A hot summer’s night in 1838 at…Nohant, the setting of…famous and decadent late-night parties where all of Paris’s intellectuals and artists throng: Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, Marie d'Agoult, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix. Inveterate night owls, George Sand and her lover…Frédéric Chopin, stroll languorously through the gardens till dawn. The air is saturated by the opulent trail of the novelist’s sumptuous perfume. — Astier de Villatte

That's the description of Les Nuits, one of three perfumes in Astier de Villatte's new Trois Parfums Historiques collection; the other two are Le Dieu Bleu (representing Ancient Egypt) and Artaban (giving us a sniff of Ancient Rome). After a lifetime of MAJOR perfume mistakes (blind buys) and disappointments (blind buys), I was STILL ready to buy Les Nuits without smelling it first — could this fragrance bring me closer to one of my idols, George Sand? I’m a perfect example that “live and learn” is a hope, not a certainty. 

Inspiration: A few drops of a perfume owned and used (supposedly) by the famous writer George Sand were found in a travel bottle among her belongings and this bottle was entrusted to perfume historian Annick Le Guérer. Perfumer Dominique Ropion joined the Trois Parfums Historiques project to “recreate” this scent. Chromatography revealed an interesting list of materials in that tiny bottle: bergamot, rose, iris, jasmine, ylang ylang, labdanum, vetiver, benzoin, sandalwood, cinnamon, civet, castoreum. (Sand loved and wore patchouli oil but reports vary as to whether that ingredient showed up via chromatography; Ropion includes patchouli in his reconstruction.) Of course, no one knows how the original fragrance smelled — the proportions of the raw materials remain unknown. And how do we know, really, if it was Sand’s personal perfume…perhaps it was a scent used by a loved one?

Sand was a lover of fragrances and one of her favorite scents (and garden plants at her country home Nohant) was rose. Like many of us here at Now Smell This, she said that perfume was her only extravagance. (She also gave tips to friends about how much to pay for perfume – even in the 19^th century perfume businesses were overcharging!)

Les Nuits begins with "cosmetic" scents of rose and iris, creamy at first, then powdery (orris root). This “powder” smells as if it were combined with a leather aroma (orris root again? vetiver?) When I first sniffed Les Nuits, I immediately thought: “Habanita!” (in its current formulation, Molinard Habanita is another soft, powdery perfume that shares notes with Les Nuits).

Les Nuits's powdery notes present a problem for me; they mostly stand alone, not part of any “powdery” natural ingredient (with the possible exceptions of cinnamon and orris). As these powdery notes “age,” they have unpleasant chemical aromas, especially if you put nose close to skin and sniff. Making brief cameo appearances outside this cloud of powder are a white flower note, soft cinnamon and animalic, "oily" musks (though the musks smell as if they were made into a tan-colored dough with powder, powder and more powder). Les Nuits’ listed patchouli note is barely discernible (certainly it’s no patchouli Sand would recognize). As Les Nuits dries down it has a barbershop vibe, maybe to conjure the other aforementioned night owl, Monsieur Chopin?

To me, the overall character of Les Nuits is bashful (nothing I’d associate with the larger-than-life, exuberant George Sand). As I spent several days wearing the perfume, I kept feeling I was at two phases of life: babyhood (bath time with a powder finale) and its opposite — someone of an age who grew up wearing and continues to wear scented talcum powders.

For all its timidity, Les Nuit felt heavy as I wore it and that heaviness was depressing to me. (I was also depressed because this was the first fragrance by Astier de Villatte I didn’t like.)

Next up: a trip to ancient Rome with Artaban.

Astier de Villatte Les Nuits Eau de Parfum is available in 30 ml ($167) or 100 ml ($285) spray bottles; a boxed discovery set with all three perfumes (Les Nuits, Artaban and Le Dieu Bleu) in 10 ml includes an interesting informational booklet on the Trois Parfums Historiques project, $210.

As with all three historic perfumes, historian Annick Le Guérer was involved in Les Nuit’s creation. I read her interesting commentary on the perfumes here.

Note: top image is detail from French: Portrait de George Sand by Auguste Charpentier, 1837/1839, [border added] via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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