![]() ![]() Ellena looked left from every vantage the publicity image of a wispy blond girl floated spectrally over the round metallic glass Chance bottle. The car crossed an avenue, stopped at a light: Chance. It seemed as if every single one featured an ad for Chanel's latest feminine perfume, Chance. The Parisians walked around wearing black, smoking cigarettes, exhaling ashen fumes into the air, and throwing the butts and packets onto streets where Africans in cotton bleus de travail uniforms swept them into sewers.įrom his car, Ellena looked out at the bus stops. In the deep-cobalt summer sky, the cloud of aerosolized filth from the Paris traffic hovered in the blue air. You could look from the top of rue Menilmontant down over the Centre Georges Pompidou's industrial modernism all the way to the Eutelsat balloon floating over the Parc Andre Citroen. Paris was enjoying a spell of Los Angeles-like weather. He was on his way to Hermes to submit his first essais, his olfactory sketches, for an important scent he was creating. But he was just at the point of becoming particularly, and rather extraordinarily, visible to the world. Ellena was a famous ghost, a member of an elite group of perfumers who create fragrances sold under the names of designers and luxury houses while keeping assiduously to the shadows. On June 9, 2004, just before 5:00 p.m., Jean-Claude Ellena was being driven to a meeting at the offices of Parfums Hermes in Pantin, just outside the peripherique to the northeast of Paris. ![]()
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