He was besotted -- and her confidence, that air of authority she possessed, perhaps a result of her near-unassisted rise from poverty, no doubt played a part (famed fragrance bottle designer Pierre Dinand, in his emails with me over the past month, described her as “a small, discreet and introverted woman,” which I think accurately defines not who she was so much as who she seemed to be to outsiders unfamiliar with her strong sense of aesthetics, but who the hell am I to gloss a line of Dinand's?).

The book Caron released in October 2000 by Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg actually reprints a letter Ernest wrote Felicie from Grasse in 1913 while on a business trip:

Dear Felicie,
I’ve just returned to the hotel and have this sudden urge to write you. The reason is without doubt the autumn light, iridescent with the flamboyant colours of the plane trees in the Mirabeau Square and that have not yet been stripped bare by the perfumed mistral.

Does that make you smile, Felicie? Perfumed mistral!! That could be the name for a new Caron creation. Is it too audacious? Nevertheless, does not this great wind, after its cavalcade down the Rhone Valley, carry all the scents of the Midi that are carefully gathered in the distilleries in Grasse?

And yet, though absence may make the heart grow fonder, it is nevertheless cited by that same book as the reason the couple grew apart.

“During his absence, Félicie has changed,” writes Martin-Hattemberg of a 1924 trip taken by Daltroff, who spoke five languages. “The couple is experiencing deep relationship difficulties. Ernest, inattentive, thinks only of his business and seems to be neglecting his life as a couple. Félicie is bored alongside a man without fantasy, too absorbed in work and who no longer sees her as a companion but as an associate. Very quickly, discord sets in. Arguments and resentment [tear] the couple apart.”

Colard traces the disharmony further back, to 1922, when Felicie officially received half-ownership of the company, although in his telling, this was no simple split of shares but part of a tontine insurance arrangement, that is, an annuity that would pay out more to the person who lived longer. While these are not uncommon in France to this day, it does make one wonder whether Felicie had a kind of premonition of what was to come. Or maybe I misunderstand the nature of French insurance (which sounds awfully morbid).

Colard on Felicie: “She [had] realised that in case of misfortune she would be entitled to nothing…It rankled [her] that Daltroff had never married her, even if only a few people were aware of the fact.
 
“She never complained of the situation, for she was not the type to confide in others, but she had become more calculating. She felt that in the circumstances, their relationship must henceforth be on a purely business footing.”

This change in attitude caused Daltroff great anguish, in this telling so much so that Daltroff confided in Caron’s newly-hired second nose, Michel Morsetti, that he never should have let business interfere with his romance.

Which would have been a rather sensible reaction. He was then 55, in 1922. Even if she wasn’t the great love of his life (and she seemed to be), he wasn’t likely to find in his remaining time an alternative who was.

Yet this account, like all of them, is self-contradictory, incomplete, baffling. Felicie wanted a share in the business – wanted to be an equal, Colard explains. And yet, he goes on to say, of Felicie’s evolving mindset in the mid-1920s, “She could no longer stand living with this austere man, devoted heart and soul to his work, with never a touch of fantasy about him. She needed freedom to breathe, to indulge in luxuries.”

So which was it? Did she desire civil society’s official enshrinement of their bond or mere insurance? A greater appreciation of her work or her sense of adventure? An expanded remit or greater extravagance?

And if she desired it all, to which aspects did Ernest ever object?

Answers to all of those may never be found, but that travel was involved proximately in the breakup seems something of a consensus. In Colard’s version, Felicie doesn’t bristle at a trip taken by Daltroff but instead utilizes his embarkation on one to flee the coop, moving out of their joint apartment on Boulevard Pereire permanently and settling in a suite at the Ritz.

“When Daltroff returned to find the flat empty,” Colard writes, “he had a terrible shock, which resulted in a bout of pneumonia, followed by a nervous breakdown. Once back again, he shut himself up in his laboratory, from which he scarcely emerged, even on Sundays.”

Pierre Dinand, the aforementioned perfume flacon designer, thinks there’s an element of promiscuity absent from these retellings. He is currently researching Caron’s history for its latest owner, Ariane de Rothschild, who will hold an exhibition of classic Caron bottles this November at the Places d'Or at the Hotel Meurice.

Dinand pins the breakup on a flirtatiousness I’ve never in other parts heard imputed to Daltroff.
​
“Ernest was a seducer, a womanizer,” Dinand told me, adding that he and Francois Coty used to gather to watch Isadora Duncan dance nearly naked at her dance school at the Hotel Byron, rue de Varenne. Dinand, based on conversation with two prominent perfumers in the 1960s, says Ernest had an affair with the dancer sometime between 1908 and 1910.
​
“About their sentimental separation,” he said of Ernest and Felicie, “I have the impression that it is following a trip to Italy on Lake Como, to Bellagio.”
                                                                                                ______________
If the whole breakup seems rather unexceptional, especially for business partners, one of whom was perhaps – perhaps – a tad lecherous, I suppose that’s because, taken by itself, it really was– that the passions and yearnings of these two souls lost to each other attained a dolorous significance only in the years after the undoing.

Daltroff never strayed far from his organ of ingredients at the Asnières factory. He seemed to coworkers lonely, irritable, consumed. Felicie remained in the boutique on the rue de la Paix. They communicated only as much as was necessary.  

And then, four years after Felicie first demanded her half of the company in writing, something rather unexpected occurred -- unexpected not so much for her age – though 52 was hardly young in 1926, and a two-decade disparity in birthday seems sizeable even for France – but the romantic past her corporate post must have always recalled -- at least, for everyone around her if not her herself (or maybe I’m just prude about French office romance):

While still co-running Caron, Felicie married a 35-year-old electrical engineer from Douai named Jean Gabriel Isidore Joseph Bergaud.

What did Felicie find in this man she didn’t in Daltroff? Her mother died that year – was that an unwelcome reminder of her mortality – an event that coaxed her into an arrangement about which she was otherwise unsure?

 And what of this: That salesman who’d taken a young Felicie to Lille to live with him when she was just 20 – one reason he gave for his distemper was a doctor’s pronouncement that Felicie was barren, would never bear the man an heir.

How did that added element play into this marriage, which was supposedly kept secret from Caron staffers for a period? Had Jean Bergaud no desire for children (power to him, if so) – was he seeking in a much, much older female companion a partner less romantic than pragmatic given prevailing social mores?

This is part speculation, sure, but some of these elements spilled over into the workplace most remarkably. Felicie supposedly couldn’t tolerate the sight of a pregnant staffer – she sent home any Caron employee with a noticeable baby bump.

The year after Felicie got hitched, the dancer Isadora Duncan died in a disturbing auto accident when the scarf tied about her neck, becoming entangled in the car’s wheels, choked her and hurled her from the auto and onto the ground.

Meanwhile, Ernest kept toiling away at his craft, in the factory, away from the city’s glamor, distant, if only geographically, from the now-married woman who somehow got away.

“No explanation can justify, today, the separation of Ernest and Félicie. Wounded and bitter, Ernest Daltroff finds himself alone,” writes Martin-Hattemberg. “He finds it hard to bear his loneliness and his home on boulevard Pereire remains too imbued with the memories of a lost happiness.”

So Ernest sought solace as the jilted have from time immemorial, and he, too, wedded someone else – also someone 20 years younger – one Madeleine Briet, in 1932, three nights before New Year’s Eve, almost as if he was trying to squeeze in the nuptials so as to start 1933 fresh, as if such an external rite could ever work magic upon a hurt inside.

1933 – a year in which he sought renewal. 1933 – the year in which Hitler rose to power. We can trace the sad course of the ensuing decade, Daltroff’s last, from the records of various ports’ entries and exits, as the perfumer, ostensibly fleeing fascism as a Jew but on the run from his feelings in equal measure, settled in Geneva, Montreal, New York. Always on the move. Working for Caron from a distance whose measure was far greater than the obvious gaps in time and space.

Madeleine’s 1941 Declaration of Intention Form, filled out so she might obtain US citizenship, outlines the very end, seemingly. She and Daltroff took the Delaware & Hudson Railway train from Montreal to Rouses Point, NY, on June 29 or 30, 1940, settling ultimately in Manhattan at the Hotel Beacon at Broadway and 75th.

The form wasn’t signed by Madeleine until May 7, 1941 – exactly seven months before Pearl Harbor and three months after her husband, Ernest Daltroff, had already died, of cancer.

Of course, this wasn’t quite the ending – life goes on. Felicie lived on in Paris until 1967, when she passed at the age of 93.

And Daltroff’s wife, having seen him perish of cancer and then lived as a widow on Park Avenue, married a wealthy, divorced doctor, with whom she moved to Quogue, Long Island, at the Eastern tip of the Hamptons, in 1947 (upon which occasion she exhumed Daltroff from his resting place in the Bronx and interred him in Quogue, in a cemetery now home to former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn).

When record companies paid radio hosts to spin their tracks -- or rather, when that practice finally came to the attention of Congress in 1959 -- a House Subcommittee  opened a governmental investigation that took years. And here we have Hearn smiling his ass off, admiring his own dimples (though he can't see 'em he knows they're there), telling the world essentially what Congress had to pry loose from his musical counterparts with difficulty.

That he's an incorrigible grifter-gifter of previously undeclared and probably illicit encouragement. 

(That said, if he's going to continue offering these handouts, he's right: the writers have to learn to say no. It's ultimately on them.)

And for the record, I've had lunches on promoters (and tried to disclose as much whenever necessary). At a dinner some years back, I insisted on paying but had the check snatched from my hand by a drunk promotional outfit person (it's a good story for another time).

I've taken lots of freebies -- I love the Moleskine notebook the World Boxing Super Series handed out.

But obviously, as in the case of declaring items at customs, there are certain lines drawn and accepted. Some things can be taken if declared. And some things can't be brought into a country period.

What I know for sure is that only a few types of people would proactively pronounce their smarminess -- an evil, irrational dude, a dummy, and a prince. I dunno Eddie well, but I'm gonna say he's the third -- the guy who always got by. Or in his own words: "I grew up thinking I was a hard nut, and in Brentwood School I was."
____________________

I've no personal animus. But right now, I'm tired of people doing bad things and conceding as much without repercussion. That's Trumpian, and it's time for my very modest bi-annual rebellion.

Staying with Eddie:

His senior partner -- DAZN and Matchroom being basically a merged company right now -- and no, Eddie never disclosed ownership stakes in anything -- is Len Blavatnik, a notorious oligarch whose wealth stems from the privatization of Soviet public companies and also the plundering of Kazakhstan's money (literally).

Len Blavatnik and his brother, Alex, both have opened off-shore firms (where they've likely stored some not-so-allowed items, but I can't say that for sure, of course). Len opened a firm in the Cayman Islands and Alex chose the Bahamas.

​But here's the fun part of digging into even the richest and most powerful dudes: they're still human to a hilarious fault. 

The Cayman firm Len opened 21 years ago (he has since closed it) was named "ZZZ-El Porteño." I still can't tell you what the sleeping Z's were about, but "porteño" means a man from Buenos Aires -- its usage apt because one of Len's Cayman partners, real estate developer Alan Faena, does indeed hail from Buenos Aires.

Also, Faena insists on wearing white nearly always. It's pretty amazing.

I never want to hear after the death of a fighter that such sacrifice is what makes the endeavor incomprehensible to non-boxer commentators. That those who've never entered the ring can't properly contextualize and understand what goes down within.

Not just because if you study enough tape of anything, you can begin to see how it works on a mechanical level --  or 'cause if you spend enough time among other humans, their loves and losses become your own.

Not just because trauma is merely an epicenter -- its outer rings also subject to seismic tumult, even if it's somehow delayed or mediated by distance.

Not just because far too many non-fighters risk everything daily by profession. Or because every grouping of people worldwide is involved in combat -- intramural if not inter. Conducted by air if not by sea or ground. By drone joystick if not by fist or kick. 

We are pitiful beasts -- compelled by primal biology to propagate the species, convinced by causes legitimate and lawless, innate and invented, propagation is a zero-sum game. We are all enrolled without  consent in the hunger games. 

(And those are the ones among us with a measure of control; those with broken brains and bodies, imprisoned or enslaved by peer or pain, whose aim isn't to conquer but just to survive, we're fucking out here, too.)

But that's not the main reason I bristle at the notion of fighters being analysts apart by virtue of their possible fatality. And neither is it because it disqualifies me as a boxing writer -- or my many spectator-scribe superiors, whose thoughtful work has artistic value no matter its subject matter. And on that point:
 
Will some British publisher please revive the corpus of sports reporter Denzil Batchelor? He was born in Bombay, attended Oxford, died in the summer of '69 -- 50 years ago -- and unless I'm mistaken, no one has said a word about him ever since or on this anniversary occasion; I myself have seen his boxing writing only in two musty library books -- one borrowed, the other bought for a couple dollars on eBay after it was taken out of circulation, which, like the absence of the Ancient Greeks in the Dark Ages, is  civilization's loss. 

That forgetting of a person's words -- that's a writer's second death. And its tragedy isn't that the deceased feels any pain -- it's that the living doesn't know it should. 

And that's the crux of this moment, October 2019, in a week following a nationally-televised death-by-knockout of a smiley 27-year-old from Long Island.

Let's be ruthlessly adult here. Patrick Day was out cold from the punch and probably did not feel the canvas collision that proved his end. That doesn't mean any part of the process was merciful -- mercy is a concept too lofty for me to understand or invoke in this context. I've no notions of when a soul comes and when it goes. 

But it does mean we are all witness now to the second death -- not what befell a kid but what a world looks like without his presence. There's nothing unusual in that -- eulogies and obits pull anecdotes from the deceased's life precisely to fill in, however temporarily, that gap. The sincere ones, anyway (not the the ones whose schmaltz was made to order years earlier, by editors, in the event Politician A should go).

Or maybe I'm just a romantic loser who cries at the end "The Pillowman" because -- spoiler alert -- for odd and inexplicable reasons, though they eliminate the writer,  one man ultimately decides not to do the same to his work (that is the best play ever written, not incidentally, and if its last moment should ever not make me cry, please mourn the loss of my own identity -- long after boxing and film and memories of love leave this ever-more-fragmented brain, a simple joy in the survival of the word will remain -- being so essential to me now, it had better).
__________________

I sent an email to Lou DiBella, the promoter of Patrick Day, and a man whose anguish I would fractionally take on, urging others to do the same, if grief and undue feelings of guilt could be so cleanly divvied and managed via sharing, at 5:41 am on May 11, 2017.

It was a simple request: Patrick Day had just served as middleweight Ryota Murata's sparring partner in Japan, I was profiling Murata, a 2012 Olympic Gold Medalist, so I wanted to interview Day about his experience.  I about to take off to Tokyo myself.

Lou didn't get back to me that morning, so far as I can tell from my inbox (I'm no good at digital forensics, I could be missing it).  So I wound up interviewing the other NY kid sent to Tokyo to give Murata work -- Steve Martinez of The Bronx -- and originally, Puerto Rico -- who only a year earlier had lost a controversial majority decision to former US Olympian (and PBC player) Terrell Gausha.

I spoke to Steve Martinez on the phone for 33 minutes.

Martinez was a super-welterweight, like Day, and I found it intriguing from the jump that Murata's handlers were spoon-feeding him smaller guys in prep for a middleweight secondary-title bout  (yes, boxers often spar opponents of varying sizes, but keep in mind that Teiken Promotions had to fly out and then house this pair of 154-pounders for three and a half weeks, in a country sorely lacking in opposition at 160; wouldn't you want at least one true middleweight in that circumstance?).

"Once they sprung Japan up and Murata, I had to jump on it," Martinez told me of the offer. "I had never been outside the United States or the Caribbean...Once they said, You're sparring with a gold medalist, I said, Yeah, I definitely gotta get this. This is a big experience as a tourist and as a boxer."

"I'm about to go," I said.

"This your first time?" he said.

"Yeah."

He giggled.

"You're gonna love it, man."​

He told me Tokyo was so clean, people were so respectful, so kind. Akihiko Honda, the famed head of Teiken Promotions, had paid for Steve and Patrick to go on a 10-hour site-seeing bus tour one Sunday during their stay.

"It was just amazing," Martinez told me. He compared Shibuya to Times Square. He gave me advice on how to use the subway ("use Google Maps" -- best tip I received the whole trip). 

"And I do not recommend you use cabs -- out there, they expensive, man. They come up quick."

There's nothing so reassuring as being briefed by someone who recognizes your unspoken NY tendency and addresses it straight on. The subway stops running after 12:30 am, and don't be caught thinking you can just hail a cab.  

I asked him what he  liked best on that long-ass bus tour.

The Buddhist temples, the Shinto Shrines, the religion, philosophy.

Martinez told me that people who could speak English would stop him (presumably Pat, too) having seen his photo in newspaper and Web site shots of Murata training. "You're Murata's sparring partner!" One shop let Martinez take a free drink everyday (I hope it was Pocari Sweat, Japan's answer to Gatorade, but I didn't ask at the time).

Martinez told me about the small shops he liked to eat in not far from the Teiken Gym, about a boat Honda arranged for him and Pat to take, in Tokyo Bay, from which they could see the Tokyo Tower, the Skytree, the whole glittering arrangement.

It's odd, uncanny that I'm going back to Japan now. But maybe the timing is also kinda...right? I leave in two weeks. The original plan, which remains in place, so far as this freelancer's Vice editor knows, was to profile Naoya Inoue, the bantamweight sensation with bricks for hands and handsome bangs.

And my gosh, I have more material than anyone will ever publish. Lately, I've been reading his views pertaining to business, as you can see from the adjacent photo of May's "CompanyTank" magazine. And there's a lot more where that came from (for all the sarcasm, it's genuinely comforting to see a culture value print publications still).

I've been brushing up my rusty, 下手 Japanese. Been watching a soapy workplace comedy crudely called "Pretty Proofreader" on English apps (it's actually about a damn smart copy editor at a publishing house who aspires to be a kind of Anna Wintour,  and I love it).