As time unfolds, our lives are etched by images and paced to the rhythm of melodies that permeate our memory to its very depths. Years, even decades later, these images and these melodies endure, more or less readily accessible at the whim of our reflections and reveries. Tucked away in a secluded corner of our memory also nestle the scents, fragrances, and perfumes of the past. The emotion we feel when these olfactory madeleines unexpectedly resurface is among those that adorn our existence and, for one fleeting instant, transport us far across time and space…

These odours of our early years, these perfumes of bygone days – we know they linger, buried deep within the folds of our limbic system. Yet although we sense their presence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to summon them back at will. It is only by chance, along a path through the garrigue, beside a towpath, in the dimness of a dusty attic, or in the hidden alley of a village drowsing in the languor of summer, that our nostrils suddenly fill with these witnesses of the past, these indelible markers of a childhood already so distant for many of us.

The powerful exhalation of broom in flower, whose pods will burst with crisp little cracks at the height of summer (I would later discover its maritime cousin, the gorse, which, in the first warmth of spring, releases an intoxicating aroma of… coconut). The heady perfume of wild honeysuckle, here entwined in hedges of hawthorn or wild rose, there scaling an old wall in conquest. The distinctive bouquet of pine groves, an agreeable blend of bark and resin, mingled here and there with the scents—sometimes discreet, sometimes domineering – of those woodland mushrooms with sometimes strange names, such as the livid entoloma or Patouillard’s inocybe, even the impudent ones like the celebrated stinkhorn, also known as the phallus impudicus.

Nor must we forget the scent of thyme, omnipresent on certain sun-drenched screes; or that unmistakable fragrance of mint, so common along the shaded banks of streams. And what of the garlic that colonises the slopes in spring with its so characteristic and pervasive perfume? Or angelica and fennel, those umbellifers whose foliage, formed of delicate plumes, releases in the summer heat so pleasant a fragrance when rubbed between the fingers? How, moreover, could one pass over in silence the rockrose, the rosemary, the sage, the mimosa – ubiquitous in certain places – whose perfumes I would have to wait many years to appreciate, never having known in my earliest youth the southern soils where they flourish.

Natural perfume is fragile, fleeting as a breeze that brushes the nostril like an offshore wind carrying a tonic, heady, bewitching scent – like a bouquet mingled with saffron and Indian curry – the perfume of the immortelle clinging to the rocky soil of a coast. Its scaly flowers, as though cut from a sheet of antique gold, will never change their appearance, resembling a vegetable mummy dried upon its stem and exhaling its final effluvia. The image of life frozen in the thickness of time, of which only a subtle trace remains, a poetic reminiscence.

When the gold of the autumn sun dusts the old gold of the immortelles with their saffron-and-Indian-curry perfume, our ephemeral existence is exalted by the thousand mingled flavours of a life that intersects thousands of others. Insignificant moments in the world’s course – yet bearing the reflection of a cloud upon the skin or a sudden gust laden with Latin America or the Sahara. And the immortelle will die happy to have dreamed its own permanence, hoping that a fragment of that dream may cling to a molecule of our brain, which the magic of decomposition will recycle into a molecule of heady perfume -the memory of the immortelles.

Natural perfume demands sensitivity and attentiveness to the world, a sensory, sensual, and associative presence. So that you, in turn, may become the immortelle of another being whose memory endures and whom reality recalls.

Fruits of my travels, of my encounters with plants, earth, and people, of my commitments, my perfumes are reflections and summons. From the flowering enthusiasm of feminine fragrances to the tenacious woody insistence of masculine notes, from the suave warmth of tropical lands to the dense, contained odours of Siberian forests. Within the infinite complexity of accords, the quest for the singular – for that which characterises us as historical beings destined to live in this epoch and none other—prevails in my approach over the pursuit of an impossible perfection, the very antithesis of nature.

If you close your eyes, simply by breathing you will be able to travel with the scents and accompany me on a journey that is at once authentic and deeply felt.