When I was living in Paris, I had the extraordinary opportunity to tour the Cire Trudon store on rue de Seine with the American Women's Group. Cire Trudon has been making candles since Louis XIV's day and it is still being run by the same family. Today, they are mostly in the business of making and selling scented candles and on that day we were lucky enough to meet the perfumer, who was visiting Paris from Grasse, the capitol of French perfume. I've wanted to go there ever since.
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| Perfume distillery |
Grasse is up in the hills not far from Antibes, so Laura and I drove up there on a sunny, beautiful Saturday. It was great fun, but, were I to do it again, I would take a day tour or hire a private guide. We found the relatively new International Museum of Perfume to be extremely difficult to navigate and not very self-explanatory. We had much more fun and got more information at the Gallimard workshop in town. Fragonard and Molinard, the other great names of French perfume, are also handsomely represented with their own boutiques and treasures. There were several pieces of old distillery equipment on display. Flowers were heated in the pot to the right and then the steam was condensed by running it through coils in a bath of cold water on the left to get the essential oil. Needless to say, much has changed, including the invention of synthetic scents. I also didn't know that perfume is aged for up to a year before it is sold.
There were also wonderful collections of old perfume bottles and traveling cases in which both scents and other toiletry items could be stored. Those made in the 17th and 18th centuries were particularly beautiful, worked in fine woods, leathers and glass with gold or silver trim. On the left is a traveling English toilet case made in the late 18th century from some kind of fish skin, gold, crystal, ivory and agate.
After taking whiffs of perfumes, colognes, soaps and distillation oils, we could hardly smell a thing! There were many flavors I had not encountered before including fig, whisky and tobacco. Imagine!
At the end of our day, we visited the Gardens of the International Museum of Perfume, which are located a few kilometers out of town. The garden contains small plots of almost everything grown to make perfume from fig trees to lavender, but especially old roses (not hybrids). Smelling them was just like being back in the store smelling the heady perfume they made.
There were also wonderful collections of old perfume bottles and traveling cases in which both scents and other toiletry items could be stored. Those made in the 17th and 18th centuries were particularly beautiful, worked in fine woods, leathers and glass with gold or silver trim. On the left is a traveling English toilet case made in the late 18th century from some kind of fish skin, gold, crystal, ivory and agate. 
