ROMANCE OF SCENT

Evening Star, Issue 21835, 26 September 1934, Page 11

ROMANCE OF SCENT

HAWKER TO MILLIONAIRE “ Please a woman ami she will make you rich, . . .” That is an old Chinese proverb. How true it has proved to he in the case of Francois Coty! Millions of women knew him. knew every whim and aversion. Few ever met him. lint he pleased them, made them beautiful, brought to them the perfumes that they loved, so the3' made him wealthy. Coty died at Lonvenciennes a multimillionaire. Vet he began life as a hawker. He was horn in Corsica sixty years ago, and was still quite young when his parents died. After a term of military service his big chance came to him. Ho discovered a new perfume. This, ho said, would make him known to every woman in the world. He was full of determination. He would become “ The Scent King.” But at the outset there was a hard, long fight. He wore the soles of his shoes thin peddling his discovery around the streets of Paris. At first the women in the houses and the assistants in the chemists' shops turned him away. But he knew in his heart that he had found something that women wanted.

Steadily he made money. First a thousand francs, then two thousand. It was time to launch out and conquer the world. But two thousand francs was not a fortune. Coty sought to induce a financier to advance him sufficient capital to extend his small business. He was tired of hawking. He wanted to “ establish himself.”

At that important interview there was a dramatic incident which changed Francois’s life. The bottle of secretlymade scent which he held in his hand crashed to the ground. The room was filled with a perfume of such delicate insistence that the capita] was readily forthcoming. Coty at last was on the road to fortune. He had begun at the bottom of the ladder, but he soon found his way to the top. There is no doubt that the businesslike Mademoiselle Yvonne Lebanon, who became Coty’s wife, played a larga part in the building up of the fortune. She acted as a saleswoman, trying to assist her husband by selling millinery and feathers to a department store. The manager refused to buy, but ha inquired with a great deal of enthusiasm about tbe perfume she was using. “ It is my husband’s concoction,’* she replied. Madame Coty, who has since married a Rumanian, AI. Cotareaunu. realised with her husband that toilet adjuncts, like lipstick and powder, must be macla chic, and she completed bis artistic instincts for the right thing to appeal to women through the eye and nose. Francois built np a tremendous fortune. When flic break between him and Mademoiselle Lebaron came, resulting in a divorce, she claimed half his wealth, then estimated at £10,000,000. Such a claim is admissible in French law. M. VaHi. a life-long friend and trusted business colleague of M. Coty, described to a ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’ reporter how AI. Coty brought him to Britain ten years ago to found the London branch of his rapidly spreading business. “ From a single room and six employees ten years ago, the firm baa grown to fill a huge mansion in the centre of London and a factory at Brentford employing more than 500 workers.” Coty bad numerous luxurious villas and chateaux, and it was in one of tb© most luxurious homes in France—the chateaux at Loiiveucicnnes. for which he paid 25.000.000 francs—that he died. Vel, ordinarily, be used bis luxurious Immcs but httie, preferring a suite in a Paris hotel.