News

It is an aroma of another age. One sniff brings back vivid images of Marie-Antoinette, whose love of perfumes and attachment to basic personal hygiene may well have been instrumental in leading her to the scaffold. And now visitors can smell a recreation of this fateful scent, called Le Sillage de la Reine (The Queen's Wake), by visiting her former home, the Chateau de Versailles.

The fragrance was resurrected by historian Elisabeth de Feydeau, who stumbled on the recipe while preparing a biography of its inventor, the court perfumer Jean-Louis Fargeon. She mentioned her discovery over lunch to a friend, Parisian perfume-maker Francis Kurkdjian and they agreed he should try to recreate the scent using the techniques and ingredients of Fargeon's day, "just to see if we could."

Now the long-lost perfume forms the centrepiece of a display in the queen's bathroom at Versailles, about 20 minutes by train from Paris, that opens up a world in which scents, fragrances, odours, aromas and smells of all kinds usually of what might politely be called the barnyard variety were much more present to the senses than they are today.

Bad smells were closely associated with disease and Fargeon, who had travelled to Paris from his home city of Montpellier in southern France, secured the hygiene-conscious queen's good graces by presenting her with a pair of scented gloves, a recent French invention.

The Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette, who was busy transforming Versailles' routines with such new-fangled devices as bathrooms, introduced from England, was enchanted. Fargeon was rapidly appointed perfumer-in-chief and was soon supplying fragrances not just to the French court but also to other royal families around Europe.

Perfumes at that time were customized, attuned to the personality of the client and usually varying according to the season. Fargeon, considered one of the founders of modern cosmetics, refined the techniques of preservation, creating finer, more concentrated essences, and made it possible to create a broader bouquet of aromas. As a result, said de Feydau, when you smell Le Sillage de la Reine, it's as if you're walking past a magnificent bouquet comprising flowers of every season.

It took Kurkdjian and de Feydeau a year and a half to work out and set up the process of recreating the royal odour. It was difficult because although we possess the same primary materials, the environment now is very different, Kurkdjian said.

But he was very satisfied with the result, a mixture of jasmine, rose, iris, tuberose, lavender, musk, vanilla, ambergris, cedar, sandalwood and other essences. The perfume is 100-per-cent natural, and certainly something that the queen would have worn, he said.

Indeed, it may have been the Marie-Antoinettes liking for perfumes, and for this perfume in particular, that was her undoing. Many accounts have been written of the events of June 20, 1791, when Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their family retinue attempted to escape to eastern France where troops loyal to the monarchy were waiting, planning to march on Paris and overthrow the republican Constitution. Their flight was cut off at Varennes where they were recognized and arrested.

One version has it that a vigilant chamber-maid, observing the queens travelling chest packed with several months supplies of powders, pomades and perfumes, realized that the royal family were making a break for it and blew the whistle.

De Feydeau believes the truth may have been much simpler. Late-18th-century France was a pungent place, a world of open drains, cesspits and sewers where for most people the lavatory was an open field and taking a bath was a rare indulgence.

"The queen's fragrance must have made a strong contrast. I think it may well have been her scent that gave her away, either to other travellers or to people at the inn where they stopped," she said.

The royal couple were taken back to Paris under escort and publicly executed two years later.

For those with deep pockets, the perfume is to go on sale in subscription from September. Prices will be steep and quantities limited, organizers warned. Sale organizer Jean-François Quemin can be contacted by calling 33 (1) 3083 7470. The scent can also be inhaled at the Château de Versailles during visits to the display of Queen Marie-Antoinette's toiletries and travelling chest, which runs until September. For more information, call 33 (1) 3083 7800 or visit visit chateauversailles.fr/en