The Diary of a Nose Read Online Free PDF

project. In these instances, they represent a frightening promise that I have to flesh out with my intentions and desires.
    A quite different anguish grips me when I am creating one of the Garden perfumes. The fragrance I am composing does not start with an abstract idea that I have to bring to life, but with the place I am in and the premise I choose. Choosing – from a whole palette of possibilities – a smell or smells to act as signals means setting off down a path that I will have to mark out for myself; the anguish is relative to the choice. It entails sleepless nights. Some might say that the choice is personal and does not work for everyone, and I readily accept that. And yet I believe that international exchanges are globalizing tastes and therefore our sense of smell, so that we share common predilections despite a few personal aversions.
    Once I have chosen the path the anguish disappears, and then I am entirely wrapped up in the pleasure of bringing the perfume into being, of writing it. Sometimes it does return, though, when the time comes to make the final choice.

    Moscow, Monday 15 February 2010
    ‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’
    I am in Moscow for the launch of
Voyage d’Hermès
. I am sitting in a hotel lounge and ask the waitress for some black tea. She offers me a selection from Hédiard. In the same standard of hotel in Paris, I would have been served Kusmi Tea, a Russian brand. Fernand Braudel was right when he wrote that capitalism was ‘a game of exchanges.’

    Moscow, Tuesday 16 February 2010
    A gift
    I am interviewed by a journalist who asks me whether I have a gift. I understand that to mean a talent, an innate ability, a natural advantage. I reply that I couldn’t define talent, let alone what is innate or natural, so no, I don’t have a gift.
    I chose perfume by chance, or rather perfume chose me. I could have been a plumber, a painter or a musician, but no one around me was a painter, a plumber or a musician. That is not completely true: my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a music teacher in a state school. I remember that when I was a teenager, and we were living in Nice, I went to him once a week for a few months to have a go at playing the piano, using Ernest Van de Velde’s
Rose Essor Piano Method
. I can still see the colors and art-deco graphics on its cover. But no one at home took any interest in my progress. It was a different story when, at sixteen, I went to Antoine Chiris’s company in Grasse, a factory that was the official supplier to the famous house of Coty for the first half of the twentieth century.
    I went into perfumery as if into a religion, joining a firm that occupied the premises of a former Capuchin monastery. My habit was blue overalls. It was only later that I wore a white coat. Then that in turn was put away in the early 1970s: May ’68 had come and gone. There I met men and women who took an interest in me from the start, and who steered my first steps; with this support, I made progress. I was interested in everything,distillation, extraction, research, manufacturing, analysis, buying. But I was not at all drawn to accounting; finance felt out of reach and far too serious. It was the beginning of an apprenticeship, a tentative process of exploration – one I still use today: that is how I became who I am. At the age of nineteen I left Chiris to fulfill my duties in military service. I had no idea what I would be. I just hoped that, when I came back, there would be a place for me in this world that I loved.
    Since then, the Chiris facilities have been destroyed and their old premises now house the local law courts.

    Cabris, Friday 19 February 2010
    ‘Nebulous’
    I am home from Paris. I am listening to France Inter on the radio and a word suddenly catches my attention: ‘nebulous,’ spoken by a young writer who has been asked whether he is planning another novel. He replies, ‘I have just one page, there’s an idea