In 1871, Verlaine showed Cros the poems he had received from Arthur Rimbaud and Cros went with him to meet Rimbaud at the railway station when Verlaine invited him to Paris (although they missed him). Charles was now becoming interested in theoretical science, and submitted the outline of treatise on Mécanique cérébrale [Cerebral Mechanics] to the Académie des Sciences in May—effectively a prospectus for neuropsychology, which was handed for consideration and evaluation to Claude Bernard, the great pioneer of experimental physiology. At the same time, however, he associated himself with an avant-garde literary group centered on Rimbaud, known as the Vilains Bonhommes. He began to publish poems in La Renaissance littéraire et artistique, where he also published his first scientific romance, “Un drame interastral,” here translated as “An Interastral Drama,” in the July 6 and August 24, 1872 issues.
In July 1872, Verlaine and Rimbaud ran away together, causing a great scandal; Cros, unsurprisingly, sided with Mathilde in the ensuing long-distance quarrel, but left Paris shortly afterwards to meet up with Nina, who eventually thought it safe to return in the following April, shortly after the publication of Charles’s first poetry collection, Le Coffret de Santal [The Sandalwood Box]. He also struck up a correspondence at this time with the Comte de Chousy, who was subsequently to publish the satirical scientific romance Ignis (1883)2; it might have been Cros who introduced Chousy to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who sent him a complimentary copy of his own satirical scientific romance L’Ève future (1887).
In March 1874, Cros launched a periodical of his own, the Revue du Monde Nouveau, in collaboration with Henri Mercier; its second issue featured Cros’s second scientific romance, “La Science de l’Amour” (here translated as “The Science of Love”). Unfortunately, its third issue was its last. Cros wrote a comedy drama in the vein of Beaumarchais, “La Machine à changer le charactère des femmes” [The Machine for Changing the Character of Women], but it only saw had two performances, both enacted privately at Nina’s salon; Villiers served as his co-star. He also wrote another play in collaboration with Nina, “Le Moine bleu” [The Blue Monk], which suffered the same fate. In 1876, Cros and Nina were both blackballed from the third Parnasse contemporain showcase by Anatole France—never a man to forgive and forget—but that setback was countered by the success of a series of monologues that Cros wrote for the actor Ernest Coquelin, more familiarly known as Coquelin cadet [the younger]. The first and most famous was “L’Hareng saur” [The Salted Herring], in honor of which Nina decorated her salon with salted herrings hung from the ceiling. There were, however, more disappointments to come.
In March 1877, Cros found a financial backer for his work on color photography in the Duc de Chaulnes, and also began work on a device he called the paléophone; he sent a sealed description of the latter device to the Académie in April, and built a prototype, but the Duc would not provide funds to develop it. Eight months later, Thomas Edison applied for a French patent on a near-identical device called the phonograph, and it was granted.
Cros’s monologues continued to be successfully performed, but Coquelin cadet pocketed the money they earned him, only paying Cros a small flat fee for each one. In 1878, Cros married Mary Hjardermaal; their son Guy-Charles was born the following year, during which he published a second, much-expanded edition of Le Coffret de Santal. He was now attempting to develop an acid-free battery without metal electrodes, and published the early chapters of his Principes de Mécanique cérébrale in Synthèse Médicale, a journal edited by his brother Antoine, but the journal folded with the text incomplete, and it is doubtful that he ever wrote any more.
While continuing his increasingly desperate quest to make a living as an inventor, Cros jointed Emile Goudeau’s literary club, the Hydropathes, through which he met and became friends with Alphonse Allais. The club became too popular for its own good and its meetings became unmanageable; it was suspended in 1880, when its journal, L’Hydropathe, was revamped as Tout-Paris; the latter only lasted five issues, but one of them included Charles’s third scientific romance, “Le Journal de l’Avenir” (a later version of which is here translated as “A Newspaper of the Future”).
Cros continued his work on color photography in collaboration with an engineer named Jules Carpentier, but could not devise a marketable method. At the end of 1881, however, Rodolphe Salis founded a café called Le Chat Noir, with the ambition of making it Paris’s leading literary café and Cros became one of its earliest regulars, along with other Hydropathes—Salis had requested Goudeau to revive the club with Le Chat Noir as its base. It was there that Cros’s friendship with Allais matured, Villiers having fallen on hard times, and Nina de Villard’s salon being defunct. Cros missed the “double act” that he and Villiers had put on chez Nina, and started a new one with Allais; Gabriel Astruc’s Le Pavillon des fantômes (1929) recalls Cros and Allais exchanging “des passes d’armes contradictoires où la fantaisie se mêlait au document. Tous deux fabriquaient du Jules Verne ou du Robida avec une profusion et un cachet d’authenticité stupéfiants” [argumentative duels in which fantasy mingled with the documentary. Both fabricated work in the manner of Jules Verne of Robida with an amazing profusion and stamp of authenticity].
It is possible that Cros’s finest work in the field of scientific romance was done, and essentially frittered away, in these performance pieces—but it seems probable that some of the humorous scientific and pseudoscientific speculations that Allais subsequently put into the squibs he wrote for various humorous papers originated from these flights of fancy. Unfortunately, the pieces in question were randomly scattered through Allais’ various collections, obscuring the extent of his contribution to the rich tradition of French satirical scientific romance. Several of the other writers who hung out at the Chat Noir also went on to write scientific romance, including Edmond Haraucourt, Henri Rivière and Charles Laumann (who signed himself E. M. Laumann).
Cros, however, made little or no further attempt to publish any literary work connected to his scientific endeavors. His principal literary effort in the context of Le Chat Noir was the founding of a group he called the Zutistes (a calculated echo of Rimbaud) in 1883. It went nowhere, but the eventual publication of the contents of a manuscript intended to be its showcase, L’Album Zutique, gave it a certain belated notoriety. He did do some published work in collaboration with Allais, including a series of “contes sens dessus dessous” (upside-down tales) issued under the pseudonym Carlemyll, for the periodical Gil Blas, but it only included two works of marginal speculative relevance before being cut short.
Cros was not initially involved in the editorship of the café’s journal, Le Chat Noir, founded in 1882, but he did take a hand in it after April 1883. He subsequently involved himself with Le Scapin and La Décadence, both founded in 1885, but he was in poor health by then—presumably due to the heavy drinking he had begun in Nina de Villard’s salon and continued in Le Chat Noir—and both aspects of his languishing career suffered from his increasing incapacity. In 1884, Joris-Karl Huysmans published his “Decadent handbook” À rebours, in which he included a remarkably harsh criticism of Cros, with specific reference to “La Science de l’Amour”—a view not shared by all the champions of the Decadent Movement, given that Rémy de Gourmont described the same story as a “masterpiece” in 1891. There was, however, no mention at all of Cros in the second foundation-stone of the Decadent Movement, Verlaine’s non-fictional account of Poètes maudits. Perhaps the omission was coincidental, given that the book was a hastily-compiled collection of essays, but Verlaine probably had not forgotten that Cros had sided with his wife when his marriage had disintegrated.
It might have been the sting of Huysmans’ dismissal that led Cros to reprint “La Science de l’Amour” in Le Chat Noir in October-November 1885, but it is significant that he followed it up with a revised version of “Le Journal de l’Avenir” in March 1886—in which, as can be seen in the translation included here, the journal in question becomes a 1986 issu
e of Le Chat Noir rather than a 1980 issue of Tout-Paris—and a new (albeit very brief) scientific romance of sorts, “Le Caillou mort d’amour” (here translated as “The Pebble that Died of Love”) in the very next issue. He added a reprint of “Un drame interastral” to the series in August. Le Chat Noir thus featured all of Cros’s scientific romances within the space of a year—a sequence that might have formed a basis to the continuation of a series and the birth of a genre if Cros had not been so prematurely weary and seriously ill by then. He accomplished little more before dying, a broken man, on August 9, 1888, leaving his family nothing but debts.
“An Interastral Drama” is, inevitably, primitive by modern standards, but its interest is not confined to its anticipation of developments in media, or its blithe assumption that space travel will never become practicable. Its greatest fascination lies in what it refuses to say, most conspicuously about the particular charms of Venusian women (which obviously exceed those of Earthly women, in the eyes of Earthly men) and other “Mysteries of the Cupola,” but also about the other speculative elements contained in the story, all of which are deliberately consigned to a vagueness aptly symbolized by the moving images of the hero’s inamorata, lovingly reproduced in swirling smoke.
“The Science of Love” is far more modest in its speculative content than “An Interastral Drama,” but equally interesting by virtue of its cruel satirical account of a scientific mind at work. “A Newspaper of the Future” is of little literary interest, its parodic verses having lost any impact they once had as their targets have become less familiar, but its lurid account of the technology supporting the “reporters” of the future and distributing their wares is a fine phantasmagoria of phonographic extrapolations. “The Pebble that Died of Love” is a euphemistic allegory, which only employs a lunar setting and anthropological jargon in the cause of scurrilous parallelism, but it deserves attention nevertheless as a work sui generis.
The calculated vagueness and ostentatious understatement deployed in Cros’s scientific romances is also reproduced, more flamboyantly, in the “upside-down tales” he wrote in collaboration with Alphonse Allais, and echoes of it can be seen in Allais’ own relevant work, one sample of which is reproduced in The Germans on Venus, and more of which will hopefully be showcased in a future anthology in the series. Allais, however, tended to be a much more down-to-earth writer, and the speculative fiction of Allais’ most loyal disciples (insofar as their humorous writing was concerned), Gabriel de Lautrec and Paul Vibert, also fails to reproduce the strange surrealism of Cros’. There are, however, hints of the same scrupulous peculiarity in the work of two more famous writers who readily admitted Allais’ influence, Alfred Jarry and Gaston de Pawlowski.3
Cros was not without influence on subsequent French writers of scientific romance in other regards than the stylistic. His proposals for interplanetary communication were not only echoed by Flammarion in subsequent works but were put to far more robust use by Flammarion’s most fervent disciple, Henry de Graffigny, in the Aventures Extraordinarire d’un savant russe (1888-96),4 which he wrote with Georges le Faure, and by Gustave Le Rouge—who was part of Paul Verlaine’s entourage before taking up a career as a feuilletonist—in Le Prisonnier de la planète Mars (1908) and La Guerre des vampires (1909).5
“Charles Epheyre” was the pseudonym used on most of his literary work by Charles Robert Richet (1850-1935), a physiologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1913 for his work on anaphylaxis. He was the son of the Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Paris, and set out to follow in his father’s footsteps, although he also pursued his literary interests while he was a student in Paris, and continued to do so thereafter. His career was interrupted at its inception by the Franco-Prussian War, when he did military service at Les Invalides and also as an ambulance-driver—like his father, he was a pacifist. When he resumed his medical studies, he developed a strong interest in abnormal psychology while he did a stint as an intern in a ward of “hysterical” patients who were being experimentally treated by hypnosis. That same interest also extended to a keen fascination with what would now be called “parapsychology,” his initial skepticism being eroded by witnessing the performances of various spiritualist mediums, including Eusapia Palladino. Like Camille Flammarion, at whose salon Palladino performed, Richet was able to combine his career as a scientist with that of a “psychic researcher,” and was eventually elected President of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1905.
Richet’s earliest literary endeavors were conducted in collaboration with a college friend, Paul Fournier, and the pseudonym they adopted was a combination of the initial letters of their surnames, although Richet continued to use it for solo work long afterwards. The only book that can really be reckoned a collaboration is Poésies (1873), although Fournier might have had a hand in some of the short stories subsequently published under the pseudonym. Charles Epheyre’s principal outlet during the 1880s was the Revue Politique et Littéraire, which subsequently became the Revue Bleue; it was there that both “Le Mirosaurus” (here translated as “The Mirosaurus”) and “Le Microbe du Professeur Bakermann” (here translated as “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe”) first appeared, in 1885 and 1890 respectively, before being reprinted in La Science Illustrée as romans scientifiques. Epheyre’s other contributions to the periodical were various as well as numerous, including the satirical psychiatric case-study “Le pensionnaire de M. Lolo” [Monsieur Lolo’s Patient”] and “Bonne et mauvaise étoile” [A Lucky and Unlucky Star], a fantasy in the style of the Arabian Nights (both 1883). Richet’s pseudonymous production was not immediately inhibited by his appointment as Professor of Physiology at the Collège de France in 1887, but did begin to dwindle away gradually thereafter.
Epheyre’s first book was À la recherché du Bonheur [In Search of Happiness] (1879). His most interesting novel, in the context of imaginative fiction, was Possession (1887), subtitled a roman occultiste. His most famous and successful work, “Soeur Marthe” [Sister Marthe], a classic early study of multiple personality, appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1889, before being reprinted in a book of the same title the following year and adapted for the stage—in collaboration with Octave Houdaille, with music by Frédéric Le Rey—in 1898. Several other books appeared under the Epheyre name, including À la recherché de la gloire [In Search of Glory] (1892) and Le Douleur des autres [The Pain of Others] (1896), and at least two further plays written in collaboration with Houdaille were produced for the stage. Richet also published numerous books under his own name from the 1880s onwards, and that signature virtually monopolized his work after 1898, when he was elected to the Académie de Médecine. Almost all the books he signed with his own name were non-fiction, the principal exception being a volume of Fables (1891), but they do include an ambitious work of futurology, Dans cent ans [In A Hundred Years] (1892), whose appendices include a brief critical survey of previous literary works about the future.
Although “The Mirosaurus” is on the periphery of the genre of romans scientifiques, its speculative element being largely incidental, it an interesting story by virtue of being one of the earliest to pay satirical attention to the culture of science as a profession, an obsession and a social phenomenon. It is a surprisingly bitter cautionary tale, considering that its author had belonged since his early childhood to the Parisian scientific monde that comes in for such scathing tongue-in-cheek criticism in the story. “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe” is equally acerbic and original, the much closer resemblance of its plot to conventional speculative fiction being deftly offset by its deftly callous characterization of the psychology of scientific research.
Paul Adam (1862-1920) was a prolific writer, whose first novel was Chair molle [Soft Flesh] (1885), which had the signal honor of being prosecuted for indecency, landing him in jail for a fortnight. He began his career as a committed Naturalist, but soon moved on to embrace Symbolism; he often collaborated with Jean Moréas, one of that Movement’s lou
dest propagandists, and served as one of Jean Lorrain’s seconds when the latter was called out by Marcel Proust.
Adam never wrote a full-blown scientific romance, but he did have a habit of inserting lyrical futuristic sections into his Symbolist novels, often featuring technological innovations and always appealing for social reform. In his Encyclopédie de l’Utopie et de la Science-Fiction (1972), Pierre Versins lists and describes these brief inserts in such stories and novels as Coeur utile [Useful Heat] (1892), “Grandeur future de l’avare” [The Future Grandeur of Avarice] (in Critique de moeurs, 1893), Les coeurs nouveaux [New Hearts] (1896), Lettres de Malaisie [Letters from Malaya] (1898) and Clarisse et l’homme heureux [Clarisse and the Happy Man] (1907).
The story translated here as “A Tale of the Future,” Le Conte futur (1893), appeared as a book despite its brief length, and thus remains the most prominent of the author’s work in this vein. It is not the sort of work that might have been reprinted in Le Science Illustrée, but it does echo a Utopian element that can be found in many of the authors who did appear there, and some of those who appear in these pages; it deserves inclusion as an example of a significant vein of French futuristic fiction of the period, although it contrasts strongly with the jingoistic vein of French future war fiction in general, especially as represented by “Captain Danrit,”6 a pillar of Gautier’s La Science Française.
The author most abundantly represented in this anthology, Louis Mullem (1836-1908), was by far the least famous of them all; although he was a regular attendee of Edmond de Goncourt’s literary salon in the 1880s he was known there and elsewhere as a political journalist rather than a writer of fiction. He met the writer who then signed himself J. H. Rosny at the Grenier, but Rosny’s brief memoir of him, penned in the 1920s, reveals no awareness of the fact that he was ever a fellow writer of scientific romances. Rosny obviously never read the collection of stories assembled after Mullem’s death in 1908 by the man who introduced Mullem to the Grenier, Gustave Geffroy, despite the fact that Geffroy, as a fellow-member of the Académie Goncourt, must have been in touch with Rosny at the time of its compilation and publication. Rosny was not alone in that omission; Contes ondoyants et divers [Meandering and Various Tales] (1909), seems to have slipped into oblivion; there is no mention of the scientific romances it contains in any reference book on speculative fiction.
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