Mitsouko by Guerlain and its novel heroine

Mitsouko: a heroine, then a perfume

La Bataille, the novel Claude Farrère published in 1909, is set largely in Nagasaki in 1905, while the city waits for the clash between the Russian fleet and the Japanese navy. Its heroine is Mitsouko, the marchioness Yorisaka, wife of a Japanese naval officer. She is bound to him by an oath, yet she secretly loves an English naval officer, Herbert Fergan. Her husband dies at the Battle of Tsushima, fought from 27 to 29 May 1905.

She gave her name to a perfume: Guerlain says that Mitsouko is the name of the heroine of La Bataille, and that Jacques Guerlain imagined his chypre (a family of perfumes built on oakmoss and bergamot) with her in mind. In the novel a character explains that "mitsou" means "honeycomb" in Japanese and, written with another Chinese character, "mystery". The heroine is fiction, but the man who invented her had served in the navy himself.

Claude Farrère, the officer who became a writer

Farrère entered the naval school in 1894. In 1905, the very year in which La Bataille is set, he won the Goncourt, a French literary prize, for Les Civilisés, and he became a lieutenant the following year. In 1919 he resigned from the navy to devote himself to letters. Sixteen years later, on 28 March 1935, he was elected to the Académie française.

1919: a peach set against patchouli

The same year, 1919, Jacques Guerlain composed the perfume that bears the name of Farrère's heroine. It came when Europe, after the war, was taken with Japan. According to Guerlain, the formula did something new: for the first time, a velvety, spiced peach was joined to the woody scent of patchouli. The house adds that the idea of pairing a chypre with so fruity a note was Jacques Guerlain's, and that it gave Mitsouko its modernity. It describes the peach accord as an original creation of its perfumers, with patchouli, rose, moss and bergamot forming the base of the chypre accord.

Today's eau de parfum sets a note of peach beside jasmine and May rose. Its base combines spicy notes, woodland-floor notes and vetiver, and the spices are black pepper, cardamom and pink berries.

The bottle shaped like an inverted heart

The "inverted heart" bottle was designed by Raymond Guerlain in 1912. It is marked by graceful Art Nouveau scrolls, the curling style of the turn of the twentieth century. The stopper is a hollowed-out heart.

Mitsouko belongs to Guerlain's Les Légendaires collection. The collection, the house says, brings together creations by five generations of perfumers, all inspired by love legends, real or dreamed. The inverted-heart bottle, the house adds, is its symbol.

Arita porcelain and gold leaf

In 2016 and 2017 Guerlain and the Arita Porcelain Lab atelier remade the bottle in hand-painted porcelain, in a limited edition. The occasion was the 400th anniversary of the porcelain made in Arita, a town in north-western Kyushu, in Japan, where the porcelain dates from 1616. The edition was on show in the Guerlain boutique on the Champs-Élysées until 7 January 2017.

For the centenary of the perfume in 2019 the same heart was dressed in gold leaf and calligraphed designs. The atelier Hakuichi, a specialist in hammered gold, and the calligrapher Suitou Nakatsuka made the bottles. They came as 75 ml flacons in an edition of 3,099 pieces.