Danielle

Daydreaming is my sole occupation in your absence. For in that parenthesis of time, I conjure up your voice, your face, and the daintiness of your skin. But the natural fragrance of your body is something I would always miss. As if the captive senses have gone out of step, and some of those eloquent aromas have been locked away, like the closing of a gate! But whatever traces of your delicate odor intrude upon me - like the ambergris of your first kiss on my nostrils, or when your lips breathed out their autumn scent of musk - they are more disturbing than the contemplation of your other charms. You may be the most beautiful woman in the world; but I swear the pollen-like fragrance rising from your form rakes up my senses like a maelstrom.

And because you laugh at my susceptibility, let me tell you the story of Danielle, a story about fragrance.

Daniel lived by some primeval instincts not far from the spires of Oxford. Her Provencal lineage wasn't, however, apparent unless somebody sought her out and was lucky to be invited to tea. But such interludes were rare because not many people other than American tourists were driven by any curiosity in that strange city where all natives lived more or less in a state of insouciance. It were her elegiac eyes casting an irresistible spell whenever I walked past her cottage that led me into her private world. She wasn't very young, but that's not relevant to this story. But she was, not a very long time ago, a woman with whom men fell in love at first sight. And she had, like all beautiful women, a strong predilection to tragedy.

Daniel's father worked as a "nose" in a Grasse perfumery, but he had an ambivalent relationship with the elements of his profession. He was fond of quoting lines from Baudelaire celebrating the subtle scents of the human body, and had prohibited the use of perfumes in his household. His family had acquiesced, though not without a murmur that he indulged the whim in order to preserve his nasal attributes for the work place rather than to exalt human redolence.

She went to a boarding school down the hill in Antibe, and fell in love towards the end of the final year. This was considered a miracle in a town where everybody seemed to be in love with her. The object of her emotions was Edmond, a poet twelve years older, who had been in the Resistance as an young man, and now lived out his life wandering on the Cote d'Azur, engaged partly in reviewing poetry for literary magazines and partly in experimenting with scents in flowers as an amateur phytologist. When he wasn't busy in these pursuits, he discovered himself in solitude, far from salons and bars, musing in the forest, lost among the hills or near the sea-shore, often envisioning a woman who would lead him out of his dream of love into an endlessly ecstatic existence.

She had met him at a friend's party, and was enraptured by this carelessly dressed man with sensitive lips and penetrating eyes breathing down his ardour and earnestness into ears unused to such music. She seemed fulfilled beyond measure during the first week they spent together in the forests above Roquebrune. She symbolised for him life and movement, not so much on account of her vivacity, or the wild side of her apparently calm nature, as on account of her sensitive brown eyes and the sweet scent of her body.

"What is most fascinating about you," he told her at the end of the Roquebrune sojourn, "is the essence of wildflowers that comes forth from you," and vowed in an ode addressed to her that, like Petrarch, he would immortalise his own Laura through re-creation of her fragrance in a new rose. The autonomy of body odours, which she had once regarded as a conceit of an old father, suddenly became a revelation in Edmond's poetry.