La Couleur de la Nuit
Voyages Imaginaires (2020)

La Coleur de la Nuit is a nocturnal velour, casting blue and violet hues in my mind. Images appear of a tryst under the ever darkening sky, among a patch of lavender, nestled in the evergreens (mmm, fir balsam). It's like a reflection pool where passions dissolve. Its bedstraw sweetness is as subtle as woodruff, and the rose and geranium is an impressionistic glow. It feels as tender as a lingering kiss, while there is a concurrent strange moonlit aloofness.

I think of the scene in the film adaptation of Maurice when Scudder, Maurice's working-class lover, climbs up on a ladder to enter through his bedroom window, and crawls into his bed to make love. It's that kind of dimly lit, forbidden affair. This is the smell of Scudder. Grass stains mingling with a fougère splashed on earlier in the day when he was at the barbers, and the sweat of countryside gamekeeping, hunting pheasant.

An unimpressed reviewer suggests that La Coleur "smells like a variety of freshly cut garden weeds plucked and mixed together and made into (an) abomination salad." That withering assessment made me want to smell this—thank you, dear reviewer.