Violet perfume – 6th day of Violets

On the 6th day of Violet perfume….

Eleanora Duse

we tried Laura Tonatto E. Duse, named after the Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

Reading her biography is interesting and necessary since I just spritzed and need to allow for drydown. I have heard this name before, but really did not know anything about her. She lived from 1958 to 1924 and was very well-known and much admired for her style of acting, which was more natural than the current French style of emotionalism and overacting — think Girard Depardieu (sp). She acted without makeup early on, relying on her talent instead of the methods of the French school of acting (I’m not copying that quite word for word from the Encyclopedia Britannica, honest, but it’s not a very original sentence, if you know what I mean.)

This is one quote I could find attributed to her easily — the drydown doesn’t take that long:

The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

Hmmm. Eleonora, as you might have found out, and to use another quote, “That way madness lies.”

She did not go mad, but she did become quite ill and was no longer able to act without makeup. While bringing the troupe she had formed to the U.S., she died here.

George Middleton met her and wrote “The Lady with the Beautiful Hands” about their meeting. This is where I love this babe with all my heart. Mr. Middleton apparently produced plays, and while watching one of his plays populated with very young, beautiful women actresses on stage, she said to him, “‘Yet there seems to be nothing but beautiful women in your theater.‘ And as she pointed to a famous star in a bathing suit she added with a shy smile: ‘That is not art, that is nature.'”

Ah, now we have had enough time for the drydown, though I have found another Old Babe Icon, which is a tremendous thing to get on a Saturday morning. E. Duse the perfume is a lovely creation, my favorite from the Laura Tonatto line so far. Violet, vanilla and amber, this is soft and beautiful. I’ve been trying to ignore this one’s siren call for days as I spritz it and hope I don’t have to buy it, but it has beautiful sillage, just feels like a warm summer day. An excellent violet perfume rendition from a perfumer who is often more interested in infusing history or art into her perfumes than good smells. This one achieves both. I think Eleonora would have worn this happily.  Sample of Laura Tonatto and other violet perfume samples available at Surrender to Chance