Grâce de Klavdia Simimi 2016

My school friends and I read Thomas Mann's "Zauberberg" in high school, not as school reading, but as a kind of "club of dead poets" we were, out of affection. Our erotic fantasy, more lasting than many a more direct stimulant, inspired the carnival scene of the brave Hans Castorp with the beautiful Clawdia Chauchat from the "good Russian table": Clawdia lends him a Crayon, more exactly, a propelling pencil (that's why I bought one later). Out of Hans, heated by punch, by lung disease, but above all by the long accumulated sensual attraction to it, a long speech breaks out, which combines philosophical insights ("le corps, l'amour et la mort, ces trois ne font qu'un...") with the revelation of his sexual dreams; the pornographic nature of the speech is wonderfully broken by the fact that it is held in educational French, even partly in anatomical Latin. Finally Clawdia puts on a cardboard hat for him ("Adieu mon prince carneval!"), predicts bad fever values for tomorrow - and then adds quietly, already while walking: "Et n'oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon!". Whether this request not to forget to return the pencil is to be understood as an invitation to her room is up to the person addressed to decide for himself. And even the reader never really learns what progress the night has made. Despite this double openness the little story has an enormous erotic force not only for hormone saturated teenagers.

Since this reading I have retained a weakness for the freedom-loving, cat-like Clawdia Chauchat with her Tatar facial features (yes, I think one can have an affection for novel characters as well as historical figures). And that's exactly why I had to test this fragrance ("Klavdias grace") when I stumbled across it in a perfumery today. It was a curiosity test, and I didn't really expect that I would like it, especially since I had never heard of the brand before and found the bottle to be as kitschy and flavorless as possible. But it had to be easy.

To my great surprise, however, the fragrance proved to be just as beautiful and sensual as Madame Chauchat: in the beginning a rather conventional and rather masculine, but with all this wonderfully balanced chord of lavender and various citric notes (with a slight hint of nerolige), which then quickly becomes not only creamily soft (but not trivially soft), but also often, but always very gently broken: Sometimes the scent plays into the delicately fruity (it sounds a bit like peach, although I don't find anything like it), sometimes into the wonderfully finely dosed and yet noticeably woody-spicy and sometimes even into a barely noticeable dirty sadness (that could be tobacco and laurel, but I'm speculating). In all this it never becomes arbitrary and never loses its center.

Thus "Grace de Klavdia" is anything but an unprecedented, revolutionary fragrance, but a thoroughly beautiful and humane one. Maybe he's a little embarrassed about his conventionality, but whatever. Tchaikovsky is not Beethoven either and yet he is wonderful. The fragrance is perfectly wearable for men (after decanting into a neutral bottle), but truly at home on a woman. It lends aura, radiates a deep, serious softness. A radiant, yet somewhat withdrawn beauty. A great star in a vulnerable moment, perhaps.

Having made it abundantly clear that I love this fragrance and am prepared to defend and praise it against the perfumery trend, which rates the entire brand as poor to mediocre, sincerity now calls for a few critical words: Mrs Navarro, the founder of this Spanish brand, seems to have learned how to do it on her way to becoming a Master of Fashion and Beauty Communication (which you can apparently really acquire at Madrid University): Get yourself a solid perfumer (here Paolo Terenzi), let him make you half a dozen fragrances, and then concentrate on marketing: nice idea for the names of the individual fragrances, a story spun around each fragrance (but the story about "Grace de Klavdia" is not quite as beautiful as the one from the magic mountain, so I won't tell it here), into the niche perfumeries with it, and then you can also demand an absurd price. Its "roundness" (100 ml exactly 250 Euro, the corresponding scented candle exactly 100 Euro, the latter I find obscene) shows that here was not calculated commercially, but set arbitrarily. Probably you would have made a profit from a price of 17,29 Euro. Well, why say 50 euros when 250 goes? Why not 500?

Clawdia Chauchat with her rejection of bourgeois morality, her cat's eyes and her silent gait would probably steal a bottle of it. I wouldn't betray her. Maybe then she'd let me sniff at her. Ah, le corps, et l'amour, et l'odeur, ces trois ne font qu'un....