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With Flowers and With WomenWith Flowers, and with Women,
With Absinthe, and with this Fire,
We can divert ourselves a while,
Act out our part in some drama.Absinthe, on a winter evening,
Lights up in green the sooty soul;
And Flowers, on the beloved,
Grow fragrant before the clear Fire.Later, kisses lose their charm
Having lasted several seasons;
And after mutual betrayals
We part one day without a tear.We burn letters and bouquets.
And fire takes our bower;
And if sad life is salvaged
Still there is Absinthe and its hiccups..The portraits are eaten by flames..
Shrivelled fingers tremble..
We die from sleeping long
With Flowers, and with Women.
Charles Cros 1842 - 1888
Charles Cros was a multi-talented man born in Fabrezan, Aude, France. A well regarded poet, a painter, a humourous writer, and Inventor, he was a frequent absinthe abuser and a regular at some of the most well known absinth cafes in Paris. He developed various improved methods of photography including an early color photo process and also invented improvements in telegraph technology.He is perhaps best known as the man who almost invented a machine which at the time promised to tweak the worlds axis. Cros shared a dream with Thomas Edison apparently independently of the great American genius at roughly the same time. In April 1877 he submitted a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Paris suggesting that the vibrations of sound waves could be traced with a pen attached to a vibrating membrane, then the waves could be engraved into metal, and then a stylus attached to a membrane could be run over the engraved wave to reproduce the sound. Before Cros had a chance to follow up on this idea or attempt to build his Paleophone, later in the same year, Thomas Alva Edison introduced his working Phonograph in the USA.
Cros was sometimes seen as eccentric by his peers and the poet Catulle Mendès wrote of him
" It had made several lucky finds, rather significant: Typhlographe, the Squaring of the azimuth and the almicantarat, the Management of the montgolfiers by a ball of gun projected of the nacelle, the Gramophone, Galactothérapie, interplanetary Correspondence by means of immense steel mirrors, the Photography of the colors, the Transfusion of the heart, five or six varieties of Sidériscopes and the Monologue."
(get a proper translation)
The great scientist Edmond Becquerel, theorist of light, gave little consideration to the scientific work of the poet, which, although it is true is sometimes quite eccentric, reveals a sharpness of mind and brilliance of character.Charles Cros died fairly young of absinthe abuse in Paris. The L'Académie Charles Cros, a prestigious French Recording Academy, is named in his honor.
