French Lover / Bois d'Orage
Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle (2007)

French Lover is a devastating formalist poem about the thermodynamics of presence. It is seductive only through its promise of invincible restraint. It creates nothing less than a minimal field of maximal clarity.

When you put on French Lover,

"Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night."

French Lover is this weightless Geist of imagination in Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”

The perfume strips away decoration in the open and presents bitter green galbanum and the crisp wash of citric juniper, as though you’ve run your hand through a hedgerow. I also sense a buried violet-leaf sweetness stippled with spicy black pepper. Haunting angelica arrives quickly, adding a green powder and a confidently restrained animal musk. Parched cedar and vetiver settle into the base and grow in intensity, keeping the juniper particularly vibrant above them.

After an hour the push off skin is severely diminished (as most note), but a subtle incense or vetiver smoke suffuses the woody, musky base. Every note remains represented as the perfume flattens to the skin and hums there for four more hours. Short-lived indeed, but perfect.

French Lover claims a minimal though unassailable sovereignty—a dominance not by force but by a totalizing and perfect fit within the limits of its own cold material geometry. In this way it is the structural pair to Chanel No. 19 (1970): a perfume equally austere, equally alive. Despite their almost hostile coolness, something uncanny moves through both perfumes. Something properly disturbing, and—for the right people—quite bewitching.

In Stevens’s poem, the rabbit rises until it becomes stone, “like a carving in space,” and the entire world below shrinks to a bug in the grass.

Wear French Lover and become a floating king as well—suzerain of a ghostly forest, where all the trees and the wideness of night are for you.

Green and woody, this one has some appeal to it. I could have sworn I got a pinch of sandalwood. I guess that's the cedar note. I get a little spice followed by incense. Wet tree bark with the roots and some soil in a nice way. Some will love and some will probably dislike this one. I happen to like this gem. Projection and longevity is average. 7/10

I bought this on a trip to visit a friend and I remember the the day I bought it and wore the test spray out of the shop I could not feel any more obsessed with the scent.
Something about it makes you want to revisit it over and over. I love a fragrance like this especially on moody overcast days. It's one that pulls masculine in the best way, I personally wear it as a woman, but if I smelled this on a man I would for sure be interested in his good taste.

smells like the video game hollow knights world. sort of melancholic wet nature

I’ve never had a French lover, so I can’t tell you if this is accurate. Do all French people who are someone’s lover smell this way? If so, I should get me one asap. Apparently, the alternate name, Bois d’Orage, was given to the perfume to quell puerile Americans like myself. Ok, I’ll stop being facetious now. Malle’s French Lover by the legendary Pierre Bourdon is no laughing matter, particularly the way it’s been treated while under the heavy thumb of Estee Lauder. Several Malles had to go through reformulations when EL insisted they stay in the lineup while fully complying, without any leeway, to IFRA regulations. Reformulating is very expensive and yields no guarantees. Malle is the type that if he cannot stay true to the original to exacting parameters he would rather discontinue the perfume; his zealotry for being technically faithful to a composition and maintaining its innocence is no surprise. Though he hasn’t said that in as many words, what Malle has told us is that to save enormous sums of time and money, both factors greatly affecting the ability to craft new perfumes, some of his old-guard compositions fell on the sword. French Lover, to my nose, is one of them. Although the new formulation is not terribly far off, it’s not the same; the newer formulation(s) have had the salty sweatiness and beastly animalic musks quietened, and the longevity is noticeably shorter. Perhaps we can say our French lover has gotten older and calmed down a bit. Otherwise, it's the same perfume.

The green and bitter opening, thanks to galbanum and violet leaf, and the bitter aromatic fruit of juniper, still arrests attention. They string their way down to heart and base notes of angelica, woods, incense, vetiver, and musks. The salt and sweat of the vetiver are dialed back a bit in new formulations, as is the muskiness, as mentioned, but woody, smokey (cigarette smoke?) incense, and softly green angelica are still there and in fine form. It's old school yet modern, natural but toys with the synthetic, a bit crude and brash yet perfectly capable of staccato sophistication, comfortably masculine and comfortably feminine all at once. It's fantastic.

The third fragrance by Pierre Bourdon on my shelf, French Lover (formerly Bois d’Orage or “Storm wood”, a much more fitting moniker), is incredibly satisfying to spray on. To me, it achieves perfect aromatic harmony.

The galbanum, violet leaf, pepper, and angelica are such natural complements of vetiver, that they all sparkle as a single, bracing, bitter-green, slightly sweet but rooty, and bitingly earthy pick-me-up. This is tonic perfumery right here: as invigorating as that first deep breath of cold mountain air in the early morning.

The incense and orris root round out the bite, and the musk in the drydown is subtle and sexy. FL feels natural yet modern; only a well judged (i.e. not spiky, unobtrusive) woody amber is used in the base to propel it through the workday. The juice is masculine, smooth, and sensuous. Exactly my jam.