Visions of Isabelle Read Free Page B

bottles of the stuff to their mistresses, but, and this is the point, a different aroma to each one. Otherwise they couldn't tell them apart. In circles where people devote themselves to fornication, the motto should be 'Follow Your Nose'!"
    Vava gives out with an enormous laugh of cynicism and spite. For more than fifteen years he has poured money into his majestic scheme to be purveyor of odors to the world. He has dreams that bottles of his preciously distilled aromatics will find their way into the boudoirs of the Faubourg St.-Germain and the palaces of St. Petersburg. He has engaged a print shop in Geneva to make up ten thousand labels embellished with an imaginary coat of arms. A fortune's worth of crystal bottles lies in crates in the cellar where former owners kept casks of wine. Every few years he travels back to Russia with a trunk containing samples of his wares. The bottles that aren't broken by the time he arrives at the Finland Station are left off at expensive shops to encourage extravagant orders that never come. The Persians (and how he curses them!) have beaten him at this game. He has not the salesman's easy wit, nor enough sense to offer his clients jars of caviar. He must look, thinks Isabelle, like a lunatic, flying down the streets of St. Petersburg, screaming curses against Persians under his breath, coattails flying, hat blowing, his pockets filled with those ludicrous bottles whose labels have been pasted on askew by Vladimir.
    On his last trip, discouraged and broken, he spoke with a lawyer about suing the Persian representative. The man began to laugh.
    "His practices are unfair," said Vava.
    "There is no law against that," he was told.
    When he returned home he was nearly in tears. "Nothing means anything," he wailed as he rode back to Meyrin in a hired coach, Isabelle and Vladimir on either side. "Impossible to do business with these horrible Russians. They are intoxicated with religion and money and they stink like hell. I tell you, though, this garden is a fortune. We must plow under the old plants, bring in new ones from America, Australia. Damn the cost! Someday we'll have a scent that will set them reeling, and then, ha! We can spit in Mother Russia's face. We'll refuse to sell to them. All contracts with our concessionaires will carry one nonnegotiable clause–if one bottle, one drop, ever finds itself inside Holy Russia, then the penalty will be ten times the royalty, and the concessionaire will have ninety days to liquidate his stock. I can see them now, plotting ways to make me relent, and, when I refuse, to steal away the formulae. On the train down from Warsaw I was thinking about how we'd work. We must have a warehouse in Geneva, an old home, perhaps, totally secure, bars on the windows, one set of keys, with Nicolas–he has a head for business–keeping track of everything from an office above. I hear that workers in the South African diamond mines must pass a physical search before they're dismissed from work. A good idea! By the way, did the new retorts arrive from London? I've thought up a new combination we must try at once–" On and on, raving like a maniac, all the way back to Villa Neuve, while Vladimir searched Vava's face with his usual dutiful expression, and Isabelle stared straight ahead and wondered how long it would be before the old man would totally crack up.
    She is thinking of that mad ride, and the nights he spends in his "office" converted from a sitting room for servants (whom he refuses to employ), pouring over his manuals of chemistry, boiling up new concoctions. Sometimes, so exhausted by the time he locks his precious notebooks away, he confuses flasks of his half-made perfumes with his always available flask of vodka, and has to spit out the horrid oily substance in a stream of curses against competitors he is sure are plotting to steal his work.
    She loves him, though, in spite of his insanity. He has spent hours teaching her languages, has