This was the name of a perfume from Kenzo: Le monde est beau (the world is beautiful). I wore it in the summers of the late ’90s, when I worked for the Peace Corps, and I fell in love with it. At first because I was fascinated by the name.
It was in line with the scenarios I had made in my head as a child, as a result of the books I read. I thought that all people are good, that for each of us there is a prince on a white horse or a girl who seems to us the most beautiful in the world, that it is up to us to find them, to build our future, that I will arrive in Paris and I will be the happiest in the world, that everyone will get what they want, the conditions were to want very much and to act in that direction.
Then I was seduced by this perfume because those summers were like a journey into other dimensions, I loved the interactions with people, I learned a lot, I worked hard, I earned well, I had the feeling that my life was somewhat dull in many ways, it had taken on color.
I bought myself that perfume as a gift, so that it would envelop me every day in a kind of protective smell of illusions and daydreaming. It lasted a while.
However, the spell of ‘Le monde est beau’ fell apart.
People have not proved to be so good, on the contrary: pride, selfishness, soul wounds prevent them from turning into their luminous version. The knights on white horses and Ilenele Cosânzene were some bovarisms that I understood later, when I hit them myself, when I noticed what was happening around me. We build the future for the most part, but, no matter how determined and disciplined we are, it is not 100% in our country; the pandemic showed it to us.
Then I came to Paris many times, I saw a lot of the world, I cried for happiness several times.
If I found that perfume, I would envelop myself with the smell of the beautiful world once again, for the sake of those days, the illusions and the state of grace of yesteryear.
P.S. A similar mood was given to me, also in those years, by L’Air du Temps, which I received as a gift. A wonder of the air of time enclosed in a bottle that is too small and carefully worked. But that was then, then everything changed.