to mathematics, from music to languages. These are gifts that become evident quite early. A hypersensitive nose, though, is a hidden asset—personal, private, and, under normal circumstances, not likely to be noticed. Imagine two mothers comparing the merits of their children, for instance. “Well, I know Jean-Paul’s a mischievous little brute, and it’s true I caught him biting his sister on the leg the other day—but I can forgive him everything because he has such a wonderful sense of smell.” It doesn’t happen. The young nose is a neglected organ.

This is something the people at L’Occitane started to change on that sunny day in June, when a handful of pupils arrived in Lardiers for the opening session of a different kind of school. The pupils were between the ages of ten and seventeen, and they were blind.

The official name of this academy of the nose is
L’Ecole d’Initiation aux Arts et aux Métiers du Parfum destinées aux Enfants Aveugles
(The School of Initiation to the Arts and Skills of Perfumery for Blind Children). The classroom is in a small stone building on the edge of the village, and it will probably never again see so many international visitors. The journalists had come from North America, Europe, Hong Kong, Australia, and Japan, noses and notebooks at the ready as the pupils took their places around a long table in the center of the room.

Classroom equipment was laid out in front of each pupil: flasks of different fragrances and a supply of paper tapers. Lesson one was the technique of the informed sniff, and I quickly learned where I had been going wrong all these years. My instinct when presented with something to smell has always been to take aim with my nose and breathe in like a drowning man coming up for the third time. This method, so I was tactfully informed, is recommended for sinus sufferers inhaling medication; any fragrance student caught behaving like that would go straight to the bottom of the class. Apparently, prolonged nasal suction—I think that was the technical term—delivers a knockout blow to delicate membranes, making further olfactory investigation temporarily impossible.

Having failed the first test, I was taken aside and shown how sniffing—or, more elegantly, “tasting with the nose”—should be done. The demonstration looked marvelously graceful, like an orchestra conductor limbering
up with his baton before attacking the woodwind section. The end of a taper was dipped into the fragrance to absorb a few drops, then removed and passed beneath the nostrils in a single flowing motion that ended with a jaunty upward flick of the hand. This brief moment is enough for the nose to register the aroma. A message is sent to the brain for reaction and analysis.
Et voilà
. There is no need, I was told again, for crude and prolonged snorting.

Watching the pupils, it was clear that they were doing a great deal better than I had done with the technique of the sniff, and it was wonderful to see the mixture of furious concentration and pleased surprise on their faces as they began to read the signals picked up by their noses.

To help them, they had a formidable professor, Lucien Ferrero, who must have one of the most experienced and knowledgeable noses in France, and who has personally created more than two thousand perfumes. He had come from Grasse to take the class through its paces, to train young noses in good habits, and, with a little luck, to discover talent that could be developed.

Ferrero is one of life’s natural teachers. He has a passion for his subject and, unlike many experts, the ability to explain it with clarity and a sense of humor. The children could understand him—even I could understand him—as he described how perfume works on two levels, the perception by the nose and the interpretation by the brain; and the five broad types of perfume, from alcoholic to the
couverture des mauvaises odeurs
. (This accompanied by giggles from the class and a most eloquent wrinkling of the professorial nostrils.)

The first session was no longer than an hour or so, partly because of one of the hazards of the occupation: the onset of
fatigue nasale
. After a while, even the most eager
and professional noses become tired and lose their ability to concentrate. But also, this being France and the hour being close to noon, it was necessary to put academic matters aside for lunch. Long tables had been set up on the terrace outside the classroom, the Café de la Lavande had provided the menu, and I sat down with more journalists than I’d ever seen in one place.

It was a slightly uncomfortable moment. My previous experience with the press en masse had been several years ago, during our time in Ménerbes, when it seemed that every British newspaper was going through a period of discovering Provence. Reporters would turn up on the doorstep, bristling with questions, their tape machines cocked to record the slightest indiscretion. If, as usually happened, I couldn’t give them much of a story, they would ambush my neighbor Faustin on his tractor in the vineyard and interview him. Photographers flitted around in the bushes. One eager little news editor sent a fax to my wife expressing his great sorrow at our impending divorce (fortunately, she’s still putting up with me), and asking if, as he phrased it, she would care to share her private feelings with his two million readers. Another paper printed a map showing where our house could be found; yet another printed our telephone number. In both cases, the information was wildly inaccurate, and someone else must have had the pleasure of unexpected visits and calls from British strangers. The final accolade was a letter from a tabloid offering to buy the house so that it could be given away as a prize in a sweepstakes to boost circulation. Exciting days indeed.

It was with some relief that I found myself sitting among reporters who were more interested in the school than in our domestic arrangements. They were mostly
health editors and beauty editors, experts in skin care, makeup, and the correct way to pluck eyebrows, students of cellulite and disciples of the balanced diet. Would these ethereal creatures, I wondered, be able to hold their own with the Provençal version of a light summer meal? There were three copious courses, including a sturdy
aioli
with cod and potatoes, and enough wine to sink the afternoon without trace.

From previous experience with the press, I should have known that professional training would come to the rescue. Journalists differ in their areas of interest, in their writing styles, in their aptitude for research, and their ability to dig out a story. Some have prodigious memories, others rely on tape or shorthand. But in one respect they are alike: All journalists are good at lunch, and these women could pack it away with the best of them. When I looked down the table as coffee was served, the only bottles I could see with any remaining moisture were those containing mineral water.

National characteristics then began to emerge. Anglo-Saxons tended to sit back and take their ease, giving in to a drowsy, after-lunch languor. But the journalists from the Far East, showing astonishing vigor, jumped up, unsheathed their Nikons, and clicked away at the view. I thought it a great pity that cameras can’t record what noses can, because the scent of a fine hot day in Haute Provence is every bit as evocative as the sight of lavender and sage fields disappearing into the glare of the sun. Baked earth and rocks, the tartness of herbs, the warmth of the breeze, the smell of spiced heat—it’s a distillation of the scenery. No doubt one day they’ll put it in a bottle.

Meanwhile, a fragrant afternoon had been organized, with the first stop a demonstration of another kind of
cookery. A few miles away, at the Rocher d’Ongles, plants were being turned into oil. I think I was expecting men in white coats pressing buttons in a laboratory; what I found was a huge, open-sided shed vibrating with heat, its tall chimney sending out clouds of scented smoke. It looked as though Rube Goldberg had been in charge of construction, and the head alchemist, far from being a white-coated technician, was dressed in a very unscientific T-shirt and canvas trousers. But he could certainly cook.

It’s a recipe that uses the most basic ingredients: plants, fire, and water. At one end of a contorted arrangement of tubes, pipes, and vats, water is heated, and the steam produced passes through a tube to the plants—in this case, what looked like half a ton of rosemary. Steam releases the plant’s volatile elements, carrying them through to a coil, and from there to a condenser circulating cold water. The steam then liquefies, and the essential oil rises to the top of the water. Scoop this off, put it in a flask, and there you have five-star V.S.O.P. essence of rosemary. The same process is used with rose, lemon, mint, geranium, thyme, pine, eucalyptus, and dozens of other plants and flowers.

Looking around, I was struck by the contrast between the place of origination and the eventual place of use. Here we were in a primitive building in the middle of a field, sweating like prisoners in a sauna, watching great clumps of vegetation being boiled in equipment that resembled a giant chemistry set for beginners. And where was it all going to end? About as far from its modest beginnings as you can imagine—on a dressing table or a shelf in some perfumed enclave, dabbed on drop by drop.

Moist, but more knowledgeable, we left the furnace heat of the distillery for the priory of Salagon, built in the twelfth century for Benedictine monks, abandoned during
the Revolution, and now restored as the home of the Heritage Conservatory of Haute Provence.

It is always amazing to me that buildings like this, with their massive blocks of stone and great, perfectly formed spans of vaulting, could have been constructed without the aid of modern machinery. No cranes, no hydraulic winches, no electrically powered stonecutters—just hand and eye and an infinite amount of back-breaking labor. I couldn’t help thinking of the months it took us to restore a small house, and I took my hat off to the extraordinary patience of those monks of eight hundred years ago.

They would have approved of a recent addition to the church grounds, which was what we had come to see: a large botanical garden, laid out in that meticulously ordered way the French adopt when they want to show nature who’s in charge. No irregularities, no wayward and undisciplined twigs, none of nature’s summer abandon. The plants, in their perfect little squares, were organized by scent as well as by species, and we were given a conducted tour, sniffing as we went, through carpets of green, gray, and blue. Everything had its Latin tag, and there was not a weed to be seen. I had the feeling that lizards would be treated as trespassers.

By now, the sun was beginning to dip, and many of us were doing the same. After a long, hot afternoon,
fatigue nasale
had set in, and we could sniff no more. It was time to give the senses a rest before the final event of the day.

Dinner was outside, at half a dozen long tables in the garden of an old farm in the hills above the village of Mane, and the aperitifs were having a rejuvenating effect on the press corps. It was, so one beauty editor told me, a considerable improvement over her last assignment, which had involved slime baths and a diet of lettuce and
lemon juice at a health spa. She was a woman who admitted to having a demanding appetite, and claimed that she found it impossible to write on an empty stomach. She loved being sent on a job where the rations were good. France, for her, was food.

This made me wonder how the others were reacting to their first taste of Provence, and when I asked them it was interesting to find an almost total lack of consistency. The Japanese couldn’t get over the size of the houses, the enormous tracts of empty land, the absence of crowds, noise, and high-rise buildings. They found the food “interesting” and the wine strong, but what really impressed them was the luxury of space—almost inconceivable to someone sentenced to life in a Tokyo apartment.

The Americans were accustomed to space, and even some of the countryside of Haute Provence looked vaguely familiar; not unlike the Napa Valley without cars, as one woman said. Her initial impressions were the crumbling beauty of the buildings—“they’re so
old
”—and, not surprisingly from someone coming from the world capital of efficient hygiene, the incomprehensible mysteries of French plumbing. How do they take a shower, she wondered, when you have to hold the shower head with one hand and the soap with the other? Or do they do it in pairs?

The British, fresh from a typical early summer at home—scattered showers developing later into rain—loved the light, the heat, and the chance to eat outdoors. One woman, casting a professional beauty-editor’s eye over my face and trying to suppress a wince, said that too much sun is very aging. But on the whole, the journalists approved of the climate, and they were also pleased to discover that the people in Provence were actually “quite
nice, and not at all
snotty
, like the Parisians are.” The poor Parisians, everyone’s favorite target.

It was a good evening, and it had been a good day. No new school could have hoped for more attention at the beginning of its first term, and for once nobody was there to criticize. We all wanted the idea to succeed.

Partly to find out if it had, and partly to continue the education of my own nose, we went some months later to see Lucien Ferrero again, this time at his office outside Grasse. I’d never been to Grasse; all I knew was that it had been the center of the perfume industry in France since the early nineteenth century. I had visions of old men in straw hats pushing wheelbarrows piled with rose petals, of rickety tin-roofed distilleries like the one at Rocher d’Ongles, of entire streets and most of the population smelling of mimosa or Chanel No. 5. These fancies faded in a traffic jam going into town, and disappeared altogether at the sight of reality. Grasse was busy, crowded, and workmanlike.

It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo, and Catherine de Médici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you’ve ever smelt a tannery, you’ll understand why). And then fashion came along to set the town off in a new direction.