Of verse eternal I’ve the art. And men
Are gladdened by my voice, which speaks but truth.
The supreme reason that I proudly bear
Could not be bought for all a world of gold.
All have I touched: women, apples, fire;
All have I felt: winter, spring, and summer;
All have I found, for no wall can halt me.
But tell me, Fortune, what then is thy name?
If the man who could, without exaggeration, introduce himself this way – he whose poetic works unveil a ‘morning paradise,’ and whose heart continues to form only a bouquet of lilacs from Mont Valérien – is still a long way from taking his rightful place, he no doubt owes this to his genius, which makes him fall like no other into the play of light and shadow generated by multiple spheres. Charles Cros’s fingers – like Marcel Duchamp’s, as we will soon see – are oriented by life-coloured butterflies, which also feed on the sap of flowers but which attract no sources of light other than those from the future. These fingers belong to a perpetual inventer. Ever trembling between the object and its conception, they flutter from the page on which plans accumulate, even as his verses make do with the humble materials of an unforeseen arrangement that might result in a conquest for all humanity. Charles Cros saw words themselves as ‘processes,’ which he held just as dear as the processes whose discovery and application mark the stages of scientific progress. The unity of his twin vocations – poet and scientist – comes from the fact that, for him, the goal was always to wrest from nature a part of her secret. Whence, for example, the surprising orchestration of some of his prose poems (‘On Three Aquatints by Henri Cros’), which pave the way for Rimbaud’s Illuminations; whence his feat of making the poetic engine run on empty in ‘Salt Herring.’ The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori; that he never felt, with regard to what is, an interdiction weighing over what is not (or in his eyes, what is not yet). He was the first to artificially synthesize rubies. He ‘imagined, worked out, and detailed all the specifications of the radiometer with which Sir William Crookes gauged the void and measured the imponderable, as well as of the “photophone”, that Alexander Graham Bell had dreamed of using to make light speak and to capture the sun’s echoes. He established the principle of colour photography, and it has been proven that eight and a half months before Edison’s discovery of the phonograph, he deposited at the Academy of Sciences a sealed envelope in which he described an apparatus that was nearly identical to it in every respect. Emile Gautier, who has taken particular pains to render him his due on this score, also reminds us of ‘Cros’s studies of electricity, whose “annoying slowness” and “syrupy constitution” he so humorously deplored; his musical stenographer, since realized by others under the name of the “melotrope”; his automatic telegraph, his chronometer, his dizzying project for interplanetary optical telegraphy,’ etc.
Charles Cros’s remarkable mental adventure was counterbalanced by the pitiful living conditions he had to endure. From his garret above the Chat-Noir, where he devised the literary genre called ‘interior monologue,’ his daily choice was between poverty and bohemia. Suffice it to say that humour intervenes in his writing as a by-product of that ‘profound and bitter philosophy’ that Verlaine attributed to him, without which he couldn’t have resigned himself to social reality. The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the centre of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is levelled straight at us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Le Coffret de Santal, 1874. Le Collier de griffes, 1908, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Salt Herring.
There was a big white wall – empty, empty, empty;
Against the wall there was a ladder – tall, tall, tall,
And on the ground was a salt herring – dry, dry, dry.
He comes, holding in his hands – dirty, dirty, dirty,
A heavy hammer, a huge nail – pointy, pointy, pointy,
And a ball of twiny string – fat, fat, fat.
Then he climbs up the ladder – tall, tall, tall,
And he plants the pointy nail – bang, bang, bang,
At the top of the big wall – empty, empty, empty.
He lets go of the hammer – that falls, falls, falls,
To the nail he ties the string – long, long, long,
And to the string ties the salt herring – dry, dry, dry.
He climbs back down the ladder – tall, tall, tall,
Carries it off with the hammer – heavy, heavy, heavy,
And then he goes away – far, far away.
And since then the salt herring – dry, dry, dry,
At the end of the string – long, long, long,
Slowly twists in the wind – forever, ever, ever.
So I made up this story – simple, simple, simple,
To annoy folks who are – serious, serious, serious,
And to make the little children – laugh, laugh, laugh.
– from The Sandalwood Box
* * *
Ever since I was very young, I’ve possessed a tidy fortune and a taste for Science. Not the rash kind of science that pretentiously believes it can create the world from scratch and that flutters about in the blue stratosphere of the imagination. I’ve always thought, along with a tight cohort of modern scientists, that man is but a stenographer for hard facts, a secretary of palpable nature; that truth conceived of not as a few vain universalities, but as an immense and confused mass, can be but partly approached by the scrapers, clippers, pryers, commissioners, and stockers of real, notable, undeniable facts; in a word, that one must be an ant, a mite, a rotifer, a vibrio, that one must be nothing! in order to add one’s atom to the infinity of atoms that compose the majestic pyramid of scientific truths. Observe, observe, and especially never think, or dream, or imagine: such are the splendours of the current method.
It was with these sound doctrines that I came into the world; and with my first steps a marvellous project, a true scientific godsend occurred to me.
When I studied physics, I said to myself:
People have studied weight, heat, electricity, magnetism, and light. The mechanical equivalent of these forces has been or surely will be rigorously determined. But all those who work to express these elements of future knowledge have but a paltry role to play in the world.
There are other forces that wise and patient observation must subject to the mind of the scientist. I will avoid general classifications, because I consider them dull and I don’t understand them. In short, I was led (how and why I do not know) to undertake the scientific study of love.
I am not altogether unpleasant to look at, being neither too tall nor too short, and no one has determined whether my hair is blond or brown. It’s true that my eyes are a bit too small, a bit dull, and although this gives me a stupefied look useful in scientific company, it can be a disadvantage in the outside world.
Of this world, moreover, despite so many methodical efforts, I do not have very precise knowledge, and it was a real masterpiece of sangfroid for me to pursue my austere goal without attracting undue attention.
I had told myself: I want to study love, not like a Don Juan, who enjoys himself but records nothing, or like the poets, who sentimentalize nebulously, but like a genuine scientist. To study the effect of heat on zinc, one takes a bar of zinc, heats it in water to a rigorously determined temperature using the best possible thermometer, precisely measures the bar’s length, resistance, sonority, and heat capacity, and then repeats the process at another temperature that was just as rigorously determined.
It was by an equally exacting process that I decided (a remarkable project at such a tender age – barely twenty-five) to study love. Difficult enterprise.
• • •
We exchanged portraits. Mine was a photograph on enamel, framed in gold, with a minuscule chain so that it could be worn under her clothes.
This portrait contained, hidden between an ivory casing and the enamel, two thermometers set at maxima and minima: two masterpieces of precision in such small dimensions.
Thus could I verify any variation from normal temperature in an organism affected by love.
On pretexts that were often difficult to invent, I had my portrait returned to me for a few hours each day, so that I could take down the numbers for that date and reset the thermometers.
On one evening when I had danced twice with a short brunette, I remember having noted a drop in temperature of four-tenths of a degree, followed or preceded (I had no way of knowing which phenomenon occurred first) by an increase of seven-tenths. Those are the facts.
Whatever the case, everything had been prepared. I took the following measures: I said to M. D –, ‘Property is theft’ (that’s not original, it’s not even new, but it works every time). To Mme D –, who had suffered a miscarriage that she mentioned a little too often: ‘From an economic and social standpoint, women can and should be treated as foetus-factories.’ And I hummed, to the tune of ‘Near a Cradle,’ a few lines from a song by W – called ‘Near a Lab Jar’:
… I could see him in priest’s collar white,
Fresh novice so noble and tall,
Such things he would have done outright
If he weren’t preserved in alcohol!
Then I slipped this note into Virginia’s hand:
‘I’ll explain later. Your parents and I have totally fallen out. The ideal, the dream, the prism of the impossible – that is what awaits us. One cannot live without love … There’s a carriage downstairs: come, or I’ll kill myself and you’ll be forever damned.’
And that is how I eloped with her.
The ease I had so far encountered in this project astounded me, when in the railway car I looked at the girl, so quietly raised, no doubt intended for some mediocre office clerk, and who was now following me by the grace of a series of sentimental formulas that I had not even invented and that I really could not explain.
We were heading somewhere, one might assume.
Well beforehand, I had been shrewd enough to install a delightful and methodical series of contraptions, whose aim will soon become clear.
The train trip took three hours, plenty of time for alarm, sobbing, palpitations. Fortunately, we were not alone in the compartment.
I had previously studied this situation in as many novels as I could find:
‘You … you have given up everything for me … How can I ever …’ Then, after a pause: ‘I love you! I love you! … Oh! travelling with the beloved! The horizon blushes in the evening, and in the morning dawn pearls the sky, and we are face to face after a moment’s distraction or sleep, in lands bursting with new aromas.’
I had that sentence written for me by my friend, the poet W –.
We arrived, she like a drenched bird, me thrilled by the initial success of my research. For, without letting myself be carried away by the romantic vanity of this abduction, I had during the journey, and all the while reassuring the terrified girl, adroitly applied between her tenth and eleventh ribs a long-lasting cardiograph, so exact that even the good Dr Marey, who could describe it perfectly, had refused to buy one for the sake of economy.
Then a cab came to fetch us at the station. Terror, confusion, panic on the young lady’s part. Feebly rebuffed, my kisses permitted the cardiograph to record the visceral impulses of the situation.
And in the delightful boudoir where, laying her hands over her eyes, she cursed herself for having broken so irrevocably with the demands of morality and propriety, I could happily proceed to the exact determination of the weight of her body (the moment was of crucial importance). Here’s how:
She had let herself drop onto the sofa, lost in thought. Stopping, moved and delighted at the sight of her, I pressed with my heel the button of an electric buzzer installed under the rug; in a secret compartment next door, at the other end of the seesaw whose near extremity was occupied by the sofa, Jean (my devoted and well-prepared valet) duly noted the weight of the girl when dressed.
I flew to her side and gave her every possible consolation, caresses, kisses, massages, hypnotism, etc. – all of which, given my plan of research, hardly amounted to much.
I will skip over the transitions that led me to remove her final garments, leaving them on the sofa, and to carry her into the alcove, where she promptly forgot family, propriety, and society.
During this time, Jean weighed the discarded clothing, stockings and ankle boots included, on the aforementioned sofa, so as to obtain by subtraction the net weight of the woman’s body.
Moreover, in the bedroom where, drunk with love, she abandoned herself to my fictive transports (for I had no time to waste), we were as if in a retort. The copper-lined walls prevented any interaction with the surrounding atmosphere; and the air, first at its entry, then at its exit, was strictly analysed. Hour by hour, a team of able chemists measured the potassium hydroxide solution in the bulb device to determine the quantitative presence of carbonic acid. I recall some curious numbers in this regard, but they lack the necessary precision for a reliable table, since my own, non-amorous breath was mixed in with Virginia’s truly amorous breath. Let me simply mention the carbonic excess on the tumultuous nights when passion attained its maxima of intensity and numerical expression.
Strips of litmus paper cannily distributed in the linings of her clothes revealed to me the constant and very acidic reaction of sweat. And then the following days, and then the following nights: so many numbers to record with regard to the mechanical equivalent of nervous contractions, the quantity of tears secreted, the composition of saliva, the variable hygroscopy of hair, the tension of remorseful sobs and sighs of pleasure!
The results of the osculometer are particularly curious. This instrument, of my own invention, is no larger than the device puppeteers stick in their mouths to make Punchinello talk, which we generally refer to as a squeaker. As soon as our dialogues took on a tender cast and the situation seemed opportune, I secretly (of course) set the device between my teeth.
Up until then, I had had nothing but contempt for the expression ‘a thousand kisses’ that people put at the end of love letters. These are just hyperboles that have passed into vulgar usage, I told myself, the doing of a few poets with poor taste. Well, I’m pleased to offer an experimental verification of these instinctive formulas, which many scientists before me had considered absolutely fanciful. In the space of roughly an hour and a half, my osculometer had recorded nine hundred and forty-four kisses.
The instrument in my mouth was cumbersome, and I was preoccupied with my research; besides, simulated activities never equal the real thing. Taking all that into account, you will easily see that the number nine hundred and forty-four can often be surpassed by individuals who are violently in love.
– from The Claw Necklace