L'espérance est violente.
Mirabeau, what a pretty word, peculiarly Parisian, suspended above the Seine. It composes a memory, joins another bank, and returns by following its trail of sandalwood, pink bay and cedar. In the heart of the City of Light, on the way to the twilight of the day, there is a bridge, a poem and a perfume.
A discreet and symbolic bridge, of the master-builder spirit which transcends borders, becoming better by coming together. Those solid foundations of cedar, sandalwood and orcanox span love and musk.
A poem as slow as it is violent, expressing the brutal and desirable hope of the one who would like to believe, of the one who wants to love. Vanilla, I write your name on the water, with muffled traces of incense and violet green.
A perfume to save us, fish us silently out of the water, bringing us above the Seine, our spirits on the water of our essences, bergamot and pink berry mingled with fig in a glass bottle, fiercely reuniting bodies in unison with souls, coming back to her by following her wake.
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There are bridges where we dance: as children, we sang to them; some, where we fought, have had their names secured in history; others offer their architectual perfection to the admiration of generations. All are famous.
But there is one that needed neither dances, nor battles, nor works of genius to impose itself on our memories: it is the Mirabeau Bridge. For this, twenty lines were enough.
It must be said that they were written by a poet, and that his poem was about love, unhappy love. When Apollinaire composed it, the Marie he loved had left him. But we can only guess at their story, which he does not tell, and is it not the story of so many lovers? Love has fled, like water and like the days.
The perfume which will bear the name of the Mirabeau Bridge had to translate its force, because it resists the flow of the Seine and time, it is the impassive witness as it underlines the final resumption of the first verse; but the delicacy of the fragrance, mixed with this base, conveys the melancholy of lost loves, while also imposing a sharp note suitable for testifying to the " violent hope. "
This fusion of strength and gentleness realizes in him the bridge that is symbolic of the joined hands of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie. But as it is for the poet himself, it is to the eternal history of the lovers that we are sent back. Not to those of the legends that death immortalizes, and whose passion transcends time, but to those loves, too human, that are believed to be eternal, which are lost one day, as inexorably as the river flows.
Guillaume and Marie were certainly in love, but "the poet is a winged thing" said Plato – he flies away and is attracted by the captivating perfume of many flowers. But the young woman who is imagined to be weak and defenseless, is in reality a passionate being whose intense feelings refuse to share and exclude forgiveness. It is she who will break. Neither supplications nor the oaths of the poet will be able to change anything there.
Thus he becomes for ever the one that the women he passionately loved have rejected. It is from the despair they aroused that the Chanson du Mal-Aimé and the Pont Mirabeau sprang. To them he will be able to say one day, in an appeased farewell:
I picked this sprig of heather
The autumn is dead remember it
We will not see each other again on earth
Smell of time, sprig of heather
And remember that I am waiting for you
Paris, January 2022
Suzanne Julliard-Agie & Etienne de Swardt
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