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The Science of Love and Other Writings
The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.
The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the College de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”
The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the College de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”
121 pages, Paperback
Published April 2, 2024
About the author
Charles Cros
78 books11 followersCharles Cros or Émile-Hortensius-Charles Cros (October 1, 1842 – August 9, 1888) was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne.
Cros was a well-regarded poet and humorous writer. As an inventor, he was interested in the fields of transmitting graphics by telegraph and making photographs in color, but he is perhaps best known for being the first person to conceive a method for reproducing recorded sound, an invention he named the Paleophone.
Charles Cros died in Paris at the age of 45.
Cros was a well-regarded poet and humorous writer. As an inventor, he was interested in the fields of transmitting graphics by telegraph and making photographs in color, but he is perhaps best known for being the first person to conceive a method for reproducing recorded sound, an invention he named the Paleophone.
Charles Cros died in Paris at the age of 45.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2024
Charles Cros (1842-1888) was born into a creative family that included artists and scientists, sometimes in one person, as with Cros himself. Twice he almost succeeded in gaining patents for devices he invented—one for color photography, the other for the phonograph—but, as with his poetry, despite his intelligence and talent, was unable to make a stable living at either. Some of his writings, included in The Science of Love, read like harbingers of science fiction, and it’s not always easy to tell from his writings the points about which he is serious and those he is being playful or tongue-in-cheek about—which is to say that a quality of ridiculousness pervades much of his writing, but a ridiculousness that is of a piece with his time.
In the title essay, for instance, he lets us know of his familiarity with the principles of physics, mechanics, and the scientific method (define a problem, propose a solution, refine the results and repeat). He sets out to study less the body’s physical responses to sexual stimulation than to give scientific shape to sex’s emotional counterpart, love. However, he faces the problem of his own physical lack of distinction that would make him an ideal lure to attract a woman who might be enticed to have her (and his) physiology recorded by attached scientific apparatus during coitus. The first problem Cros must address is how to make himself attractive to women:
“I want to study love, not like the Don Juans who amuse themselves without writing about it, not like the writers who mistily sentimentalize, but like serious scientists. To record the effect of heat on zinc, you take a bar of zinc and heat it in water at a temperature rigorously determined by the best thermometer possible; you measure precisely the length of the bar, its resistance, its sonority, its heat capacity, and you do the same at another temperature, no less rigorously determined.”
But he won’t be able to test the effect of heat on his own zinc bar until he can first “make myself worthy of feminine dreams.” He determines that he needs to develop two qualities to make himself worthy: Learn how to play a tune by Chopin and learn how to write acrostic poetry. Two experts in their respective fields get his skills up to speed, and he proceeds to apply them to potential women subjects. As with any scientific test, negative results accumulate until he can refine his methodology sufficiently to find a subject willing to have her body strapped to various contraptions, i.e., a potential bride named, appropriately enough, Virginie.
The first apparatus he attaches to Virginie is disguised as a cameo with a picture of himself: “The portrait contained, concealed between an ivory plaque and the enamel, two maximum and minimum thermometers” that allow him “to verify the modification in the normal temperature of an organism affected by love,” temperatures he recorded and dated during pretenses to have the cameo returned to him. The cameo is soon supplemented by a cardiograph “adroitly inserted between her tenth and eleventh rib,” which “record[s] the visceral expressions of the situation.”
As the seduction advances, they enter his bedroom whose “copper-lined walls prevented any contact with the atmosphere; and the air, first at it entered, and then as it left, was rigorously analyzed. The potassium solutions in the ball devices revealed to expert chemists, hour by hour, the quantitative presence of carbonic acid.” And so forth. Implicit in Cros’s faithful following of the scientific method is the absurdity underlying rationalization, although I’m not sure Cros is entirely aware of the ridiculousness of his assumptions.
“An Interplanetary Drama” is set in the year 2872, a time in which astronomers have developed their profession into a cause requiring celibacy. The settled order is thrown into chaos, however, the day a young, untrained male astronomer (and thus a man not yet sworn to celibacy) encounters—via telescope—a woman of “extraterrestrial beauty” (emphasis in the original)—yes, a Venus from the planet Venus. The account of their doomed love ensues.
In Cros’s universe, all entities—animate and inanimate—seek love, or at least its nearest cousin, sex, including rocks. In “The Stone Who Died of Love,” for instance, a piece of flint, whose name translates as “Alfred,” attempts to seduce a fissure in the ground, named “Augustine,” by singing an aubade “in the void redolent with magnetic oxide.” To complete the seduction, Alfred then “used the imaginary coefficients of an equation of the fourth degree.” Why? “It is known that in ethereal space one obtains in this way incomparable fugues.”
For readers both interested in science and unperturbed by the aspect of casual fugues between consenting rocks and fissures and related phenomena, The Science of Love is your book. Hats off to Doug Skinner and his relentless quest to find and translate into English unknown and little-known gems from the French humanities.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
In the title essay, for instance, he lets us know of his familiarity with the principles of physics, mechanics, and the scientific method (define a problem, propose a solution, refine the results and repeat). He sets out to study less the body’s physical responses to sexual stimulation than to give scientific shape to sex’s emotional counterpart, love. However, he faces the problem of his own physical lack of distinction that would make him an ideal lure to attract a woman who might be enticed to have her (and his) physiology recorded by attached scientific apparatus during coitus. The first problem Cros must address is how to make himself attractive to women:
“I want to study love, not like the Don Juans who amuse themselves without writing about it, not like the writers who mistily sentimentalize, but like serious scientists. To record the effect of heat on zinc, you take a bar of zinc and heat it in water at a temperature rigorously determined by the best thermometer possible; you measure precisely the length of the bar, its resistance, its sonority, its heat capacity, and you do the same at another temperature, no less rigorously determined.”
But he won’t be able to test the effect of heat on his own zinc bar until he can first “make myself worthy of feminine dreams.” He determines that he needs to develop two qualities to make himself worthy: Learn how to play a tune by Chopin and learn how to write acrostic poetry. Two experts in their respective fields get his skills up to speed, and he proceeds to apply them to potential women subjects. As with any scientific test, negative results accumulate until he can refine his methodology sufficiently to find a subject willing to have her body strapped to various contraptions, i.e., a potential bride named, appropriately enough, Virginie.
The first apparatus he attaches to Virginie is disguised as a cameo with a picture of himself: “The portrait contained, concealed between an ivory plaque and the enamel, two maximum and minimum thermometers” that allow him “to verify the modification in the normal temperature of an organism affected by love,” temperatures he recorded and dated during pretenses to have the cameo returned to him. The cameo is soon supplemented by a cardiograph “adroitly inserted between her tenth and eleventh rib,” which “record[s] the visceral expressions of the situation.”
As the seduction advances, they enter his bedroom whose “copper-lined walls prevented any contact with the atmosphere; and the air, first at it entered, and then as it left, was rigorously analyzed. The potassium solutions in the ball devices revealed to expert chemists, hour by hour, the quantitative presence of carbonic acid.” And so forth. Implicit in Cros’s faithful following of the scientific method is the absurdity underlying rationalization, although I’m not sure Cros is entirely aware of the ridiculousness of his assumptions.
“An Interplanetary Drama” is set in the year 2872, a time in which astronomers have developed their profession into a cause requiring celibacy. The settled order is thrown into chaos, however, the day a young, untrained male astronomer (and thus a man not yet sworn to celibacy) encounters—via telescope—a woman of “extraterrestrial beauty” (emphasis in the original)—yes, a Venus from the planet Venus. The account of their doomed love ensues.
In Cros’s universe, all entities—animate and inanimate—seek love, or at least its nearest cousin, sex, including rocks. In “The Stone Who Died of Love,” for instance, a piece of flint, whose name translates as “Alfred,” attempts to seduce a fissure in the ground, named “Augustine,” by singing an aubade “in the void redolent with magnetic oxide.” To complete the seduction, Alfred then “used the imaginary coefficients of an equation of the fourth degree.” Why? “It is known that in ethereal space one obtains in this way incomparable fugues.”
For readers both interested in science and unperturbed by the aspect of casual fugues between consenting rocks and fissures and related phenomena, The Science of Love is your book. Hats off to Doug Skinner and his relentless quest to find and translate into English unknown and little-known gems from the French humanities.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
September 14, 2026
A wonderful collection of short stories that at times read like pieces of nonfiction from a fantastical reality. While extremely unique they do remind one of "Flatland" by Edwin Abott or the metaphysical stories of Jorge Luis Borges
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews