SCENTED FLUFF(Charles E.J. Moulton) SCENTED FLUFF

This story from 2010 is an excursion into the changes that occurred with the instigation of the first world war. The old world tumbled and a new one rose. Kingdoms tumbled and with them a lot of the dignity the old world possessed disappeared.
I examine these changes by comparing two different times and places through the eyes of one lady who represents everything that the old world was: grand, lovable, decent and articulate.
This story is dedicated to my fantastic grandmother Anna Julia Sofia Kronzell, the grandest Grande Dame of them all.

Lucienne Arcienne–Mayfield sat in her mansion with assorted members of her family. There were twelve of them all in all still gathered around her within the large dining room. As they were all listening to grandmother speak of old times, a few of them were also recollecting how their own time was in a turbulent change and how that would affect them later in life.
It was Lucienne’s eightieth birthday, so naturally she was the centre of attraction. There had been superb meals, garden parties, musical entertainment in the form of a chamber quintet playing waltzes and polkas and a range of speeches held by assorted members of the press. Tennis and golf had been played and there had been spectacular presents on display.
Fifty family members had arrived, not counting the wives and the husbands. Her five children, twelve grandchildren and twenty-five great-grandchildren had been there. Three cousins, two brothers and three nieces. Some of them had already left, some of them were sleeping in one of the mansion’s twelve bedrooms. Some of them were reading in the library and a couple of youngsters were playing chess. One young couple were making drunk love under a tree, but Lucienne didn’t know that and neither did anyone else. If Lucienne had known, she would’ve reprimanded them in the strictest of manners. Premarital sex was a thing too taboo to think of.
The mansion’s lot had been smack full of Rolls Royce cars, Bentleys, Jaguars and Benz vehicles. There was even a Fafner among them, owned by Lucienne’s third youngest grandchild Benjamin, a twenty five year old bon vivant and also the boy under the tree mentioned before. He had bought the car although German cars were not so popular right now. He didn’t want to keep the car, not with that man in Germany having become leader of the country that had made the car. Many British people were afraid that the man might become more powerful than he should be.
The year was 1933 and Lucienne’s family had been spared losing all too much money. The crisis had been very bad, but the depression had been even worse in the U.S. and so Lucienne had been smart about her money and luckily no one could take away her house, anyway. Her husband Gordon Baxter Mayfield had been dead now for ten years and his smarts and his textile empire had brought them fame and fortune.
Her grandson Theo Gordon Mayfield had just signed a contract for a film with Chaplin and he hoped that he could transcend into talkies. No one knew who would make it after the silent movies became obsolete. Chaplin was one of the few who still made them, the old silent films. The business was a different one now and the key selling factor was a good film voice. Musicals was en vogue and a man named Busby Berkley was very popular, choreographing thousands of girls in luminous violin costumes. Theo hoped to land one of the Broadway Melody films.
Behind Lucienne was a large portrait of King George V. It had been a gift from the royal court as a thank you for her financial assistance in the international conference for economic aid in the crisis on June 2nd this year. That painting had just been hung up there today by one of the court’s personal assistants. He happened to be Lucienne’s fifty-five year old son and had brought the painting from Windsor Castle himself yesterday morning in order to present it now.
It was the year of films like Duck Soup, The Invisible Man, King Kong and 42nd Street. In the charts were songs like Night & Day, Stormy Weather and Easter Parade. Sweden was ruled by Gustav V and America had Roosevelt. It was the best of times and the worst of times. It was the year of The Marx Brothers and Adolf Hitler.
Lucienne was speaking about her life two years before Paris was occupied by Germans and when everybody listened to Johann Strauss instead of Harry Warren and Chopin instead Dick Powell. Her new record of Mozart music played by the London Symphony, a present from her grand daughter Ethel, was spinning at the old turntable gramophone a meter away and somebody had to go and wind it up now and then in order for the music to keep playing.
The room as such was quite lovely and the large doors lead to a terrace that had an overview over the landscape that eventually could admire Stonehenge. It was beautiful to see the sun rise over the English countryside.
Here were instruments, a grand piano and a cello and two guitars, as well as countless original paintings by English masters. The chandelier hanging from the middle of the room was a sparkling and beautiful sight in this approaching dusk.
The company of relatives were sitting in the corner next to the game room that lead to the library. They were facing the dining room, gathered upon the range of red velvet sofas whilst grandmother sat with two of her great-grandchildren in her lap and told everyone about what life had been like back then.
“In those days,” she claimed in her melodic mezzo, “there were no talkies or automobiles, no telephones or Marconi machines. We didn’t have any radio receivers or phonographs. We had newspapers and books. That was good enough for us. Gordon always loved to read and so we spent many evenings reading books aloud to each other.”
Twenty-three year old Ethel, who was influenced by modern women’s liberation in society as well as in romance, had been chewing on a question for a bit. She had no idea how her grandmother would react this time. It was a bit of a teasing factor. Apparently, Lucienne had met her husband during the German occupation of Paris 1870 – 71. This German-French war had been devastating for the city. In the middle of an attack by a general named Moltke on the 15th of September that year, Gordon Baxter Mayfield, one of the England’s wealthiest textile tycoons, courted the daughter of the steel magnate Remy Arcienne. The two men had become friends during a visit to Madrid five years ago and it wasn’t until last year that love had actually blossomed between the hearts of the 21 year old girl and her thirty five year old gentleman caller. This man had inherited his fortune and position from his father Mortimer Mayfield. This man had built his textile empire up from scratch the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation 1837 and now his son Gordon was madly in love with a French steel tycoon’s daughter.
The question that Ethel had was: had grandma been courted by anyone else previous to grandfather? She had always dismissed the question with the answer: yes, of course, dozens of men had courted her. That was the proper and dignified answer to a tricky question. Case closed.
Young people being what they were and are, they wanted to hear the story of how she met and lost one particular gentlemen caller in 1869, two years before Gordon took Lucienne to England and married her in Westminster Abbey.
“Tell us about the gentleman caller,” Ethel demanded.
Lucienne pretended not to understand.
“Gentleman caller?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
The entire ensemble joined in a chorus of wails and laughter.
Lucienne waved her arms about, her elegant, lace decorated gown tingling with light from the setting sun.
“I do not know why you want to hear this story over and over again,” she said in her high British English coloured by the French idiom. “It is just fickle. It is … uh, how shall I put it … scented fluff.”
“Nooo,” her thirty five year old granddaughter Laura protested, “it’s romantic and so very lovely.”
“All right,” Lucienne nodded, “I shall tell you the story again.”
“With all the naughty details,” her forty five year old daughter Victoria demanded.
Lucienne smiled, although she disliked having to accept the fact that it was seen as having been naughty, whatever that was. We must remember that being naughty in those days was a kiss on the cheek.
“This was 1869, the year of the Suez canal. Ulysses S. Grant was president of the United States and Napoleon III ruled France,” she began. “A song named Little Brown Jug was popular that year and at every possible occasion there was a vernissage with romantic paintings or a soirée with Johann Strauss music. I went waltzing with so many diplomats that I have forgotten their names. Gandhi and Neville Chamberlain were born that year and Queen Victoria had locked herself up in Windsor Castle for eight years now. That was because of the death of her beloved Albert and a certain Mr. John Brown.
Anyway, Paris was a haven of parties and dinners for me in 1869. I was young and pretty and rich. Many young men took long walks with me, hoping to win my love. Now-a-days, you youngsters go to the talkies. We danced, went to the theatre or walked about in the fresh air. I used to have my parasol in my hand and my white spring hat on and I would take the man’s arm and we would walk and talk and pretend to be in love. Either I met the man again or I didn’t.
England wasn’t all that popular with Parisians, but we had lots of friends there and so my future husband kept on courting me as well. I fell in love with him first in 1870, so now I was just into Parisians.”
Ethel interrupted: “What made you fall in love with grandfather?”
“His eyes, his smile and his flowers,” Lucienne said and suddenly she was a young girl again. There was a look of dreamy love in her eye that transported her family back to when she had been young. She waved it away suddenly just like she would a silly bee buzzing around her. “That was real, my fling before that is just … what did I say … scented fluff? Yes.”
“We like scented fluff, don’t we, Laura?” Lucienne’s 14 year old great-grandson Peter said.
Laura smiled and patted her son on the knee and shook her head, then leaned against her husband Robert’s shoulder.
“That particular day, it was a day in July just like today, there was no gentleman caller to walk with me. So, my brother André had to serve as my date. We walked and walked and my brother taught me about art and theatre and checked my skills on reading and writing. He always kept a note pad and a small writing tool with him and so our walks would be lessons. That day we passed a house I had never seen before. It was very well kept and had a large iron gate leading up to a gorgeous English garden.”
“Grandmother always loved the English,” young Penelope said and her sister Emma laughed.
Ethel asked them to be quiet.
“The amazing thing was the man kneeling down next to the rose bushes. He tended to them with such care that I had to convince my brother to stop and wait before we went on. He spoke to them. He even sang to them.
Well, eventually we walked on and spoke about other things. But that man never left my mind. I was thinking about that man all the time. That was enough reason for me to go there again. I convinced my brother to take another walk again with me and lead him to the house. Sure enough, there he was again singing to his roses.
I stood there a long while just looking at him. He didn’t turn around toward me, although he must’ve noticed me. Maybe he thought I was just a very nosey little brat.
Anyway, this little girl, namely me, had been standing there a long while when the man turned about in my direction anyway and asked me if I liked the roses. My brother said nothing, but knew that I was happy to be offered a rose.
Of course, we all thought that this strange man was a simple gardener. We had only seen him in his garden and people are stupid, even rich people like us were judging only by what we saw and not by what lay beneath the surface.
So to us, he was a gardener.
We spoke of the weather and of the political situation in Paris, of our King and of current French artists like Corbet, Manet and Rodin. We even mentioned the slaves in America and how they had been freed by Mr. Lincoln and that Mr. Grant was doing a nice job, considering that he was actually leading a country torn apart by a civil war. The gardener was very well read and I really wondered who he was. Well, soon my brother lead the conversation to another topic, namely our house and eventually we said that we needed to go home.
We did so, but I kept on blabbering on about this gardener who never ever mentioned that he was anything else but a gardener. All our questions about the house never referred to himself. He spoke of the rooms and of the garden and of little chores, never that he might be a wealthy man. We were stupid, as I said. I was in love, but in love with someone just like you might be in love with an animal, someone of a lower class, someone that you might want to cuddle and caress.
Anyway, I could not ever stop talking to this man. I went there every day. One day my father joined me and as we returned he was sure he had seen him somewhere. The hard part was that I really couldn’t ask him what his name was after three months of idle conversation.
The horrid thing was that I became more and more in love as time passed. My family really were going crazy.
I tried my best to occupy my time with other things like inviting other prospects of marriage and writing my diary, practicing piano and arranging dinner parties.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t get my thoughts away from this man, whose name I did not even know.
Then finally, one day, I told my father that our garden actually needed a brush-up and that we might want to hire a professional gardener. My dear father, a very busy man, smiled knowingly and was aware of my love.
He was also aware of the fact that he knew that he wanted someone of social stature as a prospect for marriage and that this man may not be the right choice. I disagreed. He might be rich and famous.
The next day, we agreed to invite the man to tend our garden, We would come to his house the same time of day and ask him if he was interested in working on our bushes, so to speak.
When we arrived, the man was not in his garden and I was devastated. We looked for him in other parts of the mansion, but we didn’t find him. Finally, we rung the bell and a very handsome older man opened the door. We told him that we had seen a gardener take care of the roses for the last months and that we had been speaking to him. We would like to hire him to take care of our grounds.
The butler, who called himself Gilbert Aznavour, claimed that this man was Yves Polenc and that he, most certainly, was not the gardener. He was the master of the house. Being an heir to an immense fortune, he had actually founded a publishing house on his own and spent his evenings reading and courting possible new writers.
His other big interest was gardening.
My father, who felt that it was his duty to defend my future, asked the butler if M. Polenc was married. He wasn’t, but he was seeing many young ladies.
He loved dancing and eating out and was doing so today.
Well, first it was very interesting to hear this and I immediately saw myself as his wife.
We both went home and I think for days we said nothing about this man and his celebrity.
I felt completely silly, not because I had been impolite. I had been very nice. The problem was that I had tried to convince myself that I had the right to love this gardener, because he was a simple man.
What had I thought? That a person was only valuable if he was rich? That was preposterous. Anyway, we met and the courting began. We went dancing and eating out and he told me about gardening and I told him about my summer hats and about travelling to the Provence in the springtime. We had a great deal of fun and it was a wonderful experience to know him.
However, the secrecy was more intriguing than knowing everything about him. It was exciting to wonder where he was from and who he was. He finally married another rich girl and I married Gordon, but we kept contact for a decade or so. It was fabulous to have danced with him and called him my fiancée for a while, but when I realized that he wasn’t a mystery for me to discover it became tiresome.
Two things were vital here: people were valuable no matter their social stature. Still, keeping the mystery within a relationship would keep it alive. It could remain exciting if you surprised your partner once in a while. Remaining mysterious was excellent. I tried to remember that even when Gordon and I were older and a bit bored with one another.
What I found interesting is that Gordon later told me that Queen Victoria had been seeing one of her servants five years before my relationship with Yves. The difference was that John Brown really was Victoria’s servant. Polenc wasn’t. Me and Victoria have something in common, after all.”
With that, Lucienne patted her grandchildren on the knee and walked up to pour herself a brandy.
Theo Gordon Mayfield, the talkie star, came into the room as the family were blabbering on about grandma’s romance. There were questions posed as to where Yves was now and Lucienne responded that he probably was still married to his woman and lived in Paris.
“Are you telling them your story about the scented fluff again?” Theo asked provocatively.
Lucienne laughed. “A bit of perfume and spunned sugar is necessary in life … once in a while,” grandmother added with the lifting of one eyebrow.
Theo laughed. “Well, grandma, I’m off to bed. Will you come with us to Ascot tomorrow?”
Lucienne nodded. “If you join me for tea in the morning. Who won the chess match?”
“Kenneth,” Theo answered.
“See, movie stars are not good at everything,” Laura chirped.
“My brother has a little more chess experience than me,” Theo giggled. “My Freudian vanity only extends on screen.”
And so, Chaplin’s new colleague was off to Mrs. White’s party.
Ethel sat and mused over how Lucienne had been so in love with this gardener and that it had a little bit of Jane Austen to it.
Lucienne knew that these range of jokes would be coming up now for an hour, but it was nice to be laughed at by young people.
She drank brandy and ate some cheese and listened to some Mozart. It reminded her of Gordon.
Finally, to top off a nice day, they all stood there on the terrace watching the moon rise over England getting tipsy. Good old Ethel was humming the current hit Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Lucienne was contemplating her choice of hat and dress for the races at Ascot tomorrow and Laura was probably wondering how long Ethel would be tapping her feet to the rhythm of the song.
The conversation again meandered onto the topic of grandmother’s romance and somebody joked: “Who knows what other skeletons are buried in grandmother’s closet?”
Lucienne drank down her brandy in one swift gulp and smiled:
“Mmm-mm,” she protested. “No skeletons. Just scented fluff.”
Then, she announced that she was going to bed and she was leaving them with trying to solve this strange mystery. They now had a puzzle to solve and that was good enough for her.

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