Charogne Etat Libre d'Orange 2007

or in German: 'Die Blumen des Bösen' is a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire and probably his most famous work. It deals - not only, but very much - with the increasingly alienated person in relation to his environment, his moral uprooting, and his 'Ennui', the boredom. The poet consciously succumbs to the fascination of the ugly, the repulsive - or indeed the evil. And one poem, in the collection 'Spleen et idéal', is titled 'Charogne', carrion.

Etat libre d'Orange's Charogne refers to this poem by Baudelaire. It is not a scent of overt rot or even decay, but a captivating, very sweet floral fragrance. The lily, the eternally intoxicating flower of transience, is at the center, yet Ylang Ylang and Jasmine - also not olfactory lightweight - almost equally push forward. Despite this weight of white flowers, the fragrance retains something lightly playful, almost fleeting, and thus reveals - sometimes only briefly, and never for very long - its animalistic, very beautiful heart. This is a delightful scent of white flowers that tells of transience, of 'Vanitas', the empty, beautiful shell, and behind the perhaps off-putting first impression of its name, it playfully connects to Baudelaire's epochal poetry.

In conclusion, in the immortal words of probably the greatest anti-war song of our time and from its (pre-)last stanza:
'Tell me, where are the graves, where have they gone?
Tell me, where are the graves, what has happened?
Tell me, where are the graves - flowers bloom in the summer wind -
when will we ever understand, when will we ever understand?'