Charles Cros is not just a poet and typical figure of late nineteenth-century Bohemian Paris; he is also one of the inventors of colour photography and the gramophone. This remarkable and bizarre combination of rôles gives proof of a mind concerned with the exploration of the physical, spiritual and emotional possibilities of existence (Rimbaud, too, in this period, saw himself as ‘un multiplicateur de progrès’, hoping to bring a new spirit of semi-scientific discovery into poetry). For a long time Cros's work went largely unrecognized in either field, his poetic talent being overshadowed by that of greater spirits (Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Verlaine) and his theoretical research in the sciences being overtaken by the practical discoveries of others. But in the twentieth century, partly through the enthusiasm of the Surrealists for his original bent of mind, his work has aroused considerable interest. The bulk of his poetry is contained in two collections: Le Coffret de santal (1873) and Le Collier de griffes (published posthumously in 1908).

One can distinguish in Cros's verse an absorbing mixture of sensuality and detachment, of sentiment and irony. On the one hand there is the lovepoet and the fascination which woman exerts over him, promising heady moments of intense feeling, excited senses and the swaying tight-rope of danger and death; she is the enchantress offering her varied potions of joy and frustration.