Free The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain Page A

his glasses; he wasn’t wearing any cologne. There was just an adour of aftershave containing honeysuckle and mint mixed with cigarettes.
    As he waited at the red light, Pierre found himself next to a runner who was jogging on the spot; sweat of course,but also Eau Sauvage. On the other side of the boulevard, he passed a couple in their fifties – probably tourists – who were trying to find where they were on a map; the woman wore Shalimar and the man smelt of Elnett hairspray. He steals his wife’s hairspray, was Pierre’s conclusion but he didn’t have time to dwell on that before he detected Arpège on a woman with plaits wearing a grey trouser suit, then Habanita on a young blonde woman with blue eyes.
    After that he had several Poison, another L’Air du Temps, two Solstice, then Lacoste for men, Montana by Montana, Quartz by Molineux, Anaïs Anaïs, Caron’s Poivre, Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, Sikkim by Lancôme, Joy, and a surprising Épilogue by Coryse Salomé.
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    When he reached Place Saint-Augustin, he sat down on a bench and took off his glasses and hat. His head was spinning. He had done it. A waiter from one of the cafés came over from his terrace to ask if he was all right.
    â€˜Drakkar Noir, Guy Laroche,’ replied Pierre.
    The snow was beginning to come down, in sparse flakes at first, then in flurries. He returned home soaked through, his hat covered in white powder. He tapped it so that the crystals fell off, and put it on the sitting-room radiator to dry.

 
    On 18 April 1982, he had put down his smelling strips, stopped up the last five perfume bottles he’d opened and put them back in their places in the perfume organ. Then he’d left the room, locked the door and flung the key into the top drawer of the chest before getting drunk on ‘67 Bowmore. It was finished. His symbolic locking of the room was intended to put an end to twenty years of creativity.
    No one dared touch the key; the orders were clear: the door must not be opened, the ‘study’ had been condemned. Not to be opened under any circumstances, not even for hoovering. The room became the tomb of his creative genius, a Bluebeard’s chamber in which his perfume organ slept.
    Aslan had designed the organ himself, a semicircular case with adjustable shelves on which almost three hundred bottles of essential oils were stored. It had taken the master carpenter in Faubourg Saint-Antoine nearly ayear and a half to build it, using the best-quality wood. It was decorated with a mermaid created by a sculptor. The mythical fish-tailed creature had her left hand on her heart and in her other hand she held – over her head like a crown – a representation of his three-branched smelling-strip -holder.
    She was Aslan’s crest, his emblem, the muse that appeared on his letterhead and on the seal he used on his envelopes.
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    He planned to spend New Year’s Eve on his own. Esther and Éric had phoned earlier, and in the evening Pierre settled down to while away the last hours of the year in front of the television, watching the highlights of the most important events of the last twelve months.
    January – Thierry Sabine and Daniel Balavoine had been killed in the Paris–Dakar race, and the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded live on air a few minutes after it took off.
    March – Jacques Chirac became prime minister, inaugurating the first ever cohabitation in French political history, and a bomb exploded in Galerie Point Show on the Champs-Élysées, killing two and injuring twenty-nine.
    April – a reactor exploded at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl, but, thanks to an anticyclone, the radioactive cloud avoided France.
    June – stand-up star Coluche died in a motorcycle accident on a minor road in the South of France.
    September – terrorist attacks devastated the capital, targeting the main post office at Hôtel de Ville, a