Jean-Christophe Hérault
Dreaming enables him to recapture that world without preconceptions and that child’s freshness, which will channel his seedbed of memories and turn it into a creation.
When you meet Jean Christophe, you are struck by his deep voice and intonations. He speaks with an extraordinarily calm and steady rhythm that suggests that he chooses each word with care, that he has thought long and hard about what he is saying, that what he is trying to convey has been honed to perfection in order to achieve his goal. Jean Christophe makes himself clearly understood and forces you to listen, wait and believe. Is that the secret of his perfumes? Undoubtedly.
Jean Christophe has a very particular relationship with time. With him, everything goes back to the starting point of childhood and so, when he talks about how he became a perfumer, he describes a path that was "the fruit of a long process, of a long reflection that began when I was a child and lasted until my first professional experience in the world of perfumery, when I was doing quality control for Fragrance Resources in Grasse. For me, coming from the Oise and Paris, it opened up my senses. It was fantastic to be able to smell the perfumery ingredients, the raw materials and then the fragrances that were produced in the factory. Since then, I have learned to appreciate all raw materials for their intrinsic qualities. The charm Jean Christophe experienced in Grasse echoes his childhood memories: "My father gave me Joop Homme by Joop and I instantly fell in love with the fragrance. I couldn't explain why I liked it, but I understood that it was a masterpiece". Putting his faith in these echoes rooted in emotions he experienced as a child, having kept the child in him alive as he grew up, Jean Christophe confided to Pierre Bourdon: "I told him I wanted to be a perfumer and on my emotions and my sense of connection with perfume he offered to train me. It was a gift from my god, from a man I admired as much for his talent as for his choices, his erudition, his intelligence and his eloquence. I waited four years for him to train me. Four years waiting for that induction, but Jean Christophe is patient: "During that wait, Pierre encouraged me above all to smell the flowers.
When you come from Paris, you don't know the scent of mimosa, jasmine, centifolia rose, lavender and lavandin cultivars, even aromatic herbs. It also encouraged me to look at chromatographs to learn and memorise how to compose a blackcurrant base, a cedar or rose essence, a jasmine absolute. It turned those four years into a wonderful learning period. Then it was time to take the next step and learn the perfumer's trade: "At the end of that period, Pierre called me in Paris and said to me: I will only train you if you read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I read it and found it fascinating and disturbing. This monument of a novel is the story of an artist's vocation. You see how Marcel Proust himself becomes a writer. It is an itinerary that encompasses his love of the arts, his sensitivity, his imagination, his knowledge, his life experiences. You follow the process of his realisation as an artist Proust had a genius for telling everything, explaining everything, describing everything the importance of childhood, his relationship with his mother, his first loves, Françoise's cooking, the melodies engraved in his memory Pierre Bourdon had given Jean Christophe a mirror that allowed him to free himself It was a Jean Christophe reconciled with his true nature as a dreamer and a person easily captivated by invisible phenomena who began, not only his apprenticeship as a perfumer, but also, as he himself says, a lesson in life.
