Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
I
n the end, it was Rachel who led us to the answers.
This was among the files on her flash drive.
M
arthe Lincel’s most famous scent was a runaway success in the early 1950s, Rachel wrote.
Lavande de Nuit starts as a winter-white scent, and turns into summer on the skin. The first burst of powdery sweet heliotrope and white iris develops a sharper note of wild cherry, drying down to a milky almond base with a signature flourish of the unexpected, in this case, a bracing dash of hawthorn. After a few hours of warmth, it pulsates with wild herbs and lavender in sunlight. A faint mist of caramelized hazelnut and vanilla emerges, and finally a deep, smoky lavender. It is one of those scents that seem alive on the skin, subtly incubating, insinuating its personality, and leaving an enchanting trail.
It is still made today, in bespoke quantities, by the Musset boutique, now part of the huge BXH luxury-brand empire. The original elegant frosted glass flacon has been replaced, and the composition using modern commercial ingredients is heavier on the vanilla notes, which were such a joy when they unfurled more slowly, like the telling of a secret. But it is still a wonderful perfume, one of the greats, even if it is only available these days as part of a library of classics maintained by a small but highly regarded Parisian house.
The perfume was born, like
Mme.
Lincel, in Provence, in the hamlet where she was born and where she lived until she went away to Manosque. It still stands: Les Genévriers (The Junipers) is a hillside farm overlooking the great blue ridge of the Luberon chain to the south, and the wide sweep of the valley to the west.
Old buildings can weave their own magic, and this one has a powerful presence: for all its failing structure, left to rot for years now, the unsafe walls and skewed lintels, it has a monumental quality. It must have been like Cold Comfort Farm in winter.
This part of Provence is a country of contrasts, the searing heat and the bone-biting cold; the golden days of heat and the violent storms; sweetness of the soft perfumes that pulse in the sun and the treacherous changes of mood. The wind is the pacemaker of the day’s rhythms, from the summer zephyrs that sustain the spirit to the savage howling of the mistral.
These days, Les Genévriers lies abandoned. Spectacular views roll out from all four compass points: views that Marthe would not have seen since she was a very young child. It seems encased in another era, one with a tragic air. Once you know Marthe’s story, and that of her family, it’s hard not to feel that the tightly shuttered windows echo her sightless eyes and the way those who were left turned their backs on the world.
For the biggest mystery is Marthe herself. What became of her? How did her story end? Where did she go when she left her boutique in Paris for the last time in 1973? No one knows.
A
ccording to the local administrators at the
mairie
in the village at the top of the hill, the property had been put up for sale many years previously but so convoluted is the inheritance division among family members—a regular complication of French property—that the legal tangle had defeated several sales. Now the last of the family to live there was dead.
Others claimed the property was haunted, that this was the reason it had lain not only unsold but uninhabited for so long. When I mentioned the name of Marthe Lincel, the woman in the grocery store nodded enthusiastically, and said, “Of course!” as did a small gaggle of customers waiting at the post office. But it transpired that it was the family name they knew, as everyone in the village knew the names of all the prominent families linked to the land, and not specifically of her renown as a perfumer.
Sabine Boutin, a local businesswoman, walked around the hamlet with me and did her best to put Marthe Lincel in the context of her family home.
“If you speak to anyone in the village, they will tell you that they remember the place from their childhood. This was the place where they could be given little jobs, like collecting walnuts or picking fruit in the orchard, helping with the drying or bottling of the tomatoes. Later, when it went to rack and ruin, their children came to explore and to play. It was considered a dare to steal into the vaulted cellar through the open wood store and defy the ghosts to play games and tricks around the pillars. It was considered the local equivalent of a forgotten castle in a fairy tale. After Marthe’s sister died, there was no one there, only spirits and mischief.”
I assumed the stories of hauntings started then.
“No,” said Sabine. “That was a much sadder story.”
M
arthe Lincel was, by all accounts, an excellent student at the school for the blind in Manosque. After the inevitable difficulties of settling in away from home, she made friends and was remembered by all as kind, determined, and perceptive.
Then came the dark days of the Second World War.
Marthe’s younger brother, Pierre, was twenty-two when the war in France ended. He had joined the army but spent most of the previous two years marching around a parade ground in Marseille, having convinced the medical examiners that some problem with his sinuses would prevent him from being much use in combat.
Then, when it was over, like so many other young men, he could see no future in subsistence farming. Marthe’s memoir gives a picture of a cocky lad with plenty of different girlfriends, all giggly things wearing cheap scents and the sweet aroma of honey soap. He headed for a fruit-preserving factory at first, then worked at one of the new agricultural machinery plants. The family rarely heard from him. Much later, word reached the village that he had been killed in an industrial accident.
But there was an earlier tragedy.
Marthe left for Paris, her fortunes rising. But at the farm, it was another bad year. The weather veered from severe frosts to torrential rains through the early and late summer, which took the crops in the fields. One by one, the tenants were leaving. Without them, the work was doubly tough and demoralizing.
Then Cédric Lincel was killed by a shot from an old revolver he was cleaning.
O
nly the younger sister, Bénédicte, clung on with their mother.
Bénédicte was pretty and clever, they said, and had several local suitors but she never married, even after their mother died and she was free to live her own life. Instead, Bénédicte became a recluse. Those who visited the hamlet began to come away with unsettling stories: the family was cursed, and the tragedy foretold; spirits danced in the darkness and shared the rooms with the living; strangers materialized out of nothing; a mysterious and dreadful stench was emanating from the courtyard of the big house; lanterns flickered and died for no reason. An atmosphere of fear grew and took hold.
As Bénédicte aged, alone, the farm falling into ruin around her, the village children dared each other to venture there by night. Odd occurrences continued to be reported, but they were never convincingly anything more than rumor fueled by idiotic pranks.
One day, arriving at the farm with provisions, Arielle’s granddaughter Sabine found Bénédicte trembling and unable to speak coherently. Not until the doctor was summoned was she able to tell them of the horrors she had witnessed.
T
he key to Bénédicte’s experience was in the other files on the flash drive: notes marked with precise library catalog numbers from the research archives of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Avignon. They led to an extraordinary collection of tape recordings made by Bénédicte herself in 1996, when she was seventy years old.
Terrifying though Bénédicte’s ordeal had been, it was never a haunting. There was an earthbound, though equally distressing, explanation.
Visual hallucinations such as these are known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it is almost certain that Bénédicte was suffering from this mysterious condition. Phantasmagoria, or visions, were a manifestation of a certain kind of progressive sight loss.
Charles Bonnet, a natural philosopher from Switzerland, was the first man of science to attempt to understand the visions from which his own grandfather was suffering, including a distressing parade of people, vehicles, and horses that were not actually there. In the eighteenth century, Bonnet developed the theory that these, along with moving landscapes, geometric patterns, and disembodied faces, were actually a symptom of macular degeneration.
Strangely enough, he discovered, even people with healthy sight could potentially experience these hallucinations if they were blindfolded for long enough. They seemed to be caused by lack of visual stimulation rather than madness, by the brain trying to make up for fewer impulses from the nerve cells in a damaged retina. When the brain does not receive as many pictures as it expects, it tries to compensate by drawing on the areas it has always used to process faces, surroundings, patterns, and colors.
But normally, the condition was an indication of age-related macular degeneration, one of the most common causes of blindness. And, unnervingly, visions most often occurred when the subject was in a state of drowsiness or relaxation, which would explain why Bénédicte was most often affected as she sat by the hearth to rest.
Was there a genetic predisposition in the sisters that was responsible for them both losing their sight? It seems likely. Like her sister, Bénédicte was to put her blindness to admirable use. She collaborated over several years with the eminent ophthalmologist Professor Georges Feduzzi at the university in Avignon to produce a scientific paper on the disease, its purpose not only to present research on a little-known condition, but also to reassure its terrified sufferers.
T
hat transcripts of the tape recordings made by Bénédicte Lincel were released is a tribute to Rachel, her persistence and genuine ability that she had no need to exaggerate for effect. All Sabine knew was that Bénédicte had been treated by a professor at Avignon University and that the bulk of the Lincel estate was bequeathed to the ophthalmology department there when Bénédicte died. Rachel did the detective work and had the intuition and persuasive skills needed to gain access to the archives.
I’m not certain how well she was able to translate the files. Well enough, I think, with the basics of the story already understood from Sabine. But, for whatever reason (her illness, most likely), she hadn’t managed to unravel the story in its entirety by the time she left the flash drive with Sabine; and though Sabine would have been able to read the files, the mixture of English and archive reference numbers meant nothing to her.
In the many hours of recordings, among the vivid first-person accounts of the onset of her blindness, her confusion and terrors, is her account of the last time she saw her sister and Marthe’s young apprentice, Annette.
T
here was never any proof that Marthe Lincel lived beyond her early fifties. The Musset boutique allowed their loyal clients to believe that Marthe had retired to her native Provence. Perhaps the Mussets, sadly and slyly misinformed by Pierre, genuinely believed that was the case. A quiet death would have been in the natural order.
Here, after my reading the transcripts of the tapes and much discussion with Sabine, her mother, and eighty-four-year-old grandmother Arielle, is what we believe happened to Marthe and Annette.
When the last meeting took place between the three siblings, the garden beyond the courtyard was being dug up in preparation for the installation of the pool. The hazards would have been difficult for anyone to negotiate, but for Marthe, trying to navigate from memory, it would have been impossible. Nothing was the same as when Marthe knew the ground so intimately. Walls would have crumbled when she reached up to steady herself. Piles of soil would have given way.
We know she held on to Bénédicte as they stumbled out after Pierre’s drunken raging, but after he attacked Annette and struck Bénédicte unconscious, Marthe and Annette would have had no bearings.
We can’t know what exactly happened to them that night. It seems no fatal harm came to them, because Bénédicte found them huddled together in the courtyard barn the next morning. Possibly they were injured. But they were gone when she eventually returned, concussed and panicking, from the village.
Whether one or both of them fell by accident into the excavation, or whether Pierre cold-bloodedly set about bludgeoning them with his fatal blows once he had led them over to their grave, no one will ever know. What can be said with certainty is that Bénédicte’s account of that night and the following day strongly implicates him.
Bénédicte found it hard to believe that Marthe would leave without speaking to her. There was no previous indication that the sisters were about to be estranged. The next day, Pierre had hours in which to commit murder and bury the bodies.
To the world, Marthe left Provence, and then Paris. Pierre played the helpful brother to collect Marthe’s possessions from the boutique and her apartment, and explained that she had gone away, perhaps even that she was not well. He left a few more drops of poison for Bénédicte, in case she ever came looking, and no doubt found some way of putting an end to any other suspicions. Annette had no parents, which was one of the reasons the kindly Marthe was keen to support her. The teachers at the school for the blind saw her off to Paris with the famous Marthe Lincel. When they never heard from her again, they must have presumed she either never succeeded in her chosen career, or that she simply stopped work to marry and raise a family as so many young girls did.
Why didn’t Pierre kill Bénédicte, too? Perhaps he was so drunk he was barely aware of what he was doing until it was too late. Perhaps with Bénédicte dead, too, he would have been too obviously a suspect when he came to take over the farm. Did he have reason to sense that the net was closing in on him and fake his own death for Bénédicte’s benefit? No one will ever know.