They were all as genial as possible with me, looked at my map with interest, and suggested various places that I might visit. The conscript presently showed me up to my room, which was bare but clean, and asked me how many handkerchiefs I had with me. I thought it was rather a personal question, but showed them to him, and he deluged each one with a different scent. He said they were the best scents that could be obtained in or around Grasse, and they were certainly very strong. For some days thereafter my "essences turned the live air sick," and one of the handkerchiefs now, after several washings, retains a faint commemorative odour. But the attention I valued, though the scent I came to dislike extremely.
They were nice people, all of them, though a little greedy, as next morning's settling up showed. But I was still on the high road between Nice and Grasse, and I suppose was fair game.
The weather was still lovely as I set out early in the morning, and Grasse was a sight to see, with its towers and roofs lit up by the sun, as it stood on its dominating height over the wide valley, in which the light mists still lingered.
I walked right through the town, but if I had not already seen something of the processes by which the scents from the miles of flowery fields through which I was passing are extracted and hoarded, I think I should have stayed to do so. For I am so constituted that every manufacturing process remains a complete and insoluble mystery to me until I have seen it, and yet arouses my curiosity and my willing interest.
It was about this time of the year that I had visited one of the light, airy factories of Grasse. I remember a huge, scented mass of the heads of violets heaped up on a white sheet on one of the upstairs floors. It was half as high as I was, and smelt divinely. These were the only flowers in evidence, for the full harvest, when all the great space of this chamber would be covered with gathered blossoms, was not yet. But there were sacks of lavender there besides, and bundles of sweet-scented roots—orris, and patchouli, and vétiver—which can be turned into essences as sweet as those taken from the flowers themselves.
I remember in other rooms boiling vats, very clean, and bright copper vessels, and great stills; and casks full of the fine grease which is used to catch and hold the distilled essences. It is spread on sheets of glass, framed in wood, like school slates, which are stacked in tiers; and other tiers hold the wooden trays for the flower-heads ready to be treated. And of course there were great stores of attractive flasks and bottles, all labelled and ribboned, and ready to take their places in the shops of Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, and every other place where there is a market for them.
There was a room, too, with machinery for turning out scented soap. You saw a soft fat pink deliciously-smelling roll squeezed out of a press, and in no time sections were cut off and stamped in another press into cakes ready for the toilet table.
I must confess that I have only the dimmest idea now as to the actual details of the various processes by which the scent of the flowers is stoppered up into the aristocratic bottles, but I have seen it all done, and the impression remains on my mind that any scent that bears a label from Grasse does come from the flowers themselves, and with no adulteration that I could see anywhere.