It makes scents: Grasse
Grasse is French for ‘fat woman’. I have yet to discover why this Provence town ended up with such an unflattering name. In fact, most of the ladies in Grasse are slim and rather elegant. Altogether it’s a very stylish town, partly thanks to its fame as the world capital of the perfume trade. Well-dressed locals flit about town looking much smarter than the tourists gawping at them. Occasionally, as someone walks by, you get a waft of perfume –none of the cheap stuff–as the citizens of Grasse refuse to embrocate with anything but the very best: Christian Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Givenchy. An experienced nose might just be able to distinguish all the different aromas carried on the breeze.
Restoring the past
A charming lady employed by the tourist office, who didn’t smell so bad herself, guided me round Grasse’s old town. Wandering through the narrow medieval streets you get a sense of how Grasse must have been in centuries past. Many of the houses look as if they haven’t been touched since before the Revolution. Fortunately, the town authorities recently agreed to splash some cash on renovating the more desperately crumbling buildings.
Everywhere you look, the construction industry is plying its trade; times are booming right now for Grasse’s builders. My guide sneaked us into an old townhouse undergoing restoration: the high ceilings, huge old fireplaces and beautifully panelled windows gave a glimpse into the lives of Renaissance Grassois, before going to the Musée Internationale de la Parfumerie.
Paintings and perfume
The tour naturally gravitated towards the town’s cathedral, Notre-Dame-du-Puy de Grasse. Deceptively compact from the outside, the interior opens up to reveal a cavernous space, with gaping arches, stretched buttresses, treasure-trove transepts and a highly impressive pulpit. The cathedral’s columns, the size of tree trunks, still bear the scars of a fire in the late 1700s caused by a lightning strike. The undoubted highlights are the three Rubens hanging on the right-hand wall. I sneaked off a quick couple of photos of them before the ancient church caretaker ticked me off. However, my guide was more worried that we couldn’t enjoy the Fragonard painting in one of the transepts because the spotlight wasn’t working. There then followed a major bureaucratic incident, with the caretaker claiming that new lightbulbs were the responsibility of the town hall, while the town hall placed the responsibility squarely on the cathedral’s shoulders. My guide made sure her complaint went straight to the top – perhaps to the mayor himself. No doubt many forms were filled in and several committees convened at the town hall before the lightbulb was finally replaced. On top of the town hall is a tiny flat roof, which offers a superb vantage point over the entire city. Off to the south roll the hills of the Alpes-Maritimes, while in the other three directions lies a vast patchwork of terracotta-tiled roofs, identical in colour and reassuringly Provençal.
Beyond these rooftops stretch the innumerable fields of lavender, jasmine, mimosa, orange blossom, violets and roses, which for centuries have thrived under the Côte d’Azur sun to be harvested for Grasse’s perfume trade. Tonnes of these flowers are required for just a few pounds of oil. Other perfume ingredients, including various interesting bouquets such as whale vomit, Tibetan goat musk and the anal secretions of an African cat, obviously hail from slightly further afield. At lunchtime, I was invited to a restaurant called Le Gazan in order to sample their Menu Parfum. An aperitif (pétillant aux fleurs) was followed by mullet, then stuffed quail with a rose petal confit. Dessert was a jasmine crème brulée. The restaurateur explained that the idea was to prepare me for my afternoon’s activity: a tour of one of the town’s perfumeries.
There are around 40 such perfumeries in Grasse, although only a handful, including Fragonard, Galimard and Molinard, are open to the public. I opted for the latter, where I was first treated to a tour of the old perfume factory. Unfortunately, the perfumes are no longer distilled here (they’ve relocated to the town’s industrial centre), so it’s a museum rather than a working factory.
Self-made scent
Things looked up when Céline, an expert from the atelier de tarinologie (the fragrance workshop) at Molinard, offered to help me create my own perfume. She had 80 scents altogether to choose from, ranging from jasmine, musk, cedar and coconut to clove, spearmint, nutmeg and something overpoweringly potent called civet cat – which really does come from the anal glands of this African mammal. Celine certainly knew her stuff. She claimed to be able to recognise any of the 80 scents with her eyes closed. When I put her to the test, sure enough, she was correct every time.
Mix and match
The mixing process is fairly straightforward. First of all, you choose the top notes of your scent, which comprise a quarter of the overall perfume; the heart notes then take up another quarter; and finally the base notes, which make up half of the finished product. Whenever you apply a perfume to your skin, the top notes last around 10 minutes, the heart notes a couple of hours and the base notes for the rest of the day.
As I embarked on creating my perfume, Celine congratulated me for my olfactory good taste. It was a far cry, she said, from one of her previous guests. Celine explained how, during their fragrance workshop, the young wife had taken her to one side and begged for help. She explained that her husband was a little too restrained in the bedroom department and she wanted to concoct a perfume that would make him a good deal more frisky: a sure-fire aphrodisiac, in other words. Rather reluctantly, Celine mentioned the civet cat scent, which the lady proceeded to add to her love potion in gargantuan amounts. The result, Celine confided, was a tad vulgar, but the customer was delighted with it.
Sniff of success
For my creation, I erred on the side of caution and opted for top notes of blackcurrant, mandarin and petitgrain, heart notes of green tea, licorice, lavender and fern, and base notes of vanilla, white musk, grey amber and honey. As with all her customers, Celine then registered its recipe on Molinard’s central computer, just in case I wanted to order further batches in the future. Somehow I doubted it. My special blend certainly wouldn’t have the same power over the people of Grasse as that unique fragrance created in the 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Based on the novel by Patrick Süskind and set in 18th-century Grasse, the film tells the story of a talented perfumer who murders beautiful young virgins and manages to distil their essences into the world’s finest perfume. Just one sniff of it drives people it into a frenzy of orgiastic love.
WHERE TO STAY
The four-star La Bastide Saint-Antoine will spoil you with its swimming pool, jacuzzi, fitness centre and Michelin-starred restaurant. You can even take cookery classes and arrange a tour round the extensive wine cellar. It must be good if, as they claim, the Rolling Stones spent most of 1975 partying here.
48 avenue Henri-Dunant
04 93 70 94 94
Hotel Le Patti
Place du Patti
04 93 36 01 00
Bastide Lou Pantail – four-star chambres d’hotes
25 chemin du Santon
04 ?93 70 71 62
WHERE TO EAT
The Bastide Saint-Antoine
A two-starrred Michelin restaurant with a lunch menu (including sautéed squid, lobster risotto, roast scallops or monkfish) at €63, an Scents and Flavors menu (including prawns in coconut, seared tuna, hake and baby duck) at €178 or the Discovery menu (including roasted scallops, spicy langoustine, rabbit, and chocolate panacotta) at €198.
48 avenue Henri-Dunant
00 33 4 93 70 94 94
Le Gazan
3 rue Gazan
04 93 36 22 88
Lou Fassum
381 route de Plascassier
04 ?93 60 14 44
WHAT TO DO
There are three perfumeries open to the public for guided tours.
Molinard
60 boulevard Victor Hugo,
00 33 4 93 ?36 01 62
Fragonard
20 boulevard Fragonard
04 ?93 36 44 65
Galimard
73 route de Cannes
0493 092000
Office de Tourisme Grasse
093 36 66 66
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