Sitting in her apartment in a pale purple ball gown she eats marmalade on honey coloured toast and has time to contemplate that quote.
“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”
And a ghost of the night before, incipient as winter dawn sunshine, appears for a moment before her mind wills it away.
She was never under the host, per se.
Sure after a cocktail or two they had their proverbial roll in the hay, but it was, she impresses on herself, purely proverbial, or so she thinks. Not at all carnal, as she remembers things, clutching at memories like stray white feathers in stormy weather.
‘Yes’, she gasps, grasping at a flash of the past through time and gin and tonics, they returned from the garden and sat with other guests, holding hands just by the band playing old time jazz at the edge of the lawn, a woman singing, doing a so-so Sarah Vaughn.
Was it ‘Summertime’? No. A number by Cole Porter.
An April breeze, a dawn that agrees, daffodils… ‘As once more she sees’ his face again in front of her again, his mouth moving to the music:
‘It’s Spring again
And birds on the wing again
Start to sing again’
Then her lips start to mirror his as they had the night before, as she joins him in ‘The old melody’:
‘I love you
That’s the song of songs
And it belongs
To you and me.’
And suddenly all the violets still in their soil that surround her make sense.
He had ordered them dug up from the very spot next where they had exchanged vows.
She remembers now.
They came delivered by Cadillac and his driver in the darkness immediately before morning broke.
In inside garden air, warding off that growing, falling sense of despair, she turns her mind to how to break it all off.
*************
L’Essence de Cristobal Balenciaga is a light airy perfume resembling the half remembered memories of an evening perilously misspent.
Opening with an unexpected and unmentioned citrus jam note, the fragrance is soon subsumed into a vast array of flowers, all violets.
One could be deceived for thinking this the scent of a simple and straightforward young woman. That would be a mistake.
An internal accord of complexity and steely determination manifests itself in a vetiver, lawn grass and cedar tree background that gives the whole package genuine staying power and silage, whilst remaining defiantly unsweet and uncute.
This silk ball gown contains a young woman with a past that stretches back long before last night.
And as for men? They will come and go and some of them will smell, for a time at least, of violets too.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
The Perfumed Dandy. 
It is all very Glen Cove Long Island in the summer at a party at the Larrabees before that lovely girl Sabrina moved in over the garage with her father the chauffeur. Isn’t it romantic?.. and your review is very romantic with a tinge of darkness that I love.
I think I might like this Balenciaga against my bare skin. Bravo!
Mr Lanier
As ever the apposite cinematic reference.
Such a long time since I saw Sabrina.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
It is still marvelous darling!
I would have suspected nothing less. I would assume that like its star it has an undying beauty.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
Beautiful, so wistful and yet so succinct. That lovely portrait of Dovima could be just that heroine you mention. I feel a very strong need to go and sample this melancholy violet now!
Ah, but beware Rosa at first she seems the sparkling socialite.
Only does the realisation of personal sadness dawn that the melancholy becomes apparent.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
So well put, a fragrance of emotional departure, lovely to see but not to live. I shall enjoy it on others without envy.
Mr Tulloss, Sir
I quite agree, it has a certain debutante distance that is bought with elegant distress.
I prefer to keep at arms length myself.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
Cole Porter and Balenciaga… the perfect tie!
Your note is delightful, de-lovely…
Why Thank You Dear Genealogist
So nice of you to drop by.
See you soon I hope.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
I will give it a sniff if I encounter a bottle but sadness is not for me, even though I love violet. Another great read. I’m enjoying the perfume letters. Thank you!
Dearest Lilybelle
I do hope I haven’t put you all off this perfume with too much talk of melancholy. This scent has a definite air of the complex and a complicated past, but is also able to party with the very best of jazz age society.
Catch her in the right mood and she’s sparkling if slightly unhinged fun.
But can it all last?
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
I’m not at all put off, curious now, rather. Melancholy one moment, sparkling and unhinged the next…that sounds intriguing.