From "III Writing " The story of Dioressence

"Grasse," says Turin, "is twenty-five kilometers from Nice, fifteen kilometers inland, just behind Cannes. The story I heard is this: Grasse was a big leather town in the early nineteenth century, particularly gloves. Gloves used to be scented because people believed disease was carried by bad odors. They used to strew castle floors with thyme and stuff because they thought it would fight off typhoid. So a guy named Antoine Chiris, originally Italian, set up a natural raw-smell-materials distillery-the climate's ideal for growing flowers-to make scents to scent the gloves. He had a patent on steam distillation, Antoine Chiris et Compagnie, he was the first, and his method was so powerful that more and more fragrances started to be made there, and suddenly Grasse was the perfume capital of the world, the origin of virtually every high-priced perfume molecule you could want. This lasted for years.

"Then in the 1960s, of course, the bomb exploded. Synthetic raw materials arrived-synthetic heliotropes, synthetic rose molecules. Suddenly anyone with a basic chemistry set could start welding atoms to each other and exporting them. And then French labor costs shot up, and today almost all the naturals, the roses and jasmines and greens, come from the Third World, where they're cheaper to make, and the synthetics come from labs everywhere you can imagine. Some naturals do still come from Grasse, and these ingredients are the most expensive in the world today, and the highest quality. Laboratoire Monique Remy makes a pure distillation of fresh hay that is . . . unpronounceably wonderful. Distilled hay is the smell of liquid summer sunlight.

"The French perfumers," says Turin, intently. "There were people of great class among them, but the industry basically was just a bunch of kids from Grasse, which means typical Côte d'Azur, which means a bunch of criminals. I was talking to a perfumer raised in Grasse once, she said, 'Either you became a perfumer or you stole motorcycles.'

"They're quite familiar with sensuality. One of them, a man, once gave me a guide to Rome that he'd written. It was twenty pages, typed, and it was a shopping guide. It consisted of nothing but expensive shoes and ladies' lingerie. He'd obviously known Rome entirely as a place for fucking. This guy once described Henri Alméras, who did Joy for Jean Patou, to me as 'Vous savez, Alméras . . .' " Turin makes a lecherous expression, puts out his hands, and flexes his fingers. " 'Il était toujours les mains en avant.' " Groping.

"I got to know Guy Robert particularly well. He's a professional-level jazz pianist, writes fiction, is a terrific cook. You should hear him talking about olive oil. He knows the only place to get it. He took me to one of the best restaurants I've ever been to, Le Bistro le Paradou, west of Aix. He's in his seventies now. He's been in the business a long time, has bad relations with Jean Amic, the old head of Givaudan. It's a small world, Grasse. Everyone's screwed everyone else at some point, literally and figuratively. There are some real scam artists. A very, I mean very small world. Often the scam is buying natural raw materials from India and passing them off as real Grasse products, and I swear to God I think it's not the money; it's to see if they can outfox the damn gas chromatograph. Everyone gets swindled." He mentions the filthy-rich head of a private perfume house. "She's gotten taken for millions. She's battening down the hatches a bit. They sell you the best stuff the first time, and then they resupply you with some Chinese shit. Or Madagascar, or the Comoros. So you have to keep incredible quality control.

"These perfume people-their obsession is what's so terrific. They get a flight to Rome, connection to Palermo, and the supplier, who basically greets them on bended knee, says, Here's our new citrus for this year, and they smell it, and it's the best, the best in the entire world, and they snap it up. At Chanel, when they have to dilute the perfume with ethanol-Jesus, ethanol! It costs nothing, and it smells of nothing!-Chanel still gets ten competitors from Europe to bid for it, they put all the samples in wineglasses, everyone is standing around smelling this stuff, and then they decide OK, this Spanish guy is going to supply us with ethanol for Chanel No. 19. This is the kind of obsessional mania that makes great perfume. You have to be this obsessed. Then they go to Tunisia and lock up one guy's total jasmine supply for a full decade. He's got guaranteed sales, at Chanel rates-imagine those, he gives them a jasmine that is absolutely drop-dead stupendous (and on his life he doesn't dare do less), and no one else in the world for any price can get their claws on that jasmine.

"The best Guy Robert story is this. The House of Dior started making perfumes in the 1940s. Very small scale. The first two, of which Diorama was one and Miss Dior the other, were made by Edmond Roudnitska, a Ukrainian émigré who'd studied with Ernest Beaux in Saint Petersburg because Beaux was the perfumer to the czars. So Dior approached Guy Robert-they invite him to dinner, they're talking over the cheese course, no sterile meeting rooms, this is a brief among gentlemen-and they said, 'We're doing a new perfume we want to call Dioressence, for women, but we want it very animalic. The slogan will be le parfum barbare, so-propose something to us.' Oh boy. Guy can hardly wait. Of course he wants a Dior commission. And the challenge of mixing the florals of the traditional Dior fragrances into an animal scent (because this isn't just any animalic, this is a Dior animalic, if you can imagine such a bizarre thing) is just a bewitching challenge, who else would have the guts to attempt joining those two. So he gets right to work, plunges in, and he tries all sorts of things. And he's getting nowhere. Nothing's working. He's frustrated, he doesn't like anything he's doing.

"In the middle of this, someone in the industry calls him, and they say, 'There's a guy with a huge lump of ambergris for sale in London-get up here and check it out for us.' Ambergris is the whale equivalent of a fur ball, all the undigested crap they have in their stomachs. The whale eats indigestible stuff, and every once in a while it belches a pack of it back up. It's mostly oily stuff, so it floats, and ambergris isn't considered any good unless it's floated around on the ocean for ten years or so. It starts out white and the sun creates the odorant properties by photochemistry, which means that it's become rancid, the molecules are breaking up, and you get an incredibly complex olfactory result. So Guy gets on a plane and flies up to see the dealer, and they bring out the chunk of ambergris. It looks like black butter. This chunk was about two feet square, thirty kilos or something. Huge. A brick like that can power Chanel's ambergris needs for twenty years. This chunk is worth a half million pounds.

"The way you test ambergris is to rub it with both hands and then rub your hands together and smell them. It's a very peculiar smell, marine, sealike, slightly sweet, and ultrasmooth. So there he is, he rubs his hands in this black oily mess and smells them, and it's terrific ambergris. He says, Great, sold. He goes to the bathroom to wash his hands 'cause he's got to get on an airplane. He picks up some little sliver of dirty soap that's lying around there and washes his hands. He leaves. He gets on the plane, and he's sitting there, and that's when he happens to smell his hands. The combination of the soap and ambergris has somehow created exactly the animalic Dior he's been desperately looking for. But what the hell does that soap smell like? He's got to have that goddamn piece of soap. The second he lands in France, he sprints to a phone, his heart pounding, and calls the dealer in England and says, 'Do exactly as I say: go to your bathroom, take the piece of soap that's in there, put it in an envelope, and mail it to me.' And the guy says, 'No problem.' And then he adds, 'By the way, that soap? You know, it was perfumed with some Miss Dior knockoff.'

"So Guy put them together, and got the commission, and made, literally, an animalic Dior. Dioressence was created from a cheap Miss Dior soap knockoff base, chypric, fruity aldehydic, plus a giant cube of rancid whale vomit. And it is one of the greatest perfumes ever made."

Something passes over Turin's face. He says "Dioressence is still being manufactured, and sold everywhere, and everyone buys it, and it's now a total lie, a total lie to the original, to what it was. Miss Dior is also still around, and it's only half a lie. Dior have continuously cheapened their fragrances and substituted less expensive materials till the gods departed and all that's left is a gorgeous, empty, lamented name."