Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [3]
As a young man, Guérin was sent to Toulouse to study chemistry. On his return, he worked alongside his mother at the helm of the company, learning trade secrets for a business that would soon become exclusively his. All told, Guérin would devote more than sixty years of his life to Parfums d’Orsay.
By the 1920s Jeanne-Louise was acknowledged as a highly successful entrepreneur and a captain of industry. Parfums d’Orsay then employed about five hundred people. The business included a printing house and a package design studio as well as manufacturing and shipping offices. A large, bright room housed women who worked sorting through white, yellow, orange, and crimson rose petals, which, once picked over, were piled high in huge wicker baskets. There was a small inner room, a sanctum sanctorum that housed the perfumery’s “organ,” an imposing semicircular display unit lined with flasks of essences the researchers used from time to time in their work. In the laboratory, the heart of the operation, workmen and chemists in white smocks watched over sixty-five gleaming metal cylinders in which the essences of scents were conserved. Once verified and analyzed, the essences were blended according to a secret formula, about which any one person knew only one part. They were then decanted into a suspension of alcohol and expressly distilled just for the length of time required to obtain the perfect homogeneity for the company’s signature perfumes.
Those chemists who had the good fortune over long years of practice to develop that special olfactory gift for memorizing scents and scent combinations were known as “noses.” Like a musician practicing scales all day long, a “nose” worked until he was capable of recognizing and combining some three thousand different fragrances in order to achieve perfect harmony. Presented with a scent for his consideration, a “nose” could determine what was lacking in the fragrance, that necessary je ne sais quoi required to heighten its personality. It could take many long days and nights before that moment arrived, but when it did, the awareness of what element was needed seemed to emerge naturally, crowning a labor of many months. Knowledge of the laws of chemistry alone was insufficient to the task of predicting the possible reactions and mutations of certain essences on certain bodies. In order to assemble a blend worthy of the name “perfume,” a “nose” had to cultivate an unfailing exactitude for the essential combination of fragrances to master the true science of scents.
Under the reign of Mme Guérin, perfumes were created that would become known around the world: La Finette, L’Ambrée, L’Aveu, Le Charme d’Orsay, Le Chevalier à la Rose, and above all Le Dandy. This perfume perfectly represented both the taste of the period and Jeanne-Louise’s refined style. In 1916, she commissioned an opaque black crystal perfume bottle specifically for Le Dandy, with octagonal facets, a large pearl stopper, and a gilded label. The bottle was designed by Louis Suë and André Mare, architects who, at the same period, also created the designs for the Parfums d’Orsay stores on rue de la Paix in Paris and Fifth Avenue in New York. The Paris boutique, with its imposing facade, was situated on a corner with a modest front and a covered entrance that contrasted with the imposing shop windows—two on rue de la Paix, five others along rue Daunou. In pure Art Deco style, the veined-marble window surrounds were decorated with flowering branches, garlands of fruits, and bronze drapery. Inside, the fantasy scenes of Suë and Mare were given equal freedom.
By 1936, Jeanne-Louise had bought out all her investors, and soon after, her son took over as