Royal Bain De Caron / Royal Bain De Champagne by Caron, 1941

It's always fun to review perfumes from the house of Caron, because everyone knows that everything that anyone says may well be trueabout their specific formulation! In this case, my generous vial of ROYAL BAIN DE CHAMPAGNE bears the original name (before the champagne police filed another law suit, or did this one precede CHAMPAGNE/YVRESSE?) and came in a box with the reference/batch #Q6961492 GE. All of this means, of course, that I can blather on with impunity, with no danger of anyone charging me with anosmia, since the likelihood that anyone reading these words has a sample from this very batch is no doubt vanishingly small. With this feeling of liberation to galvanize my spirit, let me begin by saying that I really had no idea whatsoever what this fragrance was about. The original name, to begin with, was all wrongat least as regards the contents of my vial from batch #Q6961492 GE. Far from evoking images and memories of champagne, this bain would appear to be filled with chopped up leaves of wilted tuberose. It's not really tuberose, I realize, given the notes said to be in the original perfume, but that's what the overall effect is to my nose, a sort of pseudo-tuberose: thick and tuberose-esque without however approaching the heights (and authenticity) of FRACAS or CARNAL FLOWER. Key word here: thick. How can I be detecting a thick pseudo-tuberose note in a fragrance devoid of tuberose? you may ask. Probably in the same way that a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter for an infinite amount of time would eventually produce all of the works of William Shakespeare. Just keep mixing the components up again and again, and forget the recipe, and let someone else throw in his two cents' worth of advice, and then start again, and fiddle some more, and eventually, when all the planets are correctly aligned, a vial drawn from batch #Q6961492 GE will find its way into the hands of a single sniffer, on a day with the right humidity, who has precisely the chemical components in her body created through the digestion of eggplant and garlic sauteed in sesame oil and served with sticky brown rice. That person, and that person alone, will smell pseudo-tuberose in ROYAL BAIN DE CHAMPAGNE, batch #Q6961492 GE. It's not bad, I think, but in order to fairly evaluate this scent, I'll need to try it in a bath. There's no point in complaining that an apple's not an orange, after all. If, as legend has it, ROYAL BAIN DE CHAMPAGNE was composed to be used as a surrogate solution for the champagne with which some wealthy gent scented his baths, then it really must be tested in those waters. I may have to acquire a bottle for that purpose. Do try this at home!

And so I took a bath in it. Literally. I admit my French is imperfect--the dazzlingly sophisticated French professor at my small undergraduate school went on a sabbatical leave and never returned so I took Italian instead--but "bain," royal or otherwise, suggests bathing, to my mind, even though something might have been lost in my translation.

(Historical note: The nouveau-riche Texan for whom this was created expressed a desire to take UN BAIN DANS LE CHAMPAGNE, and Caron did its best to oblige, though there's no champagne to be found here.)

This bottle had been sitting around the house untouched for over two years, dating from the time of the grand romance with the Caronista whose head was filled with Modernist fantasies. I wasn't too sure what to do with it then--the splash bottle itself said "pour me in the bathtub" whenever I looked at it--and after the romance ended bitterly, I couldn't be bothered with it.

And then it resurfaced. My thought upon sniffing the bottle was that there must be some sort of "Caronade" (a la the time-honoured Guerlainade) as it possessed an unmistakable Caron vibe (so to speak). I just wasn't sure whether I thought it was truly a wonderful Caron, however...

So while the steaming water poured into the tub, I added a generous dose of RBdC. (As I've said elsewhere, it's an interesting way to find how a fragrance smells when it isn't on one's own body.) First impression: HORRID, absolutely horrid. A wild melange of diverse notes that didn't seem to work together. But I just left the room and let the water run, and when I returned it had settled into a pleasant if unusual amber floral that I found quite soothing once I was soaking in it.

After the bath, I splashed some on my still-naked self: OMG! HORRID IN THE EXTREME! I actually thought I was going to have an asthma attack as the vapours seeped into my respiratory passages. I had visions of 1950s B-movies about killer smells emanating from a secret, sinister laboratory. This went on for ten to fifteen minutes, but I stubbornly held on, reckoning it would soon dissipate, like the opening blast from an old-fashioned floral aldehyde. (In fact, that's exactly what I thought it was--not a floral oriental.) The storm passed--not quickly enough for my liking--and what remained was an interesting if somewhat perplexing vintage-type floral. Not the best I've ever smelled, but hardly the worst--let's just say there's something prototypically (if not stereotypically) "vintage" about it, as might be expected from a product of the 1930s.

In the final analysis, it's a pleasant enough amber-based floral with a rose top note that in my mind recalls an old sepia print photo, like that of my German grandparents that was once on the bureau in my parents' bedroom. The polite oriental notes combined with the amber are, in some transitory moments, achingly nostalgic. The incense note, though, seems "off"; it disturbs the overall harmony and, as far as I can tell, accounts for the opening stench. (And I do mean STENCH.)

A worthwhile fragrance for those who like vintage scents--if one can survive the initial shock.