Jules Verne

The Manuscript in the Safe

In 1989, a great-grandson of Jules Verne took a locksmith to a family safe that was assumed to hold nothing worth the trouble of opening. Inside was a handwritten manuscript, brittle at the edges, in the novelist’s own cramped hand: Paris au XXe siècle — Paris in the Twentieth Century. It described the Paris of 1960: a city of gas-powered cars and elevated trains, of machines that send documents over wires and calculating engines in every bank, of electric lights drowning the boulevards, ruled entirely by finance and engineering. In it, a young man who loves poetry cannot find a reason to exist, and dies in the snow.

Verne wrote it in 1863, at the very start of his career. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel — the man who had just made him famous and would manage him for the rest of his life — refused it flatly. No one, Hetzel told him in substance, would believe such a prophecy, and no one would enjoy it. Verne put the manuscript away, and it stayed away for a hundred and thirty years. When it was finally published in 1994, it became a bestseller in France — partly as a curiosity, partly because its guesses had aged so uncannily well.

The episode is the Verne story in miniature. The world remembers him as the smiling prophet of submarines and moonshots, the most translated novelist on Earth after Agatha Christie. But the actual man was stranger: a failed playwright who invented a new kind of novel in partnership with a publisher who was also his censor, a global celebrity whom the literary establishment of his own country refused to seat, and a writer whose darkest imaginings — about machines, money, and the people crushed between them — were edited out of his public image, sometimes literally locked in a safe.

The Boy on the Quays

Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, the old Atlantic port on the Loire, the eldest of five children. His father, Pierre, was a lawyer who assumed his firstborn would inherit the practice; his mother, Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe, came from a family of Nantes shipowners and navigators. The family home stood on the Île Feydeau, a wedge of eighteenth-century merchants’ houses in the river. From its windows a boy could watch three-masted ships warp down the quays toward the sea, carrying names of places he had only seen in atlases.

Family legend — and it is legend — says that at eleven Jules ran off as a cabin boy on a ship called the Coralie, bound for the Indies to fetch a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline, and that his father caught him at the first stop downriver and extracted the famous promise to travel “only in his imagination.” The tale comes from a worshipful 1928 biography by his niece, and modern biographers have shown it to be embellished at best, invented at worst. What is documented is duller and more suggestive: a comfortable provincial boyhood, a Jesuit-inflected education, a real and unreturned adolescent devotion to Caroline — who married an older man in 1847, a wound he nursed for years — and a head permanently turned toward the harbor.

That same year his father sent him to Paris to study law, and for a while Jules obeyed. He passed his examinations; he also discovered the theater. Through family connections he found his way into the salons around Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, whose son became a friend. In 1850, Dumas’s own theater staged the twenty-two-year-old’s one-act comedy Les Pailles rompues. When Pierre Verne finally understood that his son intended literature rather than law and cut off his allowance, Jules stayed anyway. He took a nearly unpaid post as secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique from 1852 to 1854, wrote librettos and comedies that went mostly nowhere, and sold a few adventure stories to a family magazine — including tales of a balloon flight gone wrong and a winter locked in Arctic ice, the seeds of everything to come.

The lean decade ended in bourgeois compromise. In 1857 he married Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two young daughters, and bought into a stockbroker’s practice at the Paris Bourse to support the household. But the compromise had a secret clause: he rose before dawn to write, and spent his free hours in the Bibliothèque nationale, filling notecards with geography, geology, astronomy, and engineering. He was not researching any particular book. He was researching all of them.

Two Volumes a Year, Forever

In September 1862, a mutual acquaintance sent Verne to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, an idealistic republican publisher who had returned from political exile with a plan to educate the French middle-class family through beautiful books. Verne arrived with a manuscript about three Englishmen crossing Africa by balloon. Hetzel saw at once what it was: adventure wired to real geography, fiction that taught while it raced. Cinq semaines en ballon — Five Weeks in a Balloon — appeared on January 31, 1863, and was an international success almost immediately. Verne, thirty-four years old, quit the Bourse.

Hetzel signed him to the first of a series of long-term contracts that would bind him for the rest of both their lives: multiple volumes a year, delivered like clockwork, for flat fees that transferred most of the upside of a global phenomenon to the publishing house. In 1864 Hetzel launched a family magazine, the Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, and gave Verne’s project its banner and its mission: the Voyages extraordinaires, intended — in Hetzel’s words — “to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science, and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format, the history of the universe.”

What followed was one of the great sustained bursts in the history of popular fiction. Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, with its three-man crew fired toward the Moon from a giant cannon in Florida. The Arctic obsession of Captain Hatteras; the globe-spanning search of In Search of the Castaways; then, serially across 1869–70, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, in which the mysterious Captain Nemo carries a captive professor through the world’s oceans in the electric submarine Nautilus. In 1867 Verne crossed the Atlantic — his only such crossing — on the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, and saw New York and Niagara; the trip became a novel too.

The method behind the marvels was industrial in its discipline. Verne wrote from five in the morning, drafted and redrafted, and mined newspapers, journals, and patents into a card index that he told an interviewer had grown to some twenty-five thousand notes. His fantasies were extrapolations with bibliographies: the French navy had launched an experimental submarine, the Plongeur, in 1863, and Nemo’s Nautilus was its dream upgrade. His friend Nadar, the photographer and balloon fanatic, campaigned loudly for heavier-than-air flight; Verne put him in the Moon novels barely disguised, as the daredevil Michel Ardan — an anagram of Nadar.

The purest demonstration that Verne was writing about the present, not the future, was Around the World in Eighty Days. It contains no invention at all: the Suez Canal had opened in 1869, the American transcontinental railroad the same year, the last link of India’s railways shortly after. Verne simply read the timetables and saw that the planet had quietly become a machine a passenger could ride. When the novel ran as a serial in Le Temps at the end of 1872, readers treated Phileas Fogg’s itinerary as live news; wagers were laid on whether he would make it home in time. The stage version that followed ran for decades and — together with its sibling adaptations — made Verne richer than the novels themselves ever did. He bought a sailing boat, then a bigger one, then a steam yacht, and cruised from the Baltic to the Mediterranean; he settled in Amiens, his wife’s orderly hometown, a compromise between Paris and the sea.

Hetzel remained partner, father figure, and filter. He made Verne rewrite endings, brighten tones, and blunt politics. Nemo had been conceived as a Polish exile avenging Russian atrocities; Hetzel, with an eye on diplomacy and markets, forbade it, and the captain’s nationality stayed a mystery until The Mysterious Island recast him as an Indian prince who had fought British rule in 1857. The dark manuscript of 1863 stayed in its drawer. The public Verne — sunlit, wholesome, safe for children — was in large part Hetzel’s invention. It sold magnificently, and it was a cage.

Eight Days in March

The optimistic machine broke in 1886. Verne was fifty-eight. In February, pressed for money — his son Michel’s debts and failed ventures had bled him for years — he sold his beloved steam yacht Saint-Michel III. On March 9, as he reached his own doorstep in Amiens, his twenty-six-year-old nephew Gaston — his brother Paul’s son, a favorite — drew a pistol and fired twice. The second bullet lodged in Verne’s left leg and never came properly out; he limped for the rest of his life. Gaston, who appears to have suffered from paranoid delusions, spent the rest of his life in asylums; the family and the authorities hushed the affair, and no reliable account of his motive exists. Eight days later, before Verne could even absorb the first blow, Hetzel died. Within a year his mother was dead too. He never sailed again.

Biographers conventionally split Verne’s career at this point, into the optimist before and the pessimist after, and though the split is too neat — the man who wrote the 1863 dystopia had never really been an optimist — the late books do darken. Robur the Conqueror and its sequel Master of the World trace an aviation genius’s slide into megalomania. Propeller Island floats a billionaires’ paradise that tears itself apart. Facing the Flag imagines an inventor auctioning a superweapon to the highest bidder — and drew a libel suit from a real French chemist who recognized himself; Verne, defended by a young lawyer named Raymond Poincaré, future president of France, was acquitted.

The wounded celebrity meanwhile became, of all things, a municipal politician. Elected to the Amiens city council in 1888 on a Republican list — to the surprise of his conservative Catholic family — he served for the rest of his active life, sitting through committee meetings on schools, fairs, and drains, and championing the city’s grand circus, opened in 1889. It was the least extraordinary voyage imaginable, and he seems to have taken it completely seriously.

One honor never came. The Académie française, which had crowned the Voyages extraordinaires with a prize in 1872, never elected him to a seat, and the French literary world filed him under commerce rather than art. “The great regret of my life,” he told the English journalist Marie Belloc in 1895, “is that I have never taken a place in French literature.” He kept writing through diabetes and dimming eyesight — the contract, and the habit, outlived every grief — and died at home in Amiens on March 24, 1905, at seventy-seven, leaving a drawer of finished and half-finished manuscripts. On his tomb, two years later, a sculptor set a bronze of Verne bursting out of the grave, arm flung toward the sky. It is titled Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth, and it has become one of the most photographed graves in France.

Lost in Translation

What happened to Verne after death is a story in itself, and for decades it was a story of distortion. His son Michel published the leftover manuscripts — and quietly rewrote them, adding chapters, characters, and in places whole plots; scholars only disentangled Jules from Michel in the 1980s, when the original texts were finally printed. Worse had already happened in English. The Victorian translators who fed the anglophone market cut the novels by as much as a quarter, mangled the arithmetic, renamed characters, and censored passages that offended British or American readers. The standard English Twenty Thousand Leagues lost nearly a fourth of its text and turned measurements into nonsense. On the strength of these mutilations, the English-speaking world concluded that Verne was a clumsy writer of boys’ adventure stories, and for most of a century shelved him accordingly.

His rehabilitation came in two waves. In postwar France, critics and philosophers — Roland Barthes, Michel Butor, Michel Serres among them — began reading the Voyages as a serious, strange, obsessive body of work, a mythology of the machine age. And from the 1960s onward, a small band of scholar-translators in the English world — Walter James Miller, then William Butcher, Arthur B. Evans, and others — retranslated the major novels honestly, restoring the engineer’s precision and the darkness the Victorians had cut. The UNESCO index of world translation came to rank him the second-most-translated author on the planet, ahead of Shakespeare. The first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954, was christened Nautilus; astronauts and rocket engineers cited him by name; an entire genre — he called his books “novels of science,” a generation before “science fiction” existed — claimed him as a founder.

The claim he would have disputed is the one most often made for him: prophecy. He insisted he invented nothing, and he was largely right — he read harder than anyone else, and extrapolated from what the nineteenth century already contained. The real prediction was the one nobody was allowed to read: the 1863 Paris of screens, wires, traffic, and triumphant finance, where the arts starve amid abundance. His publisher judged it unbelievable. It sat in the safe while the world caught up to it, and when it finally emerged, the prophet of wonders turned out to have been, all along, a clear-eyed witness of where the wonders were taking us.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Jules Verne” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Verne)
2. Arthur B. Evans, “Jules Verne’s English Translations,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 32 (March 2005) (https://julesverne.ca/jv.gilead.org.il/evans/VerneTrans(article).html)
3. William Butcher, Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006)
4. Herbert R. Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography (St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
5. Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, trans. Richard Howard (Random House, 1996) (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/183636/paris-in-the-twentieth-century-by-jules-verne/)
6. Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, including UNESCO Index Translationum data (https://jv.gilead.org.il/)