30. Praying in Paris for Perfume

One of the fun things to do in Paris is shop for perfume. Since the most exquisite and expensive fragrances in the world are produced in France, they must cost less there, right? I don't know if that's true or not but as an American female tourist in Paris I had to buy at least one bottle to legitimize my trip. Of course, if you add in the cost of trans Atlantic transportation, hotel, and food the chic glass bottle containing the elixir of thousands of dead blossoms will costs thousands of dollars more than if you bought it at home.

      My favorite perfume all my life has been Chanel No. 5. Except for a few youthful years, when I spent my allowance on “Evening in Paris” a dime store perfume I gave my mother for any gift giving occasion. Many children I knew thought their mothers loved this strong scent. Now I know mothers didn't love that scent, they loved their children.

      Paris has hundreds of perfumeries, stores that sell only perfume. Ok, they also sell toilet water, cologne and creams with perfume scents. There must be one shop on every commercial block. Jane, my traveling companion, and I asked each other, “Where do we find the best bargain in the perfumes we want?” We couldn't answer. We turned to our every ready tourist guide and looked up perfumeries. We decided we would just concentrate on those in our arrondissement, the sixth, also known as the Latin Quarter. That way we could walk to all of them and not worry about buses or the underground.

        We were staying on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne University and not too far from the Seine River, Notre Dame Cathedral, and Avenue Saint Germaine with lots of cafes and French book stores. The famous English book store, Shakespeare & Co., was also nearby.

       Walking along in the cold April weather, we stopped at 5 perfumeries, mainly to get warm. No one warned us the song “April in Paris,” was false advertising. All the shops carried the same products at similar prices. I have since learned you can't judge more than 3 different perfumes at a time, because of olfactory fatigue. Your scent sensors got tired. As usual, we were naïve and just kept smelling everything we were offered. After four shops, with aching feet and red, frozen noses, we decided to buy at the next shop.

      The fifth store was beautiful. Its front window held beveled glass panes, crisscrossed with slender metal inserts. The ancient looking carved wooden door was painted a deep green and the walls inside were pale green, A saleswoman, black hair sleeked back into a smooth bun, approached wearing a precisely fitted black sheath dress and beautiful black leather pumps. She smiled. Which was a shock. Not many French people were kind enough to smile at two young women, dressed in drip dry plaid dresses. Although some may have laughed at our gaucherie behind our backs.
      She spoke English with a delightful accent. We fell under her charm and bought more than we would have otherwise. Yes, it might have been a smart marketing ploy, but we had found elsewhere that many French didn't care enough about making money to be pleasant (at least to young American tourists).
      The sparkling glass shelves and show cases were filled with hundreds of glass bottles, all shapes and sizes. I had already decided I would buy Chanel No. 5. In 1920 Coco Chanel wanted to develop a modern fragrance for women she had taken out of the constricting corset. Her chemist presented her with small glass vials of scent numbered 1-5 and 20-24. Coco chose vial 5 and decided to keep that number as its name as it had special meaning to her from childhood. She also thought the name suited her perfume because five was thought to signify the pure embodiment of a thing, its spirit, its mystic meaning. Perhaps I liked it so much because it was the first modern fragrance to use aldehyes which, according to those who know, have a champagne-like, sparkly, fizzy odor that makes the fragrance fly off the skin. Of course I didn't know this until much later.
      For my second bottle, I chose one I had liked on a friend back home, Replique by Raphael. It was younger than No. 5, not coming on the market until 1944. Its advertising said it's top scent notes included bergamot, lemon, cardamom, coriander, sage and neroli oil (from the bitter orange tree). This description sounds like ingredients for a stuffing recipe. Perhaps they make the wearer think subconsciously of food. To me it was a sweet yet sophisticated, woodsy fragrance.
     My third and final choice was a newer creation, Cabochard, created in 1958 by Gres, an important French fashion house. Its advertising made it sound like a men's club: a mix of citrus, leather and tobacco. Again, that's not what it smelled like to me, but maybe its aim was to subconsciously be attractive to men, who in many cases would be paying for their lover's scent. I loved its spicy, flowery scent.
      Jane also bought several bottles which she kept safely sealed in their original wrappings during the rest of our cross-Europe trip.

      I decided Cabochard would be my signature scent of Paris. So I opened and used it for the rest of our stay. However, I realized that as we continued around Europe in our bouncy little car, the opened bottle of Cabochard might leak. What could I do?

     The answer came while we were visiting one of the beautiful, old French churches. At that time Catholic churches still had tiers of lighted candles, holding the prayers of the faithful. Many contemporary churches use electronic candles. But in this church you could purchase a candle by dropping coins down a slot, then light and place the burning candle in a holder where it would stay until it burned itself out.
      I discussed my perfume problem with Jane and asked, “Do you think one of these candles might help?”
      She gave me a strange look. “You want to light a candle, say a prayer that your perfume won't leak and then leave the candle to keep burning as a reminder about your perfume?”

      “Good grief, no! I just want to buy a candle to take back to our hotel. I don't know where else to get one. I'll light it and let the wax drip around the top of my perfume bottle to keep it sealed.”

                                                            The  End