“I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”
--Eleanor Roosevelt
Sa Majesté la Rose by Serge Lutens
Anyone cosmopolitan like we at Wit would stay far, no, farther, away from rose perfumes. So basic and overwhelming is the experience of smelling one's first rose--more vivid than achieving first skydiving or Emily Dickinson or sex for the first time--that the huge pink roundness, fullness, Heideggerian present-at-handness of a single blossom can last anyone an entire lifetime.
And what of rose metaphors, possibly the only things more clinging and trite and cloying and stupid than the so fair it's unfair flower itself? The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; (said Dali, no stranger to trite himself, then:) but the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
So when we wore Sa Majesté la Rose by Serge Lutens we couldn't believe who we blossomed into, so much more powerful is any rose than a single woman, even witty ones.
The overpowering feminine principle outsmarts every Witty wile, every attempt to resist being her that we have ever cleverly devised.
In short, wearing Sa Majesté la Rose is like having a perfect pair of breasts so that nothing else about you could ever moth anybody to any of your other flickering flames, no matter your Ph.D thesis or outlandish sculptures or gorgeous children whose accomplishments are broadcast upon BMW bumper. You will have "those" breasts, my dear. The Platonic ones, just as every rose is "that" rose, and you know what Gertrude Stein said.
So wear it, Your Majesty, when you want to bring them to their knees, or when you want to grow oh so lively, oh so crimson...
-Theresa Duncan
In memory of Theresa Duncan
