I have been going deeply into a perfume that was never meant to be made public. It was a private scent that Edmond Roudnitska, one of the great perfumiers of the last century, made exclusively for his wife Thérèse. I know little about Roudnitska and his wife. I don’t know if they were wealthy or troubled, loving or kind. I don’t know if they were shaped by history. Edmond died in 1996 and, some years later, because she knew him well, Thérèse allowed Frederic Malle to have the formula for the perfume named after her.

I like Roudnitska’s Le Parfum de Thérèse, but I always feel a little melancholy when I hold the bottle. There is a peculiar resonance about things that are personal to us, the things we leave behind. Roudnitska created this perfume for his wife in the 1950s and I can hold this cold glass bottle containing it today. There is a lightness to its first notes, taken from cucumber and melon. Perfume writers like to compare that melon to the one in Roudnitska’s Diorella. Or argue that it prefigures much in modern perfume. Le Parfum de Thérèse is a kind of jasmine, but not one that is easy to grasp. There is something uniquely sensual about this perfume. It gave me a shock. I felt I was looking into someone’s bedroom. Or into their soul (even though I don’t believe in souls). Does it make me feel sad? Only a little. Loss is loss. It is part of the human condition. It is something we have to live with. Chanel’s Boy is a perfume named, or about, Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who was Mme Chanel’s lover in the early 1900s until he died in a car crash. Chanel’s website is very clear on the importance of Capel, a good-looking, wealthy fellow, to Gabrielle. “He was the love of her life and the first to encourage her to pursue her creative endeavours. Inspired by his sophisticated style, Gabrielle Chanel imagined women dressed in tweed, with short, boyish hair and flat shoes.”

I don’t know how much she loved him or what love meant to her. The perfume itself was made long after both Mme Chanel and Boy had died. It is an easier perfume than Thérèse because it is less personal. Boy was created by Olivier Polge in 2016. As far as I know, Olivier, still a young man of 50, knew neither Chanel or Capel. Boy is a green perfume and opens with a thousand shards of green light. And then it is a perfume of wet, clean earth. I recall interviewing Polge some years ago and he told me that earth, for him, smells “clean”. Since then I have found that I agree. He is right. Earth smells clean. And beautiful.

Boy has many subtle facets. There is a mist that rises from the ground. I conjure fanciful images of a forest drive in a Bugatti, a gentleman in a tweed jacket, in the distance an attractive country house, even though I don’t like the countryside. It is also a sensual perfume. Polge has used floral traces or something else (his own magic) to create a sense of colour that feels like flesh. The note is as real as reddened or ruddy cheeks. There is a lot of life in this perfume, which is an homage to distant love. But to my nose, despite the slightly romantic (just the right touch of powder) in the dry down, there is no sadness here.

I wondered if the recent death of Alain Delon would lend a little melancholy note to Dior’s Eau Sauvage. Created by Roudnitska, it was Dior’s first masculine, launched in 1966. A recent campaign featured a young and muscular Delon from Robert Enrico’s 1966 film Les Aventuriers. Like Boy, the perfume is sensual and green; the Chanel has a softer finish but Sauvage has the weight or pedigree of a vintage classic. Perhaps Eau Sauvage and Delon can speak for the passing of an old world. I have watched Delon in René Clément’s Plein Soleil a few times. I love the way it shows the Mediterranean in the years before over- tourism. Sauvage is a wonderful perfume if you wonder what masculines used to smell like.

There is a relationship between books and perfume. Annick Goutal’s perfume Eau d’Hadrien was influenced by a holiday that the perfumier took in Italy where she read Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian. It is a lemon perfume but I did not notice a single lemon in the book (I could have missed it). The book, a fictional memoir of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, is part Gladiator and part Death in Venice, as the Emperor describes his love affair with Greek boy/man Antinous, who drowned at the age of 18 or 19. It is a book about statecraft, love and mourning. “Little did I know,” says Yourcenar’s Hadrian, “what strange labyrinths grief contains, or that I had yet to walk therein.”

The perfume appears to be simple, but better to say that it is subtle. It is a lemon perfume with a dark, masculine presence. The lemon is, by turns, hazy, cool or preserved in sugar. The minimalism of the perfume is close to the Hadrian of the book. He is a careful and austere man, interested in philosophy, love and management. And he is nearly lost in his sadness. There are so many ingredients she could have used in this perfume, but they are not here. Many colours are missing. It’s elegant but a little bereft. It dries down to a lemon glow; I sensed pale wood and perhaps I imagined ashes (like the remains of a Roman ritual) at the close.

I found another Hadrian perfume. Peau by Arquiste promises to celebrate the living, fleshy body of Hadrian’s lover. Accordingly, it is a deep leather and a sensual perfume. But Peau is not melancholy. For a while I thought Goutal’s Eau d’Hadrien was a cold perfume. And that it held only a small measure of loss or sadness. Then I noticed that in the novel, just like in history, the Emperor Hadrian had thousands of statues made of his lost love. Many have been destroyed but plenty of others are still present in the world’s museums and ruins. I realised that the cool austerity of the perfume is an image of the perfect marble of the statues.

“Sheltering the flame of my lamp with my hand,” recalls Marguerite’s Hadrian, “I would lightly touch that breast of stone. Such encounters served to complicate the memory’s task: I had to put aside like a curtain the pallor of the marble to go back, in so far as possible, from those motionless contours to the living form…”

These perfumes might break your heart. Roudnitska’s Thérèse is troubling because it was never meant for us. There is a singular tone of sensual intimacy in it. The writer Victoria Belim has suggested (brilliantly) that Roudnitska found a way to intensify the more disturbing aspects of the jasmine to amplify its darkness. Certainly, the level of tenderness is hard to bear.

I can recommend one more book about loss: The Other Garden by Francis Wyndham. This book is set in England during the 1940s and I think it is implied that the narrator is a young gay man. It is about the relationship between this young man and an older woman. Both are stuck in a conservative small town. And while the Second World War happens, elsewhere, far away from them, they drift in a quietude of Hollywood gossip, endless cigarettes and play torch songs on a wind-up gramophone. The book is sad because the woman dies. The book is beautiful because it captures her and holds her memory. “She had on a tartan shirt, brown corduroy bell-bottom slacks and high-heeled shoes which seemed to hurt her (perhaps because she wore neither stockings nor socks)…”

The Other Garden is a work of loss. And I think that some or much of its power comes from its truth. It is fiction, but it doesn’t feel like fiction. And I don’t know if Annick Goutal can really channel a note of sadness from a thousand-year-old Emperor. Or what memories of Edmond or Thérèse are held in that strange and special perfume. The small cold bottle and the paperback book, they move forwards in time. Less troubling is the dry down of Boy. It has one of those chic and cloudy endings and it is also moving forwards, towards delight.

Collages by David Lock. Taken from 10+ UK Issue 7 – DECADENCE, MORE, PLEASURE – out NOW.

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