Hyacinth Bouquet Quotes

Spring, in Brittany, is milder than spring in Paris, and bursts into flower three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its appearance—the swallow, the oriole, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale—arrive with the breezes that refuge in the bays of the Armorican peninsula.[28] The earth is covered over with daisies, pansies, jonquils, daffodils, hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones, like the wastelands around San Giovanni of Laterano and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. The clearings are feathered with tall and elegant ferns; the fields of gorse and broom blaze with flowers that one may take at first glance for golden butterflies. The hedges, along which strawberries, raspberries, and violets grow, are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle, and brambles whose brown, curving shoots burst forth with magnificent fruits and leaves. All the world teems with bees and birds; hives and nests interrupt the child’s every footstep. In certain sheltered spots, the myrtle and the rose-bay flourish in the open air, as in Greece; figs ripen, as in Provence; and every apple tree, bursting with carmine flowers, looks like the big bouquet of a village bride.

I follow her into a storeroom at the back of the shop and catch my breath when I see the bouquets she has made for the shoot. I've seen a lot of wedding flowers, but nothing like these. There are soft apricot roses with dusty-blue delphiniums, creamy-white peonies with miniature pink alliums. Waxy green orchids with deep purple irises. A phone rings in the shop and she excuses herself and goes back outside to answer it. I bend down and pick up a pretty tumble of glossy green ivy and pale purple bells on slender stems. The flowers have a delicate scent, something elusive between hyacinth and freesia.

But on earth here in France, every sense was bathed in luxury, luxury of which she became more and more aware as she grew older. The palate was indulged with strawberries from Saumur and melons planted in the Loire by a Neapolitan gardener long ago, with trout pate, Tours pastries, and vin d’Annonville, with its delicate bouquet. The nostrils were pampered by the happy work of Catherine de Médicis’s Italian perfumers working with the flowers from the fields of Provence, producing heady fragrances to be worn on throats and wrists and to scent gloves and capes. Hyacinth, jasmine, lilac—all wafted through the rooms and from the bathwaters of the châteaux. The skin was caressed with unguents and the feel of silk, velvet, fur, leather gloves of softest deerskin; goosedown pillows cupped weary bodies at the day’s end; and in winter, newly installed Germanic tile stoves at Fontainebleau provided central heating. Eyes were continually presented with beauty in ordinary objects rendered more opulently pleasing: a crystal mirror decorated with velvet and silk ribbons; buttons with jewels affixed. There were fireworks reflected in the river; paintings by Leonardo; and black-and-white chequered marble paving in the long palace gallery over the Cher that spanned the rippling water outside. Pleasing sounds were everywhere: in the chirping of the pet canaries and more exotic birds in the garden aviaries; in the baying of the hounds in the matchless royal hunting packs; in the splash and gurgle of the fountains and elaborate water displays in the formal gardens. And above all that, the sound of melodious French, exquisitely spoken; witty conversations, and the poets of the court reciting verses composed to celebrate the aristocratic dreamworld they inhabited, with a haunting melancholy that it would all pass away.