When Jacques Polge was a boy his mother would take him every year to spend the long summer holidays with a friend in Grasse, the centre of the French perfume industry. Polge, who is the master perfumer, the 'nose’, of Chanel perfumes, can still remember how wonderful it was. 'From Cannes to Grasse to Nice was all fields of flowers: roses, violets, orange-blossom and especially jasmine – you could smell the jasmine the moment you reached Grasse,’ he says. 'You were surrounded by flowers.’
Polge is standing in his maisonette on the Left Bank in Paris reminiscing, though these days he is surrounded by beautiful things of a different kind: paintings and drawings from Vuillard to Cecil Beaton, plasterwork lamps and marble busts, shells and sculptures and books, books, books.
The flat seems quirky, scholarly and cosy, but Polge denies any striving for effect in his decoration. 'I like inventive, odd and interesting things, and if they’re all beautiful they’ll go together, no matter what era they come from,’ he says. It’s usually a recipe for decorating disaster, but he has pulled it off triumphantly.
Under the curving staircase that leads up to his bedroom and study is an extraordinary juxtaposition to prove his point: a wildly theatrical sofa and chair designed by Vietti in the 1950s, with deeply buttoned seats and scrolling serpentine arms covered in coral fabric, stands next to a 19th-century Italian marble funerary bust, a mirror from the set of the 1997 film Quadrille, an oriental rug and a witty screen designed for Polge by the illustrator Pierre Le-Tan, depicting perfume and perfumery, with noses floating among clouds of scent.
Polge arrived in the world of scent by chance. At the end of his degree in English and literature at the university of Aix-en-Provence, and unsure what he wanted to do next, he answered an advertisement by an American perfumery firm and got the job because he could speak English. There followed an apprenticeship in the laboratory of a perfumer in Grasse, then some years in New York and Paris creating scents, among them the classic Rive Gauche in 1969. Then came the call to the house of Chanel in 1978. Polge believes that almost anyone can be trained to be a 'nose’ if they start early enough, but few could invent a perfume. 'That is a question of creativity,’ he says. 'Many people can play the piano, but there is only one Alfred Brendel.’
Polge has been the maestro at Chanel for more than 30 years, inventing such glorious scents as Coco Mademoiselle, and he feels the hand of history on his shoulder. 'With No 5, which Mlle Chanel [he always refers to her in this way] created in 1921, a style of perfume was established for the house of Chanel.
It is my mission to reflect the style she created, to enhance it, to make it live today.’ And no expense or trouble is spared. 'In 1921 Mlle Chanel had to use jasmine from Grasse for No 5, the only place they grew it in industrial quantities and where they had the expertise: every petal must be picked by hand. Jasmine grown elsewhere – nowadays it’s grown in Calabria, Egypt and India – has its own characteristics, but they are slightly different from the jasmine in Grasse and, to keep the perfume authentic, as she first made it, we continue to have ours grown there.’
Polge’s latest creation, Beige, is based on the honey-tinged scent of hawthorn blossom, an old-fashioned flower whose time he thinks has come. He got further inspiration from Proust’s work A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, where glistening hedges of hawthorn play a central role, and, in the packed bookcases of his flat, there is a first edition of the book. Many of his books are about the artists whose works he collects, mainly those from the 1930s and 1940s. 'It’s an era I love, though some of its artists have been a bit neglected, unjustly I feel – people such as Bébé Bérard, Michaud, Giacometti, Jean Hugo – but it means I can still afford to buy their work. Not like the furniture of that era – Jean-Michel Frank is now so expensive.’ That is less true of the work of the little-known firm of Audoux-Minet, whose trademark rope-bound table and chairs furnish Polge’s dining-room.
They were made in the Côte d’Azur in the 1930s. 'Picasso had lots of their rope chairs,’ he says. 'And I love them for being so simple and unpretentious.’
In his work, as in his decoration, Polge takes a simple ingredient that is perfect in its own way (hawthorn blossom, a seaside chair) and transforms it into something elegant and memorable by choosing other objects or scents that will bring out its essence. And his favourite among the scents he has created? 'It is always the one I am working on at the moment. The best perfume is always the next one.’
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