Jean-Michel Duriez of Jean Patou and Rochas inspires a character in a French thriller

The white-shrouded body of a beautiful woman is found on a boat on the Seine, right under the windows of the central police headquarters of Paris on the Quai des Orfèvres. She was the face of the campaign for Idole, the new Jean Patou fragrance. The sole clue left on the body is the business card of Camille Beaux, Patou’s in-house perfumer, who becomes the first suspect in the murder investigation…

Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is not purely coincidental. In fact, fragrance aficionada Ingrid Astier, the author of Quai des Enfers, published in the prestigious French collection Série Noire, modeled her character on her friend Jean-Michel Duriez, the in-house perfumer for Jean Patou and Rochas. Beaux is of course a tribute to Ernest; Camille is Jean-Michel Duriez’s favourite name. However, Camille Beaux isn’t entirely Duriez: “He is a perfumer who’s going through a prolonged fallow period after having had a big hit, explains a chuckling Duriez. I’ve never had a big hit!”

In Quai des Enfers, part of the mystery revolves around the meticulously slashed roses laid down on the first victim’s doormat, and in the manner of her death, inspired by a painting by Lord Lawrence Alma Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus. The crime shocks Camille Beaux into conceiving a new perfume around the rose, one that will “attack beauty” by emphasizing the butyric, fatty, animalic aspect of Rose de Mai absolute. “A dying flower, put on the rack, exhaling its last breath in front of the wolf, with its greasy musky fur fed by the thrill of blood torn from the petals…” enthuses the perfumer. The result is published on page 343 of Quai des Enfers: for the first time, an entire, original perfume formula, along with its creative process, becomes part of a novel. Rose, costus, ginger, castoreum, ethyl maltol, maple lactone, rose oxide… It’s all there.

“Ingrid wanted to include the perfume in the story and she kept asking me questions about the notes… I ended up writing the formula and sent it to her by fax: she reproduced it as is in the book. Then one day, I surprised her by having the actual fragrance delivered to her flat!”

In the novel, the fragrance is called Rose de Nuit, a fitting name but one that is already taken by Serge Lutens. One can only hope that some day, Jean-Michel Duriez and Ingrid Astier will find a way to share it with a larger public… I, for one, will pester her until I smell it. After all, we have been talking of having dinner since we met, practically two years ago...