Adventures in Paris: Scent of a Woman

I have been jonesing for a real French fragrance.

Yes, I am well aware that my regular scents, Chanel No. 5, Coco by Chanel and 24 Faubourg by Hermes, are all French. However, beloved as these are, I can purchase them right here in the 'burg which somehow dilutes their French pedigree.

For years, I've harbored this vision of me sweeping grandly into the House of Guerlain's flagship boutique on the Champs-Elysees, whipping off my designer sunglasses, tossing my perfectly coiffed hair (I am always having a great hair and weight day in this fantasy) and imperiously gesturing at the "exclusive collection" house fragrances as wraiths in little black dresses scurry to accommodate. I exit the salon de parfum toting a beautifully wrapped package and trailing a distinctive Oriental spicy/floral/chypre cloud that leaves the hordes along the avenue swooning in olfactory ecstasy.

Other women do this all the time. Women like Madonna. And Princess Caroline of Monaco. Why can't I? I made up my mind that during this trip the fantasy would become reality.

And it did. Sort of.

I really hadn't planned to go into Guerlain the afternoon that I found myself at their threshold. The weather was unseasonably warm and humid with intermittent rain. I was wearing jeans. My makeup was gone, my only jewelry beads of perspiration. My reflection mirrored in the windows told me I was not having a good hair day. After four days of eating croissants, pommes frites, creme brulee and tarte tatin, I wasn't having a great weight day either. But with my Paris vacation more than half over, I knew that it was now or never. So I took a deep breath and forged ahead into the fragrant inner sanctum.

The sales associates were all chic in their little black dresses (at least that part of the fantasy came true). And they spoke perfect English. Thank goodness, for my French was not tripping off my tongue as mellifluously as I would have liked.

Stoppers were pulled out of bottles and dabbed onto my wrists. Atomizers were spritzed onto paper strips and waved beneath my nose. Top, middle and base notes were discussed with the seriousness of quantum physics. I found myself sagely tossing about words like "sillage" and "drydown."

And I left there with a bottle of Guerlain's exclusive Elixir Charnel Oriental Brulant housed in a gilded box wrapped in ribbon and scented tissue paper and tucked into an elegant Guerlain bag that drew lots of suitably envious glances on the metro.

And it only cost 170 euros (ouch). I'll leave it up to you to figure out the intricacies of the daily exchange rate and the duty free tax.

The day I returned, I test drove my new fragrance. As I turned away from my vanity, my persnickety orange cat Henry (aka Monsieur Henri, my personal stylist and beauty consultant) awoke from a nap on my bed. He blinked his topaz eyes, twitched his nose at the unfamiliar mixture of tonka bean, almond, vanilla, styrax and clementine. He jumped down and rubbed up against my leg purring approvingly. Figures he'd be the one to notice. That cat is so damn French.

Is this my favorite perfume ever? Actually, I still prefer Coco. And as much as the Elixir Charnel OB costs, that's a good thing. Let's face it; this was a once-in-a-lifetime splurge. Never going to become my signature.

But the Elixir Charnel OB is extremely wearable. It possesses a smoky, sexy, spicy, ambery yet subtle je ne sais quoi quality that is very French, yet somehow still me.

And you can't get that in Hattiesburg.

Adventures in Paris: I See Dead People

On previous visits to Paris, I'd paid homage to most of the major "must see" tourist sites. Eiffel Tower, check. Louvre, check. Musee d'Orsay, check. Versailles, check. Sacre Couer, check. Arc de Triomphe, double check ( even hauled my ass up the stairs to the top. IMO a waste of time. There are much better views from the steps of Sacre Couer and from the Pompidou Center).

But I had never set foot in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery nor the Pantheon, the mausoleum that houses the remains of France's most honored men (and a few women). Since, we're getting close to my favorite holiday, Halloween, and I have a somewhat morbid streak, I figured it was time to do the crypt crawl.

Pere Lachaise is a large "city of the dead" as we call them in New Orleans with the rich, famous, infamous and not-at-all-famous thrown together for all eternity. The architecture alone is worth seeing as are the gloriously eccentric funerary mementoes on display.

Here you'll find, among others, the grave sites of French author Colette, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (can't miss his tomb covered with an sphinx-ish sculpture and umpteen billion lipstick imprints) and American rock star/bad boy Jim Morrison. There are always a few faithful devotees hanging around the famous graves. Even the dead have their groupies.

The uber-dignified, yet still creepy, Pantheon originally was constructed as a church to St. Genevieve, but in the wake of the French Revolution, it was turned into secular meeting place/mausoleum dedicated to memorializing the intellectuals of France. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, both Curies, Pierre and Marie, and Louis Braille are among those interred here. There's also a slew of Napoleon's generals. Apparently just being a FoN (Friend of Napoleon) imparted greatness by osmosis. Napoleon, by the way, is not interred here. He has his own monument/tomb over at Les Invalides. He would like that.

Impressive, but overall the Pantheon is a little cold and emotionless. But then again that should be expected from a monument to dead intellectuals.

I didn't include the underground Roman catacombs on my Paris "to do" list; seemed a little too goth, even for me, with all those skulls and bones right out in the open. I also tend to be claustrophobic. However, I was able to descend into the caves of Reims' famous champagne houses with no problems, so the catacombs remain a distinct possibility for another time.

Hey, I'll use any excuse to return to Paris.