I am well aware that our profession becomes more complicated every day and it is increasingly more difficult to keep it within certain purely artistic limits. Classifying and giving greater emphasis to our analytic powers results in a weakening of our creativity. Culture, taken almost solely as technique or study, as the Kingdom of Omnipotent Reason was sure to lead our profession and in fact the whole society to a wasteland close to desolation—a desolation of the soul, of the spirit, of mystery, of intuition and of myth. And have we not said that the characteristics of the creative perfumer were precisely these?
Voltaire, one of the fathers of Rationalism, thought that Reason was certainly a weak light but it was the only thing that counted. But no work of art, no great perfume has been made with this as a premise. Aware of the reality of the time in which we live today, the perfumer as an artist is in a critical situation.
Scientifically and astronomically speaking, the sun is of extraordinary interest. However its warm, radiant and golden brilliance shining over a valley and over a sea fascinates the inhabitants of a humid and industrial Europe and brings them to the Mediterranean.