December 10, 2024
Violets in the House of Ghosts
] sing to us
the one with violets in her lap
] mostly
] goes astray
–Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments, tr. by Anne Carson
It’s raining hard silent pellets down on celluloid forest floor. Three raggedy figures, obscured by greyscale, huddle under an umbrella. They take refuge in a quaint little home with no sign of any human residents, and suddenly, the new century explodes. The year is 1907, and Spanish Trick Film director Segundo de Chomón releases ‘La Maison ensorcelée’ – the first ever cinematic depiction of a haunted house – to widespread delight. The same year, Jacques Guerlain, master emblematic figurehead behind once-perfumers to the French Royal Court creates his most sensitive masterpiece “Après l'Ondée.” During the last breaths of the Belle Epoque, just years before the outbreak of the First World War, the European mind was straddling between the vivacity of the thriving nouveau riche’s freedom, and the relentless colonial statesmanship of the 19th century lurching towards its breaking point in the buildup of international tensions. It is no surprise that at the precipice of being thrust into modernity, both wondrous and horrible, old ghosts stake their claim. The idea of a haunted house not only stages a forced encounter with intergenerational conflict, but insists upon the residual affect of places and things. I am primarily interested in the ways in which, by virtue of its own cultural history and affectual potential, we might also diagnose Après l'Ondée as ‘haunted’ like a house – that is to say, existing as both a relic of sentimental cosmetic antiquity, and a contemporary artistic presence able to viscerally affect the lives of those who encounter it. In short: something about this perfume today feels inhabited by its nameless and innumerable past wearers: elegant socialites and homely housewives alike. In a purely olfactive sense, the drenched botanicals of Après l'Ondée constitute a delicately expired index of fleeting and ephemeral beauty, readily able to conjure things unseen and secrets unremembered.
Like snorting lines of makeup powder off the grave of Charles Baudelaire, your first breath of Après l'Ondé captures everything invigorating and life-affirming about the scents of springtime, and of your late grandmother’s bathroom. Cool orris root, sterile and watery, rubs up against fields of naturalistic violets in the spring. A sort of tepid anise forebodes the scene, distinctly dating the composition, and keeping the smell ambiguously split between realistic florals and precomposed 20th century women’s fragrance types. Finally, the crown jewel of Jacques Guerlain’s twisted mind emerges, an obscene dose of chalky and vanillic heliotrope – resplendent in all her girlish glory. Though my words are deliberately ostentatious, this perfume is not. Through the lens of consumer psychology, one might argue that the limited success of Après l'Ondée under the shadow of its Grand Bal iris-violet little sister L’heure Bleue indicates the faint beginnings of a more expression-oriented use value of perfume. In comparison, l'Ondée does not so much shout bold and desirable ideals of glamour and wealth, but appeals to more sensitive souls looking to capture the wistfulness of a memory with perfume, rather than attract attention. Much like one of my other favorite fragrances of the 20th century, Diorissomo, the more nature-oriented and short-lived composition of this perfume inherently markets itself as something one wears for pure sentimental sensorial pleasure. This is one of the foremost reasons I have asserted l'Ondée carries memories along with itself, because even in its own era, some would have surely regarded it as overly wistful or interior.
I can’t help but think of one of the more profound cliches of the haunted house genre, the idea that tragedy insists upon itself so vividly, so concretely, that personal grief lingers in a space for centuries, rendering its basic functions unusable as a sort of vengeful memorial to previous dysfunction. Like the Japanese folk tradition of Onryō – or "hatred spirits" – when wronged souls (usually women) die, the power of their thirst for vengeance sinks its jagged and overgrown fingernails into the fibers of this word, answering past mistreatment through violence and torment. It is not unheard of in comments of perfume messageboards like Fragrantica to hear that smelling Après l'Ondée has made someone cry. The most upvoted AI-generated ‘con’ to this perfume, created by scraping the comments, is quote: “might evoke sadness or melancholy emotions in some people.” It is hard for me to see this inexplicable phenomenon as anything other than Après l'Ondée’s ghastly spirit haunting the imaginations of current perfume obsessives. Perhaps not with explicit malice, but with a quiet kind of unfinished rumination. When I wear this fragrance, my mind stumbles with flickering candlestick in hand to the darkest recesses of its collective history. Whose wrist bore this omen in 1917? in the mournfulness of 1939? in the uncertainty of 1968? I think of innumerably shaped wooden boudoirs, dresser counters, closet cabinets, and bathroom counters who hosted this perfume’s incarnate presence like a tabernacle. How many decolletages smelled of this smell while womens’ hearts were being broken, while they made love, while they sat teary eyed and alone the next morning? I think of violets’ poetic and political association with lesbianism, I think of their cultural connotation with secrets. I imagine unsent declarations of love, heartbroken heterosexual betrothals ending in perfectly lovely and grotesque springtime weddings. I hear that April is, of course, the cruelest month – and my spirit wells remembering the folk tradition that a single violet blossomed from the ground when Mary, Mother of God told Gabriel – "behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.” I do not mean to be overly sentimental for its own sake – except that smelling Après l'Ondée I do. I believe, for better or worse, in the power of artistic affect to seep through the bonds of time – past generations and cultures and intentions – to sneak up behind you with a cluster of crushed-up violets in hand, and stab you right in the small of your back. Like Barthes’ photographic ‘punctum’ these moments are unintentional idiosyncrasies that leave your heart covered in pastel purple bruises. I do not necessarily think that coopoting that specific visual terminology is productive for the theoretical landscape of understanding scent, but I do think the English language is lacking for words that describe when your lesser senses quite literally hurl you back into situations and feelings you can’t quite place. Even Proust wrote Swann's Way in French, for goodness’ sake. Just as clueless families will always seek to happily move into the house from Paranormal Activity, I feel helpless to avoid or anticipate moments when perfume will treat me like this. I see Instagram reels of young women choking up smelling the bottle of Black Opium they wore religiously when they were regularly seeing the one who got away, and seriously wonder if these kinds of experiences are possible for using Après l'Ondée to commune with the pain of women who died on the Titanic. I don’t claim to be a medium, just a capital r Romantic with too many perfume samples on my hands. But in the right air, I do truly think that this perfume does something supernatural.
It is perhaps worth taking a step back and considering the synchronistic gendering of perfume as a beauty commodity, and film as a burgeoning discipline. Historically, these are both mediums in which men seek to stylistically represent and re-form women. The average perfumer and the average director is male, and the average subject of perfumery and star of film is female. Indeed no particular set of images has defined the semiotic landscape of movie-making like that of the woman. Once cinematograph operators had exhausted their potential to surprise their audience with motion, beautiful women became the common means to draw in viewers – both as a simple reflection of the patriarchal culture that has existed for centuries, but also, one might add, in wake of a particular hold women have had over the cinema, or potentially, a hold it has had over women. In a similar manner, while your average male perfumer or perfume business executive is beholden to the big data financial whims of middle and upper class women, they are also in a unique position to define and articulate how women communicate their own desirability and sexuality, and indeed even shape who they aspire to be. This is their intricate game of push and pull. Countless polemics have been written on the regressive anti-feminism of the cosmetics industry, but your average woman – including myself – is hardly ready to give up my undereye concealer, much less throw away my bottles of perfume and rally in the streets. Just as theorists from Mulvey to Modleski have read the inherently patriarchal visual language of cinema against the grain, finding pockets of sublimated resistance, each a star lighting up part of the constellation that guides the concerned audience member to a filmic language beyond – and intentionally antagonistic to the conventions of the medium, I believe perfume like Guerlain’s Après l'Ondée, and other smells which cease to wholly perform sexually viable seduction – in this instance by way of visceral octogenarian powdery-floral sentimentality, can be presently considered feminist in nature. I’ve articulated this point time and time again. Both because I feel I am constantly coming up upon new infatuations with these styles of perfume, and also because the present zeitgeist so compulsively seems to fear the ghastly spectral figure of one’s inevitable aging out of male desirability. From a historical perspective, however, women today shy away from wearing what is often derided as ‘grandma perfume’ – without realizing their grandmothers simply had better perfume back then. While markets for niche fragrance have exploded in past years to immeasurable artistic benefit for the cultured consumer, mass market manufacturers have been left in the dust. Smelling Après l'Ondée, I yearn for a time when big name designers weren’t playing catchup with TikTok teens. A century ago, houses like Chanel weren’t following trends – they were setting them. I do not necessarily mean to imply a nostalgia for a sort of exclusive top-down Haute Perfumery method of tastemaking, but rather, a desire to see flashes of true innovation return to all levels of accessibility and luxury within the industry.
Despite it all, Après l'Ondée still exists, reformulated on Guerlain’s website like a faded Kodak print of what once was. If perfume is to be considered at times art in the same nuanced way we consider the fashion industry, the medium’s most distinctive trait is its ephemerality. Certainly, to the extent that a perfume like this will linger for only a short time on your person, but also inasmuch as all fragrances are only really able to keep their molecular structure under standard conditions for five to ten years at best. It’s a tragic thought – that all perfumery, gone back as recently as the early aughts, is essentially born to die. I would challenge the concerned perfume consumer, however, to embrace the passage of time like the sommelier embraces noble rot in a good German riesling. That is to say while too much overpowers, but a bit of decay – some of that sour that comes with the breaking down of the fragrances' most volatile top notes – could be considered an aesthetic aspect of the matured vintage fragrance itself. At the best of moments, it only compounds the smell’s ability to haunt me. Because old perfume will decay from opening to drydown, wearing it can feel like literally turning back time. First, you spray and are met with a clear indication of its age, like a Christmas Carol visage of its own grave, but then give it some time – and suddenly glimpses of who it used to be peek through: spectral mirages waltz around you, women in headscarves and victory rolls caress your cheek or scream forgotten epithets in your ear, growing louder and more distinct throughout the day. I’m not sure of the hauntological implications of a newer bottle of Après l'Ondée, because I am not quite sure of the condition of its reformulation. Indeed, many of the animal musk tones used in the original formulation, and some of the heavier floral synthetics are quite literally illegal to manufacture in the 21st Century. That said, older bottles at least dating back to the 80s are available on the secondhand market, and for self-explanatory reasons, I would recommend opting for one of these.
Virginia Woolf was known to dislike wearing perfume during her lifetime, much to my own chagrin, but part of me thinks she just hadn’t worn this one. I consider a particularly scent-laden passage of Mrs Dalloway, and can’t help but feel this type of woman, both her and her character, are the perfect customers for such an idiosyncratic turn of the century release. If the stream-of-consciousness narrative hinges on the ephemerality of thought and the unique individuation of sensorial impression – Après l'Ondée is this passage’s impressionist figurehead. If you own a bottle, or if you were inspired to find one, I urge you to spray it on your wrist right now, sit with the lingering ghosts that cloud your periphery, and read this passage while taking in the scent. Never will you find such resplendent pleasure, such old sadness.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac— glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of niche perfumery, post-structural feminism, fiber arts, comparative literature, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.