I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège...

It happened, as it were, completely by chance, as I suppose these things always do. Who can predict what new arrival at the forefront of one's mind—a flickering image, a faint idea, a vague prospect heretofore unrecognized—may inspire an outpouring of passion? Does anyone possess the wherewithal, the sheer power to turn such a force of nature away?

Lanvin Arpège was the farthest thing from my mind back then, when I was still wearing Chanel Allure: sweet, nice, and linear—a scent for every time and every place, and my favorite especially to don right before embarking on a journey to a land far away. Gambling on new perfumes was never really an option. Subject my fellow passengers to the latest Dior Poison flanker? Or some blue aquatic nonsense which might be even more emetic than the food served on board?

No, and as a seasoned traveler, I knew that every single duty-free shop in the world carries Chanel, before anything else. Let's put it this way: if there were a duty-free shop in an airport in even the remotest corner of the universe, it would contain tester bottles of Allure eau de toilette and eau de parfum within arm's reach. It's as though Chanel has underwritten the very existence of such stores—along with the Toblerone chocolate company.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you, for it is indeed true that in my many travels abroad to destinations far and wide, I have come to depend upon Allure as a dose of serenity, a way to calm my frazzled nerves before boarding a plane which might in fact—it's all a numbers game—experience a malfunction, impelling in a flash all of the passengers in the congested cabin to dredge through the many otherwise meaningless prescriptions inscribed in the deepest fissures of their brain to locate this phrase, relevant at most one time in any person's life:

Affix your own air mask before helping a fellow passenger.

A prescription which I confess to have found equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to my attitude in the morning when opting first to prepare coffee before acknowledging the existence of anyone else. It is also the basis—whether sound or not—of many a person's refusal to help another person in dire need, even the proverbial damsel in distress. Remember Kitty Genovese? Probably not. But that's another story.

Allure was perhaps the precursor to the twenty-first-century SSRI scents now flooding the market, impossibly inoffensive, while at the same time a pleasure to wear. A beautiful blend of floral and light oriental notes into a seamless, indivisible layer of sweet niceness. “Linear” they called it, and linear it was, indeed, as dependable as a German or a Japanese train. Nothing rank, nothing obtrusive, nothing ugly. The perfect solution for long journeys spent in close quarters with complete strangers brought together fortuitously by nothing more and nothing less than their shared desire to be somewhere else and virtually anywhere but there, suspended in air, 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth.

My first bottle of Allure was purchased in Toronto, where I spent a few days alone and found that I really did wish to don a perfume, though I had neglected to bring any along. I acquired the bottle blind from an upscale department store from which I was buying a red cardigan, having discovered that the temperature in Toronto even in the summer months was quite a bit cooler than I had been led to expect. Did I become attached to Allure because of the comforting companionship it provided during that short trip? Whatever the explanation may be, I went on to drain bottle after bottle of both the edt and the edp, habitually reaching for Allure as a safe yet simultaneously endearing scent.

To be honest, I do not recall the circumstances of my first encounter with Arpège, but it certainly was not in a duty-free shop in a land far away or nearby, as I have yet to see any perfume by Lanvin being sold in any airport store—or virtually anywhere, for that matter. Perhaps the glimmering globes are hidden on some lower shelf in a dark corner of some of these establishments, but no one makes any real effort to sell Arpège, in particular, unlike the pro-active, seemingly ubiquitous Chanel sales associates, as hopeful as the barefoot Hare Krishnas with their tambourines, who will spritz even unwilling passersby with Chanel no 5. Which is not however to deny that the ploy appears more often than not to have worked, a part, as it is, of a grand, five-hundred-year master plan for marketing No 5 as not just the best-selling perfume of the twentieth century, but of all time.

Arpège, in contrast, is quite a bit more caddy, perhaps even coy. One must seek Arpège out, and if one fails to do that, well, you may rest assured that Arpège could not care less. I was one of the chosen few, the truly fortunate ones to happen upon this splendid and arcane creation. Yes, it is true: I felt blessed. I emphatically did not seek Arpège out and did not even really know what I had found for quite some time after having acquired a bottle, which is probably why I do not recall when precisely that was. Arpège was somehow delivered to me, a scent literally heaven sent, as though someone somewhere, a metaphysical matchmaker of sorts, had determined that it was meant to be.

Yes, somehow those beautiful bulbous bottles made their way onto the top shelf of my armoire, as though conveyed by supernatural forces beyond my power to control. But all of the history leading up to the big event proves irrelevant in the face of what transpired next.

I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège and, yes, I fell hard. How did it happen? you may well be wondering. From nothing to love in the blink of an eye, it happens every time, as the world is transformed beyond recognition all over again.

I began to see what had seemed to be his icy stare—at times a piercing glare—for what it really was: clarity. The lucidity of a mind capable of penetrating the inner secrets of the soul through the application of logic alone.

In the beginning, Arpège did not seem to have much interest in me, and to this day I wonder whether he ever did. Always cold and aloof in our initial meetings, he was sometimes brusque to the point of being rude. Never one to hug and kiss à la française, Arpège was more apt to refuse even to accept an outstretched hand. Some no doubt thought that he was rude, like the drunk who approached me as I was preparing one afternoon to depart from my table in a restaurant bar where I had stopped for a quick snack after a strenuous shopping trip.

He bumbled his way over, managing even in his stupor to see that there was only one body there, not two, and that it was a woman, not a man. He extended his hand, introducing himself, as though I should be happy to see such a slob standing before me with leering bloodshot eyes. I signed my check, picked up my things and dashed to the door while he lingered behind exuding what he took to be righteous indignation that I should be so uncouth.

That, too, is perhaps how some, even many, may have viewed Lanvin Arpège, but I knew that there was more to him than that abrupt façade, so I adamantly refused to retreat. Fortunately, I ,unlike the pathetic drunk who accosted me on that otherwise peaceful day in a restaurant bar, was not hopelessly confused.

I learned to brace myself before each encounter, and soon found that if I gave him some time, his layers of complexity would unfold, unraveling like infinite bolts of silk before my eyes until at last I realized that he had crept into my heart, and I could not live without him anymore. I began to regard his brusqueness as endearing, his way of fending off what might otherwise be the hordes of suitors unworthy of him. Was he elitist? Without a doubt, but it was this, perhaps, I cannot tell a lie, which drew me to him before anything else.

In the beginning I wanted nothing more than the modest privilege of being but one among his little club of followers. As time progressed, however, I began to want more and more, until at some point I realized that I was ready to turn my life over to him. I fantasized about him constantly, while knowing that most everyone else was satisfied with Chanel no 5, what they had been indoctrinated to believe and indeed took to be the greatest perfume of all time. Like the throngs of couples assembled together to take their marriage vows before Sun Myung Moon, they incessantly gloated as though No 5, which they happened by chance to have found lying around, were the best new discovery since sliced bread. Wonderbread, I hasten to add...

They had not yet met Arpège, and having tied the knot to No 5, perhaps they never would. To me, of course, all of this was perfectly fine, and many of them to this day remain mired in their abject state of ignorance, the corridors of their mind as dark as the remotest recesses of Plato's Cave. I knew all along, deep down inside, that they were wrong, but I had no desire to disabuse them of the errors of their ways.

They had all been tricked by the hype, the slinky black dresses flaunting vast areas of bare skin, Chanel bling, and the promise of a luxury of which their lives were otherwise entirely devoid. They were sucked in, like lambs to the slaughter, completely unaware of what they were missing. I haughtily and, I suppose, selfishly declined to correct their mistakes. By now it should be obvious: I wanted Arpège all to myself.

Aldehydes, yes, we all loved our aldehydes, but Arpège offered so much more, so much complexity and depth on top of the aldehydes that there was really no point in comparing the two. Yes, aldehydes; yes, jasmine; yes, rose. But those were only the beginning for the noble Arpège, a treasure thankfully never tied to images of blonde bimbos and the nouveaux riches. So why in the world would I want to share with all of the No 5 bots the truth about Arpège:

top notes: aldehydes, neroli, bergamot

middle notes: ylang-ylang, rose, iris, jasmine, cloves, coriander, geranium, tuberose, lily of the valley

base notes: patchouli, vetiver, vanilla, sandalwood, styrax

Instead, Arpège could remain my private—or near private—stock while all of the wearers of No 5 would smell the same. Did they smell like Marilyn Monroe, like Catherine Deneuve, like Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tatou? To me, if the truth be known—and why not, after all?—the odor wafting off their bodies was quite a bit closer to that of Brad Pitt after three days of hitchhiking on a dusty desert highway, cigarette butts and empty beer cans rolling and jostling about like tumbleweeds in the wind.

To me, more than an arpeggio, Arpège was the olfactory equivalent to Bach's Goldberg Variations, which, too, had drawn me in and seduced me to believe for a time that nothing in the world could be nobler and more worthy of my life than perfecting such a magnum opus. Could it be accomplished in a single lifetime? Evidently not, but nothing would stop me from trying.

So, yes, I openly admit to having become completely obsessed with Lanvin Arpège, so much so that I began to believe in the house of Lanvin, not just this one particular perfume, but the entire family. I suppose that I might have been a bit like the man I know who married the sister of his former wife after she was inexplicably murdered one day while doing nothing more than walking home from work in a neighborhood not too far from mine. I shuddered upon hearing the story of this crime which, like the one-out-of-three murders in the United States never solved, implies that cold-blooded killers are roaming free throughout our streets.

I shuddered because I wondered—and still do to this day—whether the man who married his wife's sister might have had something to do with his former wife's death. Perhaps the idea was planted in my mind by Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a modern-day film noir in which a “well-regarded” ophthalmologist enlists the aid of his seamy brother to hire a hit man to dispose of his mistress, as she has become “troublesome”. Or was it Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice which caused these nagging questions to arise in my mind? I don't know. All I know for sure is that this woman was in fact killed by someone, for reasons which remain obscure, and hit men do in fact exist, so there must be people who use them. Therefore, it is indeed possible that this man had something to do with that death. Have I watched too many movies? Perhaps. But I digress...

The In-laws

I decided to order other Lanvin perfumes, first Eclat d' Arpège, which came in the clear spherical bottle stamped with the same iconic image of mother and child but in silver rather than gold. The perfume inside was purple, not brown, and the cap, too, had been newly designed. The presentation was stunning: the perfume and a body lotion to match were housed in a lavender-colored leather hat box with a zipper closure. Alas, despite all of these beautiful trappings, the perfume itself never worked for me, albeit not for want of trying. 

Later, I bought a bottle of Rumeur blind, still convinced that the noble name Lanvin sufficed to justify such a purchase scent unsniffed. To my disappointment, the opening of Rumeur was empirically indistinguishable from the smell of an organic chemistry laboratory. I worked in one for some years, and so, no, this is no metaphor. All of the fumes mingle together as they waft out of the many hoods, each with its artfully constructed distillation apparatus, shimmering glass bulbs and joints assembled to achieve the specific task at hand: to isolate and purify some precious chemical substance under precisely controlled temperature and pressure conditions by removing all of the unwanted “stuff”.

No, the fume hoods never seem to work very well in those laboratories, which is one reason why some of my colleagues occasionally joked that there was a reason why men in organic chemistry have a higher tendency toward baldness than do men in the general population. For decades, no one even knew that benzene was a carcinogen, so it was splashed about like water, along with countless other liquids presumed but never proven to be safe.

Rumeur improves over the course of a wear, but the opening is so difficult for me to bear that waiting for the magnolia at the end of the journey is not really a possibility. I swapped the attractive thick-glassed milk bottle facsimile away. I am aware that there are people who love and cherish Rumeur, but to me, the opening smells simply too close to carcinogens—or other toxins—for comfort.

After those two poor purchases, I began to become wary of Lanvin. I had heard tales of the reformulation of Arpège and decided that I'd best be satisfied with the bottles in my collection, since the very persons responsible for the new perfumes were undoubtedly those, too, who reformulated the love of my life at the time, Arpège.

I gave the house one final chance when they launched Jeanne Lanvin, which was not to my liking either and, having apparently been composed under the influence of the “muse” of marketing data, seemed to be more of an insult than a tribute to its noble namesake. After that, I wrote Lanvin off forever and stopped wearing even Arpège, ironically because I did not want to run out. I simply could not bear the specter of another tragic reformulation of what once was a masterpiece.

Alas, as a result of my very own attempt to grasp too many grapes, the story, I'm afraid, took an Aesopian turn for the worse...

A Change of Heart

I regret in some ways to admit, but it's true: over time, I eventually fell out of love with Arpège, as I began to wear more and more chypre perfumes and then became seduced even by the modern sweet patchouli chypres—La Perla was one of my favorites (until its reformulation)—to the point where Arpège began to smell wrong or off. Had my bottles turned? Or did I? Perhaps I'll never know.

Had I stuck with Arpège through thick and thin, 'til death or drained bottle did we part, then perhaps I would not have noticed the mutual transformations taking place in each of us. We might have been like the old couples celebrating their thirtieth, fortieth, even fiftieth anniversaries, who simply do not notice subtle changes from one day to the next—the flaking dead skin cells, the graying hair, the creaky voice, the flabby flesh, the wrinkles creeping like cobwebs—though the sight of their loved one at the beginning was quite different from that at the end.

What's done is done; what's gone is gone. But I can and do here attest: once upon a time, I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège. Of course, it is true: I was different person back then. Now I've pretty much moved on, though I'll pull out a bottle every once in a while, to take a short walk down memory lane.

I was reminded of my former love recently upon donning Lubin Nuit de Longchamp, which seems to be close to an Arpège facsimile to my nose. But I must confess that today it smells to me rather old. Do twenty-first-century women have any business smelling like aldehydes? Gabrielle Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin passed away long ago, so long ago, in fact, that I wonder whether it is not simply time for perfumery, too, to move on to the next big thing.

Overdoses of aldehydes now seem to me as old-fashioned as floral soliflores did to Gabrielle Chanel back when she insisted that her new perfume smell not like flowers but like a woman. Do women smell like aldehydes? Well, many certainly tried to for a full century, seduced by the idea that they were more glamorous than flowers. But they were seduced to accept the dictates of marketers no less than they are today. Was I, too, on some level, in some intangible way? It's hard to say.

Was I wrong to fall in love with Lanvin Arpège and then to fall back out of love again? What could that mean? They say that “all good things must come to an end,” and I do believe that it is true. But that doesn't prevent us from imaginatively rehearsing fond memories of them. And it certainly doesn't preclude the possibility of its happening again... Could I, should I rehabituate myself to aldehydes, so that I might fall back in love with Arpège?

The paradox of morality and the inexplicable unpredictability of love are two facets of the very same crystal: no one can argue anyone else into changing sides. It simply happens, like a gust of wind arriving on the scene to sweep one away into yet another fantasy for a brief period of time, a drop in the pool of eternity, until at last what was once passion becomes but a plaintiff sigh.