Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

Baudelaire, “Correspondences”.

The water turns off in the shower, and steam pours through the bathroom door, slightly ajar. A woman steps out from behind the glass and reaches for a white towel; it’s freshly laundered, starched, crisp, immaculate. And so is she; a beauty by any measure of the word, perfectly composed.  She wraps herself in the towel and exits the bathroom without wiping the steam from the mirror, crosses the room to a balcony that opens onto a glorious view, the threshold floor to ceiling French doors: the Champs Elysée, the Arc de Triomphe, Le Louvre, Place Vendome.  This is Paris’ right bank: old money, sophistication, self-assuredness, inherited elegance.  And she is la femme de la Rive Droite.  

The room behind her is no less composed, every item carefully chosen and placed for effect.  Monet’s Water Lillies, a single panel, hangs prominently, taking up an entire wall. The settee facing the panel, while elegant and expensive, is not meant for comfort, but for contemplation.  She doesn’t use it. This is for guests. A commitment, an invitation. In the corner, however, a space more personal, more comfortable. A lush reading chair, a small table by its side, upon it, a single slim volume, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Beside that, a bowl of fresh peaches and lychee, and a vase of fresh flowers: ripe fruit, orange blossom and jasmine fill the entire flat.

Ex Nihilo’s Fleur Narcotique arrives in a deceptively simple manner. It’s barely there at first and gives nothing away in the initial moments. Is it a floral, a citrus, a powdery fresh or sweet and fruity scent? Hard to say within the first couple minutes. Only the notes allow a guess.  When it finally does arrive, however, it doesn’t stop: a continuous bloom, seemingly without end. Even when the fruit seems completely ripe, the petals fully bloomed, the fragrance says, “more”. It’s soft, translucent, almost watery, impossibly big, with a faint rose-like quality that places it somewhere between fruit and flower. The peach and bergamot play supporting roles, while the fragrance’s force surely comes from the Petalia in the heart—despite what Parfumo says, it’s Petalia, a captive molecule, not peony extract (Ex Nihilo).  Thus, it’s addictive in two ways. First, it is undeniably gorgeous, literally hard to pull the nose away.  Second, its bloom works the same way narcotics do: there’s something happening at the outset, then a little more, and wait, yes, still more, before it ultimately envelops the user in waves of ecstasy.

Her aura is intoxicatingly exquisite and genuinely seductive. Poets write about this kind of beauty: “I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone, / And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself / Is made to inspire in the poet a love / As eternal and silent as matter” (La Beauté, 1-4). Something syrupy sweet, with a slight edge, develops as the bloom climaxes.  Not a bitterness, exactly, but more an edge to the sweetness itself: the green plant beneath the honeyed flowers.  The jasmine remains sweet, powdery, never leans into its indolic nature. The Petalia, orange blossom and rose read as one, something completely different: three notes, one flower. The question remains, however.  Is she all beauty and seduction, “Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful” (12), or has she genuine emotional and intellectual depth? 

Beauty may be only skin deep, but beauty without depth is still beautiful. Lack of understanding does not sully the Monet’s beauty; the flowers do not become less fragrant despite a lack of knowledge of molecular decomposition; nor the fruit less succulent because it’s strange. And yet, a deeper understanding can take what is already beautiful and elevate it. The Monet hanging on la femme’s wall is the right painting, because someone told her it was right. And it is. But she doesn’t know he painted it nearly blind, working from memory and peripheral sight, refusing to stop, or that he designed the pond himself. None of these facts change the painting. It exists as a thing of beauty even without this knowledge. With this knowledge, however, she would realize that Monet was rebelling against his failing eyesight, committing an act of resistance with every brush stroke; with this knowledge, her relationship with the painting would expand. Old money doesn’t like change, nor rebellion. 

Rebellion. The book on the table has yet to be creased. What will la femme think when she reads,

Gleaming furniture, / Polished by the years, / Will ornament our bedroom; / The rarest flowers / Mingling their fragrance / With the faint scent of amber, / The ornate ceilings, / The limpid mirrors, / The oriental splendor, / All would whisper there / Secretly to the soul / In its soft, native language. / There all is order and beauty, / Luxury, peace, and pleasure. (Invitation to the Voyage,15-28)

La femme has all the accoutrements of privilege: the money, the apartment, the “right” art, the furnishings. Will she understand, however, that Baudelaire is asking her to leave these tangible things behind, and enter a world of ideas, ideals, in favor of something greater. The great irony here is that the right bank, associated with wealth, privilege, old money, lies across from the left bank, associated with ideas, culture, the arts, intellectual freedom. Fleur, despite its beauty, exists within a prison of its own making. As the heart gives way to the base, the notes arrive not only on cue, but also on script: the clean musk and woody notes work together with the moss to provide a light and airy accord. In this way, it might be said to work perfectly with the imagery of a flat on the right bank overlooking iconic Paris landmarks. In another way, there is no room for surprise, nothing outside the notes to look forward to. It was, as the notes reveal, as expected.   

Undeniably beautiful, expertly crafted, incredibly accomplished, Quentin Bisch’s Fleur Narcotique is so consistently beautiful throughout, that it’s hard to find fault with it. It’s almost perfect. Almost. However, like la femme de la Rive Droite, while she revels in patrons admiring her artwork, her decorative prowess, even her taste in literature, there is something missing. Something in the dry down that requires nothing of the aesthete. A conversation that does not happen.  It seduces and walks out of the room. 

All quotes from Baudelaire were taken from William Aggeler’s translation, 1954.