Jules Verne

In 1989, a great-grandson of Jules Verne opened a family safe assumed to be empty and found a manuscript in the novelist’s own hand: Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, describing a 1960 Paris of gas-powered cars, document-sending machines, and triumphant finance, where a young poet starves amid the abundance. Verne’s publisher had rejected it as an unbelievable prophecy; published at last in 1994, it became a bestseller. That is the Verne story in miniature — the world’s most famous “prophet of the future” was a darker and stranger writer than the one his own publisher allowed into print.

Born in 1828 in the port of Nantes, the eldest son of a lawyer who expected him to inherit the practice, Verne chose the theater instead, lost his allowance, and spent a lean decade in Paris writing failed plays, working as a stockbroker, and filling notecards at the Bibliothèque nationale. In 1862 he brought a balloon-adventure manuscript to the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and Five Weeks in a Balloon made him famous at thirty-four. Hetzel’s contracts demanded volumes a year for flat fees; the bargain produced the Voyages extraordinaires — Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas — and a publisher who softened his politics and brightened his endings for the family market. When Around the World in Eighty Days ran as a newspaper serial in 1872, readers laid wagers on whether Phileas Fogg would make it home in time.

The machine broke in 1886: his mentally ill nephew shot him at his own doorstep, laming him for life, and Hetzel died eight days later. The books darkened, and the Académie française never gave the most-read French writer alive a seat — the great regret, he said, of his life. He died in Amiens in 1905, a city councilman with a drawer full of manuscripts.

Victorian translators had cut his novels by a quarter and filed him with children’s books; his son rewrote the posthumous ones. It took most of a century — French critics, honest retranslations, and one opened safe — to recover the real Verne: not a prophet, by his own insistence, but the nineteenth century’s most exacting reader of where its machines were taking it.