That I love almost everything about Paris is no longer news. That it’s the place where I’ve always felt better than anywhere else, I’ve always said. To say that I am nervous before meeting the City of Lights again, like a person in love, that I sometimes cry like a child when I get there, would be to repeat myself, I have already written, affirmed.
But this time I will write about something that unpleasantly surprised me. It’s true that I have a sensitivity to smells. I love perfumes used with care, with attention to the space in which they are worn, to those around them and, above all, appropriate to the person wearing them. Many other scents give me unpleasant sensations.
Riding the metro at 8.30 in the morning from one end of Paris to the other brought to mind the sentence that begins Raymond Queneau’s novel ‘Zazie dans le metro’: “Qui est-ce qui pue donc tant??”, meaning “who stinks so much?” Somewhere in the Champs Elysees area, a young lady in her twenties got on and sat down next to me. At the time, I was thinking that it’s hard to have someone sweating so much that a man couldn’t sit next to him. The mask helped me terribly in this case. I kept thinking about what could happen. I didn’t notice a water crisis in Paris. Shower gel, soap, they’re everywhere.
A friend who has lived there for a few years was telling me that there is an anti-consumerism trend now, that some people only use soap without perfume, without parabens, without any ingredient that could pollute. My friend and I were evoking with horror the household soap of communism. Rude, of course. Anyway, it seems they end up polluting people pretty badly too. We got off and waited for another subway. However, it took me a few hours and a Vogalib pill to recover.
Beyond this experience not specific to this city but to all of them, Paris will always remain, through its art, its architecture, its history, seductive, offering, complex, like perfumes that cannot be mixed with anything else, they themselves having an extreme degree of sophistication.