Chantilly Cream

I went to Chantilly chateau in the 70s, when I was town twinned with a French girl who lived in the Paris banlieu of Epinay-sur Seine when it was quite posh. What I remembered most was the huge carp in the chateau lake, which would attack a baguette like a shoal of piranhas, but with more sucking and less biting.
My grandmother pronounced it shan-tillee, and it turned out she'd been there for the horse racing.

At Chantilly, you have the horse racing, a chateau, cream and lace. The French call whipped cream Chantilly (pronounced more like shor-tee-yee), but they stick a load of sugar in it and make it taste like the stuff that comes in squirty tubes. I haven't been there for decades, but when I visited every shop sold the handmade lace at imaginative prices.

And then there's the scent.
I've been snapping up the occasional bottle of vintage scent on eBay and Etsy. I admit it. If you've been bidding for something interesting in the past couple of weeks, that was probably me putting the price up. My first bottle of Chantilly - the real stuff from Houbigant not the current replacement from Dana - came from Etsy. I wasn't expecting much. Which is why I was blown away by its beauty when I unwrapped the cellophane from my 1950s boxed set. I got dusting powder thrown in.

It smells of creme Chantilly whipped up with strawberries, floated on top of champagne that you sip with a lipstick lick of the lips, then dusted smoothly with velvety face powder. I can tell you this now, because I have recently secured enough of the stuff to last me a lifetime (if I'm not too lavish). I didn't want you all bidding against me.  That's what it's like on me. It smells quite faint, light and insignificant on my friend Sonja. She has a theory about perfume for blondes; Chantilly is a dark-haired fragrance.

But what of Houbigant, who created Chantilly in 1941? They are selling a couple of expensive scents at posh shops around the globe. Their history is impeccable, except for a few incidents with their royal customers' bodies becoming detached from their heads. They were one of Queen Victoria's perfumers. They invented fougere. They have a strange monochrome website which looks like wallpaper from Versailles, in the dark.

Modern Chantilly is made by Dana; they have two websites, one is American and one is written in excrutiatingly bad English, Do go there for the fun of it, but don't buy anything. danaperfumes.org They write things like this:
"Chantilly Dana perfumes is a classic that is feminine and charming, containing Chypre Oriental. Chypre Oriental is an Oriental classic fragrance which is a blend of different extracts such as rose, jasmine and other plants that you can only find in the Oriental places."
"There are various types of Love’s Dana perfumes and one of them is the Rainforest. This is ideal for those who are environmentally conscious, since it has a clean and natural scent."
"The last product from Dana perfumes for men is No Limit, a scent that goes off to those who are competitive, with only the word win in their minds."

I rest my case, m'Lud.


Their Chantilly is not the same, although they are using bottles that look just like the vintage ones so beware if you're buying it at boot sales or online. When did Chantilly jump ship? What happened between its disappearance as a blossoming, lingering, soul stirring scent and its reappearance as a ghost that's now haunting US drugstores. Don't know. Wikipedia won't tell me.

It's not modern. Is that a bad thing? I think not, but then I span several decades myself. My nephew recently asked me if I'd heard of Led Zeppelin. As the only one among his friends who's listened to Stairway to Heaven, he thought he'd discovered them.
Perhaps there's a whole new generation who would love a flouncy fragrance that makes an entrance in high heels and a hat. Let's hear it for Chantilly. Now get online and hunt it down.