The President's Hat (9 page)

Daniel Mercier

8 Rue Henri Le Secq des Tournelles

76000 Rouen

Mademoiselle,

Your letter took me by surprise. Firstly because I was no longer expecting a reply to my notice in the paper. In fact, I was planning to cancel it when I received your message, forwarded to me by the newspaper's classified section. I'm absolutely certain it was my hat you picked up on the train.

I have read your story several times and congratulate you on your writing style, and on winning the Prix Balbec. Your account of the day and a half you spent with my hat has affected me deeply and only confirmed what I already knew from experience: this is no ordinary hat. As you have confided in me in your letter I shall do the same. It will do me good, since work has been very stressful recently.

Believe me when I tell you, Mademoiselle, that the hat has changed my life, too. I would not be in my present post nor would I be living in the beautiful city of Rouen had it not crossed my path. My name is Daniel Mercier: those are not my initials on the hat, but it is indeed mine, and
it remains of great importance to me for reasons I cannot go into here. I was so attached to it that when I lost it, I suffered a recurrence of dyshidrotic eczema for the first time in fifteen years. I consulted my doctor, who asked if I had experienced ‘a major setback or frustration'.

When I replied that I had lost my hat, he didn't feel that this was a sufficiently ‘frustrating' setback to lead to a flare-up of a past skin condition. I stopped seeing him after that, and have since consulted Dr Gonpart, a senior registrar trained at the very best hospitals, who shares my view on the link between stress and dyshidrotic eczema, having observed similar attacks in patients suffering from shock. In particular, he highlighted the case of a man who had come up in blotches minutes after losing his wedding ring in the sea.

But I digress, Mademoiselle, and will bore you no further with my ailments, which have since been most effectively treated.

Your very fine story, ‘The Hat', is, for me, the epilogue to a very personal encounter with our black Homburg. You tell me that the end of your story is true. There is, then, no hope.

How can I begin to track down the bearded man in the sheepskin jacket, who picked it up off the bench in Parc Monceau?

I understand your wish to keep your story as true to the facts as possible, but still I find it hard to believe you really left the hat there. In an ideal world, you would have remained in possession of the hat, read my notice and been able to return it to me.

Sadly, we do not live in an ideal world, and the irony of it is that the prize money for the Prix Balbec (3,000 francs) is precisely the sum I was planning to offer as a reward to whoever returned my hat.

I hope you will find happiness with the other ‘man in the hat' – the grey one – and in your new venture in the charming town of Cabourg, which I have not yet visited. I passed your story on to my wife, who was deeply touched by your writing and asks me to ask you where she might purchase your two other stories – ‘An Afternoon at the Harbour' and ‘Change of Address'.

With best regards,

Daniel Mercier

Monsieur,

I was very touched by the letter you sent by return and I completely understand how the loss of something so precious can cause all kinds of distress, as you have suffered with your eczema. I really am sorry for leaving the hat in Parc Monceau. It was a rather irrational thing to do; I was carried away by my writing, and I too came to regret it in the weeks that followed. I was very fond of that hat, and when I looked into buying myself another, I realised I could never afford one.

By way of apology, and for the benefit of your wife, I am enclosing the manuscripts of all three of my short stories. None of them have been published, so you won't find them in any bookshop. I hope you both enjoy reading them, and wish you every happiness.

Fanny Marquant

Mademoiselle,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading more of your work. Your style and characters are so engaging. My favourite has to be ‘An Afternoon at the Harbour' – I really identified with the woman waiting for her husband at the Café des Deux Mouettes, thinking about her life now, in the past and in the years to come. I think a lot of women would see themselves in the character of Murielle. Well done and thank you for moving me with your writing.

Véronique Mercier

PS What a shame you couldn't get my husband's hat back. He talks of nothing else!

Librairie de la Mouette

Fanny Marquant – Bookseller

17 Rue Marcel-Proust

14390 Cabourg

Monsieur,

We were briefly in touch a few months ago on the subject of the hat you lost on the Paris–Le Havre train.

I wanted to get this article to you as quickly as possible. I ripped it out of a magazine at the hairdresser's just this morning.

It's an interview which appeared in
Paris Match
a fortnight ago. At first glance, the man in the picture wasn't familiar, but when I saw that he had created Solstice, the perfume I wear myself, I read on and was amazed.

You'll see what I mean when you read his answer to the question at the bottom left of page 46. I turned back to look at the photo again and asked the hairdresser to lend me a biro so I could draw a beard on his clean-shaven face. I had seen those round glasses before.

Then I remembered something else I didn't put in my story: he smelt the hat before taking it with him. Monsieur Mercier, the man who picked up the hat and the man you
see on the two pages I enclose are one and the same person.

Kindest regards,

Fanny Marquant

PS The hairdresser's biro was blue, which has made him look strangely like Bluebeard …

THE SIXTH SENSE

Exclusive interview with ‘nose' Pierre Aslan.
Words: Mélaine Gaultier
Pictures: Marianne Rosenstiehl

Described as the Stanley Kubrick of the perfume world, French ‘nose' Pierre Aslan is back with a new fragrance which already promises to be one of the defining scents of the decade. We meet the legendary creator of Solstice and Sheraz.

We left you on the woody notes of Alba, back in the late 1970s. How would you sum up this decade's fragrance?
Like the women of today, of whom you are a great example: beguiling, free, independent, with just a suggestion of animal passion, totally modern, captivating … perhaps even captivated?

By you? No doubt about it, Monsieur Aslan.
Oh but I do doubt it! [Laughs.] Men are always full of doubt, which is why they make perfumes: so they can give them to you and win you over.

How has your style developed over the years?
It's difficult to say … A perfume should be representative of its era, and yet able to transcend it. It's the women who wear it that bring it to life and develop it. Take Habanita,
for example. It was created in 1921, and today in 1987, many women still wear it. They approach it differently, and wear it differently too.

How do you mean?
Women have changed, so perfume has changed too …

In what way have they changed?
Their skin is different. The species has evolved: the skin of a girl of the eighties is nothing like the skin of a girl in the 1920s. She doesn't use the same soap, or the same face powder; the washing powder she uses to clean her bed linen is completely different. The smell of the city itself has changed beyond all recognition. The humidity of the atmosphere too. A woman in the court of Louis XV would smell nothing like a woman today, and it's not about what perfume she's wearing. It's to do with her skin.

So skin changes with the times?
Absolutely. Think of the eighteenth century. What does that era smell like? Stone, sunshine, wood, manure, leaves, wrought iron. Nowadays it's petrol, tarmac, metallic paint, plastic … electricity.

Electricity has a smell?
Of course. So do TV screens.

What made you go back to perfume-making after an
eight-year
gap?
It was finding a hat … on a bench in Parc Monceau.

I don't understand …
It doesn't matter. It's too complicated to explain. Let's move on.

Monsieur,

Your letter concerning my interview with Pierre Aslan was forwarded to me by the
Paris Match
editorial office. I must say I found it very intriguing. I'm just starting out as a journalist and yours is the first item of correspondence I have received – and it's not one I'm likely to forget in a hurry.

To tell the truth, the only reason I got the exclusive with Pierre Aslan was that my little sister is in the same class as Monsieur Aslan's son. Éric fancies my sister and I think the interview served as a way of getting closer to her … Pierre Aslan hadn't given a single interview in thirteen years, so I was a quivering wreck when I went to meet him.

Coming back to your letter, are you quite sure that the hat you left on the bench in Parc Monceau is the same one Monsieur Aslan describes? Personally, I was baffled by his answer – I still am, in fact. I actually thought that section might be cut, but the editor wanted to keep it in because it shows what a complex and disconcerting character Pierre Aslan is.

As for your request, I'm sorry but I can't give you Monsieur Aslan's home address. I didn't meet him at his
house but in the bar at the Ritz with his publicist, and, in any case, even if I had his address I wouldn't be allowed to give it to you. However, I am enclosing the contact details for his publicist; if you wish to write to Monsieur Aslan, I think you could go via him.

Wishing you every success with your search and all best wishes,

Mélaine Gaultier

ASLAN

Monsieur,

Your letter is one of the strangest I have ever received. The description of your hat corresponds in every detail to a black felt hat I picked up on a bench in Parc Monceau. In fact, I mentioned that very hat in the only interview I have given recently, in
Paris Match
. Alas! I no longer have the hat, which I regret, because I was very sentimentally attached to it. Life is like that; objects pass from hand to hand, but people and perfumes remain.

With best wishes,

Pierre Aslan

ASLAN

Monsieur,

My press secretary has again passed on a letter from you. As you are being so persistent, I will try to make my reply as clear as possible: I don't have your hat any more because I lost it in a brasserie. To be even more specific, that evening there was an unfortunate mix-up. The cloakroom attendant gave me back a hat that was identical to yours in every particular, except that the golden initials were not F.M., they were B.L. I only noticed this when it was too late. I went back to the brasserie the next day but the hat was no longer there.

I hope that I have enlightened you sufficiently in this matter and I would ask you not to write to me again. I like my solitude, very rarely answer the telephone and almost never reply to letters.

Yours sincerely,

Pierre Aslan