As the reality of what was about to happen dawned upon her, she felt almost as though someone was pressing down on her shoulders willing her to sink into the ground. She looked around at the house she’d created; those artworks they’d found in St Paul de Vence, antiques given to them by her parents, photographs adorning various spots reminding her of what she could have been. The memories were theirs but there wasn’t one part of him in this house. She’d dumbly done what she’d vowed she never would; become his shadow. Under the guise they were a team she’d thought, she had shown him how to negotiate, use intuition to connect with people; reminded him that this was fundamentally both the beauty and essentiality of the world - and business. Behind the scenes, she’d been the one negotiating most of his contracts as and when he’d asked her; structured their lives at every step of his ascent without his input. It didn’t bother her when he’d asked her not to work weekends and then not go to evening events for work and then when he’d need to travel to just ‘come and be with him’ - she didn’t need to do anything else. And why did she call her friends; they weren’t right for her? Just he and her was enough, surely.
She didn’t know how everything she’d created was soon lost replaced by the magnitude of his empire and independence. Once an awkward, small-town boy who fell for an uptown girl; she was sure she saw in him a champion. But the joke was on her. Everything that she’d created, he had credit for and everything she’d once made for herself, disintegrated as if into thin air. Nobody remembered anymore. And then he took the thing she loved most in the world. The creation of her Art.
Why on earth she had focused on his career over her own, she only had herself to blame for. But it didn’t make the stark reality of what had happened feel any less just.
She ascended the stairs in almost a stupor barely hearing one of the moving people as he asked her ‘is this ready to go?’ Numbly, she glanced over to where he was gesturing; her dressing table. God she remembered when they moved here. How excitedly she’d put that dressing table in that very spot. “Yes, yes…’ she trailed off.
“Miss?” The moving man bothered her trance-like state once more as he stood lifting the table, “there’s something in here.” He opened one of the drawers to reveal a luxurious white lacquered box with neon patterns adorning it. She was distracted from her thoughts for a moment, “God I’ve been looking for that for ages…” She exclaimed reaching for the box. Inside was a bottle of perfume called Maracoca. She’d bought it for herself back when her second company had reached its first milestone years ago. Spraying some on her wrist, scents of sensual jasmine, sweet white gardenia, spicy frangipani and lively yuzu were as lively as they ever where; transporting her instantly back to a time and feeling she’d quite forgotten. The sense that anything was possible. How foreign that feeling felt now.
As the movers took the last of the boxes out of the house, she turned around to take in its emptiness. With just a bottle of perfume and a small handbag with but few items, she walked out of the front door and into the car. “Where to?” The driver turned to face her as she stared out of the window with the scent of Maracoca still heady in its promises. Her mind conjured all of the places she’d go if she could start all over again. And then a question dawned on her. Why didn’t she? “Paris,” she replied.
The story of Amaffi perfumes is fraught with beauty of what luxury should mean. Rare and unique. It’s a story that encompasses a desire to right what was wrong through the creation of something utterly timeless and beautiful. Much more than just a perfume blended of the finest and rarest ingredients in all the land, it is Madame Amaffi’s will to restore the name ‘Amaffi’ to its true namesake; perfume.
It goes that Napolean Bonaparte was passing through the centre of a small town in South of France when he was enthralled by the scents that drifted from a perfumer’s shop set across a small square. He requested some fragrance to sample and was so dazzled by them that he commanded the perfumer to join him at a court to create a bespoke fragrance that would become a part of his identity. The perfumer arrived in Paris accompanied by a woman who never left his side. After several months, the perfumer handed Napoleon his perfume. The Emperor fell so deeply in love with the scent that he ordered the perfumer to keep its composition a secret and not allow anyone else to smell it until he wore it. But for many years, the perfumer had been concealing a secret. He was not the creator of the fragrance after all; they were the compositions of the mysterious woman who followed him like his shadow. Hiding her talent while he gained the glory. A court servant discovered this secret a while later. Finding himself near the woman, he noted the smell of her skin seemed soaked with the scent reserved for Napoleon. He immediately informaed the Emperor who became outraged and ordered the execution of the perfumer. The woman knew she’d be next and so escaped to save her life. She became a fugitive on the roads, heading to the South of France before Italy to be with her family; and renouncing her perfume-making skills for ever. She married and allowed her maiden name - Amaffi - to disappear.
The story was passed down from generations and told to Madame Amaffi by her great-grandmother.
The Amaffi perfume house was born restoring the name justly to its rightful creativity. The scents a reminder that everything eventually returns to its natural state (and I have always said and believed that) and our fire is not for nothing.
As were the perfumers behind Maracoca, the houses’ latest scent, for her and for him so inspired. Master Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour who created Maracoca for Women and Nathalie Feisthaeur for the men’s scent. The freedom ‘to create without constraints’ is a marked component of this luxury house that allows the greatest perfumers in the world to put their skills to create something extraordinary.
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