The Land Where Lemons Grow

Grasse was busy, crowded, and workmanlike. It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo, and Catherine de Médici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you’ve ever smelt a tannery

we went some months later to see Lucien Ferrero again, this time at his office outside Grasse. I’d never been to Grasse; all I knew was that it had been the center of the perfume industry in France since the early nineteenth century.

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addi

“The name of the grape, so the historians tell us, comes from the Italian moscato. That is to say, musk. Now, musk is very highly thought of among deer.” Vial permitted himself a roguish twitch of the eyebrows. “It is the scent with which they—how shall I put it?—issue an invitation to deer of the opposite sex. Indeed, musk is also used as an ingre