En Passant (2000)
by Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle

it is the unaware beauty that make en passant so heartbreaking.
it has the innocence of somebody extremely handsome and not knowing it.
this pureness makes it so attractive.a very pure fragrance, calling up my parents garden with its lilac bushes, together with a tender touch of warm bread,- yes i get that. on my skin it is pure, clear like the morning sky- heartbreakingly beautiful

Smells like a confused flower shop. A very cold feeling combination of lilac and heliotrope.

For some reason, the combination of wheat and lilac ends up smelling grapefruity on my skin. I like it, but I'm not blown away by this on paper either. It's definitely nice and smells like the name - En passant is the smell of just "passing by" a huge, intense (and perhaps wet) lilac bush, while very distant, wheaty bread cools in the window sill of a very distant house, and for some reason you're holding a cucumber (which doesn't stand out at all either). Although I enjoy En Passant and respect it for its creativity, it's not my style and I see it more as a feminine fragrance. I'll have to "pass" on this one...

Unfortunately... all I get is a distinct air of wilting flowers and rotting vegetation. The sort of smell you have at the bottom of your flower vase after a week if you forgot to change the water and the flowers are dead.

Well, it's May and lilac's in full bloom and it is now that one can feel how really far En Passant stays from true lilac fragrance. Lilac seems to be "too much" near EP. Sure En Passant has lilac in it (I mean not extraction but olfactory impression of course), but there's more, much much more. There is a feeling of spring humid cool air somewere in the country (or an early chilly morning in the center of rather an old city, somewhere on an embankment of a local river, just an abstract european city). A smell of fresh bread (I don't know what it means to you, but to me this smell has always been a kind of intimate, very personal and self... well not "selfish" but something you do not usually have intention to share). And something more that makes a morning tense with anxiety that something good and important is to happen...
but well, maybe it's just a personal reaction.
One thing is doubtless: it is very impressionistic and there's a lot more in it then just the chemicals it's made of...

En Passant, created by Olivia Giacobetti, is light and clear -- white lilacs smelled outdoors just after a rain, in a small town somewhere in Europe. I adore this fragrance. It's gentle without being weak in any way, and smells like promise and hope.