Roaming the Rivieras ℅ airbnb --Grasse

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

     Grasse, the village in France most associated with the manufacture of perfumes, is high in the hills, surrounded by mountains.  The soil is arid, calceous and white, while a bit further away, in Saint Raphael, it is rose-colored.  Whereas in Nice it is moist and more green.  While most visitors consider themselves to have visited the "remote" Riviera if they have gone to Éze, or Roquebrune, two villages perchés, in fact neither village is particularly high up.  In fact, in the mountains behind Nice there are tiny villages where the winters are rude, notwithstanding the Côte d'Azur's reputation for mild temperatures in the cold season and luxury year-round.

     Driving here in the off-season is very pleasurable, which is something I never thought I would write.  Today, I drove from Grasse to the Fondation Maeght, a temple of modern art created by Marguerite and Aimé Maeght to house their collection, which contains something by almost every 20th century master --Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Giacommeti, de Stael, Chagall, Braque, and many more.  Shostakovich's Valse No. 2 was playing on the radio as I drove, the arc of the music  smoothly following the winding turns of the road.  When I got to Saint Paul de Vence, I parked at the base of the hill atop which the Foundation is located and walked up through the gates.  I remembered the sculpture on the lawns from the last time I was here, in September 2010, for a Giacommetti show.  This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Fondation, so there is a special exhibition in celebration.  Modern art is not my favorite art, but the ensemble of buildings and their placement high in the landscape is spectacular.  Walking through the grounds, visiting the sun-lit galleries, feels to me like what I think being in the home of a wildly wealthy Hollywood producer who collects modern sculpture and paintings would be like; or like being on the Hamptons estate of Peter Brant, the very wealthy businessman and collector of contemporary art.  That is to say, the display is as important as the art itself.

      From Fondation Maeght I went to Vence to have lunch at the Château Saint Martin, a Relais and Château located near the summit of a very tall peak, le Col de Vence.  Bill and I stayed there in September of 2010.  He had been given a clean bill of health by his doctors and we were there to celebrate.  It was a wonderful experience and I relived it having lunch in the wood-paneled dining room overlooking the view over the Côte d'Azur.  I had the cheapest meal available, but it was beautifully prepared and served.

     I drove back to Grasse and visited the Musée Internationale de Parfum, which had an exhibit about bathing --and alternatives to bathing, as well as its permanent displays illustrating the process of perfume making.  Most interesting to me were the opportunities to smell a variety of scents, including those of drugs, from opium to marijuana to cocaine to coffee to whisky, as well as the gardens where some of the plants used in perfume-making were being grown.  There were boxes to be opened giving off the scents of rhizomes, wood, flowers; and audio-visual displays explaining how the sense of smell operates.

     Today most perfumes are made, not of natural ingredients, but from chemical compounds that replicate the smells of natural ingredients as well as creating smells not found in nature.  For instance, "new car smell" --which some people find intoxicating.  Different people respond to different smells differently --I can't stand the smell of "neroli", for instance, while others are fond of it.  Scents have their day, then are passed over: tuberose, for instance was popular in Victorian England, and is now demodé.

     The thing about perfume is that --unlike addictive substances-- you can use it to excess without ill-effects --and, unlike food, it won't make you fat.  So I delighted in being able, while I was in Grasse, not only to visit the perfume museum, but to visit the Molinard  and Fragonard factory-museums.  I had not realized that there are fragrances made there that are never distributed outside France: which loving perfume as I do, turned me into a kid in a candy store: I wanted to try every single one.

     Which can't be done: while a sense of smell is what enables the enjoyment of perfume, no one can distinguish one scent from another after smelling about four or five fragrances.  Edmond Rudnitska, the great perfumer --among his best known perfumes are Diorissimo, Eau Sauvage, Eau d'Hermes, and Femme-- said, in a taped interview replayed at the museum, that a sense of smell is something that can be exercised, and in so doing, expanded.  He also said the main effect of perfume is not in the smell, it's in the reaction we have to it in the brain.  All of which suggests that the study of perfume can be approached with connoisseurship --to me, an idea almost as entrancing as perfume itself.