Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
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in response to some number from the Gregorian calendar, but rather by humans themselves: it would begin in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, when Jules Verne was no longer of this world. By a curious coincidence, the publishing firm of Hetzel, lifelong publisher of Verne’s novels, closed its doors just one month before the declaration of war that abruptly ended the era known euphemistically as la Belle Époque.
In 1899, Verne’s literary career had already spanned thirty-six years. Every year since 1863, with a punctuality that no political or familial calamity had ever interrupted, Verne published two or three volumes in his Extraordinary Voyages series. Travel Scholarships was number 52 on its publication in 1903. What a career! A reader who might have read Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863, Cinq semaines en ballon) at age twenty and who obtained each subsequent book by his favorite author would be sixty when reading Travel Scholarships. This hypothetical reader would be seventy-six when the last official Extraordinary Voyage finally appeared in 1919, revised (or rather, entirely rewritten) by Verne’s son Michel.4
It is necessary to take into account the vast temporal scope of Verne’s career to understand and accept the fact that, in 1899, he was no longer at his peak. Other authors—French, English, American, German, and Italian—had appropriated the concept of his “scientific novel” and were developing its speculative possibilities much more radically than Verne had ever dared to do, in such works as Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century (1883, Le Vingtième Siècle) or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Despite nearly four decades of tireless production, Verne’s greatest successes had been in the first fifteen years of his work as a novelist. The books that continue to fascinate readers even today nearly all date from this period: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864, Voyage au centre de la Terre), the lunar novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865, De la Terre à la lune) and Around the Moon (1870, Autour de la lune), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869/70, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers), The Mysterious Island (1874/75, L’Île mystérieuse), Michael Strogoff (1876, Michel Strogoff), and several others. Since those early years, Verne had worked conscientiously and faithfully to depict in his fiction every corner of the globe and to sketch out a portrait of the Earth, similar to how his compatriot writers Honoré de Balzac in The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine) and Emile Zola in the Rougon-Macquart had sought to create a composite portrait of the societies of their time.
Certain regions, like North and South America, are notable for being featured multiple times in Verne’s oeuvre. Consider, for example, The Last Will of an Eccentric (Le Testament d’un excentrique), also published in 1899, which used the format of the “Game of the Goose” to introduce readers to the various states of the United States, substituting the main characters for the game’s playing pieces.5 On a literary level, this novel probably represents Verne’s boldest concept; but the author soon discovered that fleshing out its complicated plan was proving very difficult to accomplish (as he admitted to his publisher), and it shows in the final result, interesting though it may be.
It had already been nearly thirty years since Verne had moved from Paris to the provincial town of Amiens, located an hour and a half by express train outside the capital. In 1897, he went to Paris one final time to face a defamation suit brought against him by an inventor, which Verne won. Thereafter, Jules Verne—the great lover of travel—became sedentary. His last trip was to Rouen in September of 1900 for the marriage of his granddaughter Jane de La Rue de Francy to the lieutenant Émile Villalard (he served as a witness for the bride).6
The numerous journalists—mostly English-speaking—who made the trip to Amiens to interview Verne were (like the general public) not especially interested in his recent or current novels. They wanted to meet the “inventor of the submarine,” the father of Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg, whose eighty-day tour of the globe had become a fashionable record to beat for a dozen years or so. The aging novelist would receive them all obligingly, and he would always recount the same stories to each one, since that was what seemed to interest them.7
Jules Verne was well aware of his failing strength; his health had been quite precarious for about ten years. The wound in his foot that he had received in the attempt made on his life by his nephew Gaston in 1886 had never fully healed. After an unsuccessful operation two decades earlier, Verne was forced to limp. Already half-deaf (he congratulated himself for no longer having to listen to all the stupid things being said around him),8 his vision was declining as well. Because he was afraid to have his cataracts operated on, that particular surgery would never take place. In addition to painful rheumatisms and a perpetual “writer’s cramp,” Verne also suffered from poor digestion and other ailments, all of which he wrote about extensively in his correspondence. Fearful of falling, he rarely left his home. Although doctors had diagnosed his wife Honorine with diabetes, they were unable to recognize this same malady in Verne who, to the end of his days, would be the victim of treatments that were unsuited to his needs and useless for alleviating his physical pain. “That does not prevent me from working, and a lot,” he wrote to his publisher, Louis-Jules Hetzel,9 on March 14, 1899. “What would I do without my work? What would I become?”10
Writing, as he never ceased to affirm, was his elixir of long life. At the same time, it was a very basic necessity, since the bankruptcies of his son Michel and the financial problems of his son-in-law Georges Lefebvre had cost him a good part of his fortune. Verne remained bitter about this for the rest of his life and, as early as 1890, he had definitively decided in his will that Michel would inherit his library and manuscripts, but no money. On top of everything else, Verne had to cover the tuition fees of his three grandsons, who were being educated in an expensive boarding school chosen by their father. Verne regularly lamented in his letters that Michel simply did not understand the value of money. The difficult living that Verne had eked out as a student, playwright, and stockbroker in Paris between 1848 and 1863 had left its mark on him, and he had a very real fear of falling back into poverty. He became extremely frugal, going so far as reusing the blank space on letters he received. This also explains why the Verne household decided in 1900 to leave the big house with the tower11 and move just 500 meters away, back to the house they had inhabited from 1874–1882, which was smaller and less costly to heat.
In 1898, Verne resigned from the prestigious Geography Society of Paris, whose newsletters had constituted one of the most important and reliable sources for his novels. The following year, he decided to no longer attend—or at least to do so much less frequently—the Amiens theater, whose performances he had enjoyed three or four times a week, not just as an enthusiast of the dramatic arts, but also as a director of the city’s cultural affairs. Verne was proud to have been a city councilman in his adopted town since 1888, and it was above all in this capacity that his fellow citizens knew their “monsieur Jules.” Most were more or less indifferent to his literary standing. The latter counted more for the notable conservatives of Amiens, whereas politicians on the left regarded Verne with a distrustful eye. Despite his involvement in the city’s cultural affairs, by 1899 Verne stood out most often by his absence at official meetings. His appearances became rare. The same was true for his attendance at street exhibitions or his participation in the organization of the charity office (of which his wife Honorine was vice president) or the town’s supplementary budget for that year.12
Nonetheless, far from inactive even when ill, Jules Verne took advantage of the opportunity to speed up the process of drafting his novels. Thus, on January 6, 1899, he started The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (1901, Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin), the story of a whaling expedition in the Pacific and the Arctic that begins rather uneventfully but then ends entirely in the fantastic—and also in a fog, as would Travel Scholarships. After a month-long break, he began Travel Scholarships on May 1, which was written in two drafts in just four months (and that for a novel of two volumes!). Travel Scholarships was then followed in September of 1899 by The Golden Volcano (posthumous, 1987, Le Volcan d’or) whose two volumes kept Verne busy for an entire year. At the same time, the author corrected the proofs of his novel then being published, The Last Will of an Eccentric, and revised the text of the next one in 1900, Second