COTY: The Perfume Man
L'Aimant Rose: Harkness Photo Library
In 1912, visiting a relative in Tours, François Coty, the perfume man, fell in love with the Loire Valley. Told that nearby Château d’ Artigny was for sale, he bought it and then demolished it to, he said, ‘add a new pearl to the necklace of the Châteaux of the Loire’.
It took a hundred and fifty master builders, sculptors, carvers, tile setters, painters, craftsmen and labourers seventeen years to complete his magnificent Château.
Mr Coty, who acted as clerk of the works, used avant-garde concrete, installed an electric gate and central heating. His château had its own power station, air conditioning, tailoring and bootmaker workshops, a hairdressing salon, a cold room reserved for guests' furs and so on.
The chapel was an exact copy of the one in Versailles but smaller.
All the washbasins were marble. The kitchen was white marble, the sinks were copper. The pastry room was pink and green marble, the linen room had a hundred and forty cupboards in Macassar ebony inlaid with mother of pearl.
The floors were multicoloured marble.
The stairs were Lens stone, a creamy white limestone with crystalline slivers mined from a quarry near Nîmes. The dining room had a Carrara marble* floor inlaid with bronze motifs. Carved woodwork was gilded.
You get the picture.
On the first floor, a rotunda overlooking the river Indre was crowned with a cupola decorated with an astonishing trompe l’oeil commemorating a costume ball at the Château.
Painted life size, are Mister Coty’s friends, relations, mistresses and actresses from Comedie Française. Diaghilev is there as is the Aga Khan, the Maharaja of Kapurthala, Nijinsky, star of Ballets Russes (which was bankrolled by Coty). His daughter Christiane Coty is Columbine, her husband, Paul Dubonnet** is Pierrot.
A permanent staff of forty were employed on the vast estate, which included seven kilometres of river, gardens, orchards, greenhouses, farms, three mills, a hunting lodge, a rectory, abandoned buildings, a collection of racing cars and stables for a hundred competition horses.
Mister Coty lived in the Château for six months every year.
He created his last but one fragrance, L’Aimant, a blending of rose, orchid, jasmine, sandalwood, vanilla, bergamot, peach and geranium, for the love of his life.The problem was she was not his wife, she was his mistress.
Oh dear oh dear. Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned***. She took him, in common parlance, to the cleaners. The divorce court granted her the bulk of his vast fortune.
His daughter, Christiane Coty, who inherited Château d’ Artigny, sold it in 1959. It is now a luxury hotel.
A specialist rose nursery in England cultivates L’ Aimant, a beautifully scented rose which the Coty Foundation commissioned to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the perfume.
* Michelangelo carved David from the Carrara Marble Quarry in Tuscany
** Dubonnet, an aperitif, has been made in France since 1846.
***William Congreve
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art).
Harkness Roses:
The stories behind the names by Pamela Shields
