Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
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This would already seem to be an active schedule, but that was not all. The passing of his one-time collaborator Adolphe d’Ennery, who died at the age of eighty-seven on January 25, 1899, reinvigorated Verne’s playwriting ambitions, one of the great passions in his life. Verne’s two-and-a-half-decades-old collaboration with d’Ennery had already produced elaborate theater adaptations of Around the World in Eighty Days (1874, Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) and of Michel Strogoff (1880), both of which had been huge successes (and which, in France, would continue to be performed until 1941, filling the coffers of the novelist and his heirs). Two other plays, however, had seen only fleeting success. Between 1888 and 1890, Verne and d’Ennery had attempted to write another grand extravaganza, this time an adaptation of The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China (1879, Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine), one of the novelist’s more humorous masterpieces. D’Ennery, however, who had grown difficult in his old age, found the results unsatisfying. The pair ran afoul of each other and were unable to settle their differences and finish the play. Of the two manuscripts written by the novelist, the more recent remained unfinished in the desk of the deceased, who had done no further work on it. Far from Paris and restrained by illness, Jules Verne gave his son Michel—who became for this occasion his literary agent—the responsibility of recovering the manuscript and contacting the director of the Châtelet Theater, the biggest theater in Paris. The director seemed interested and arranged for a new collaboration to finish the play. This work occupied Verne throughout all of 1899, alongside the aforementioned novels. However, the effort was ultimately in vain, and the play would never be performed. The whereabouts of these manuscripts is still unknown today.
The seaside resort of Les Petites Dalles, circa 1899.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE NOVEL
Such were the circumstances in which Verne wrote Travel Scholarships. In his working documents, Verne himself carefully noted the dates of writing: “1st V[olume]. 1 May 99 (the 2 vol. drafts finished 18 June) manuscripts of the 2 13 August, finished 31 August.”13 It is worth noting that Verne would finish work on this novel during his last vacation, which he spent with Honorine and Michel’s family at the Petites Dalles beach resort on the Opal Coast from August 28 to September 3, 1899. Two rare photographs from this trip have survived, one showing the novelist, his family, and several friends seated on the beach with an imposing cliff behind as a backdrop.
Verne’s work ledgers and manuscripts provide evidence of his precise and regular work habits: how he always wrote a first version of his novels in pencil and then revised it directly in ink. The manuscript of Travel Scholarships14 reveals four successive stages of writing. First, after dividing the pages vertically into two equal parts, the author began by filling one section with select words or phrases in pencil, made up of key words, more or less complete sentences, or fragments of dialogue (stage 1). Next, or more likely in successive steps, he developed a first version of the text, still in pencil (stage 2, finished June 18). As the second rewriting in ink (stage 3, finished August 13) took only one half of the page, we can still read one of the two earlier versions on the opposing half, although it is rather difficult to decipher. The novel, once written, then underwent a careful revision wherein certain parts were deleted or elaborated (stage 4, finished August 31).
Jules Verne and family vacationing at Les Petites Dalles.
Reading the manuscripts for Travel Scholarships yields no sensational secrets. A search for “censored” passages or episodes, suppressed at the request of his publisher Hetzel as in some earlier novels, would be in vain. Rather, the document clearly shows the author’s desire to condense his text to its most essential elements, to do away with redundancies, to render the narration more elegant, to choose the most fitting expression, and to specify details (dates, distances, measures, etc.), as was his custom. This work also continued throughout the painstaking correction of proofs—which have not survived—between the customary publication of the three successive editions, to which I shall return.15
There are, however, three notable exceptions to this observation about the unremarkable nature of the manuscripts. One sequence in chapters 10 and 11 of the first part was deleted (probably because of its implausibility or cruelty) after appearing in the pre-original edition; the plays on words from the Latin phrase Rosam angelum letorum, a recurring joke in the second part of the novel, were only added in the proofs of 1903; and the denouement was also completely rewritten and expanded in the proofs. These deleted passages and the original version of the ending are reproduced in the Notes to the present edition.
In addition to these modifications, the manuscripts reveal several changes in the names of the protagonists: Kathleen Seymour, whose first name Verne definitively wrote as “Kethlen,” was named “Kathlen” in the manuscript. The names Will Corty and John Carpenter were used interchangeably at first, and that of the cook Wagah varied throughout the text between “Walah” and “Walha.” It was only when correcting the proofs that Verne adopted the final spelling. But these are variations of only secondary importance.
After having reviewed the first part of his novel, Verne presented it to his editor on September 28, 1902 (the eve of the death of his colleague Émile Zola):
I plan, unless otherwise directed, to send you the 1st volume of the new manuscript, Travel Scholarships, tomorrow. Its setting, as I mentioned to you, is the Lesser Antilles. We ought to take advantage of the fact that public attention is currently so keenly focused on that corner of our world. I will simply have to add a note to the chapter devoted to Martinique. Another reason influencing my selection of this novel is the current issue of whether Denmark will cede its islands in the Antilles to the United States. I have need for Danish Antilles, as my heroes are French, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.
I believe that this book will interest our young readers at the same time as it will inform them.
As for the illustrations, it will be easy for you to obtain all you might need from the photographs of the Lesser Antilles. As for myself, should I have any documents, I will be sure to send them to you.16
This letter is the only document of any importance in the correspondence between author and publisher about Travel Scholarships. The concern about current events that the author expressed to Hetzel and that informed the decision to choose this novel for publication among other finished manuscripts that had accumulated in his desk was driven by the eruption of Mount Pelé on the island of Martinique on May 8, 1902, which took 30,000 lives. In response to this catastrophe, Hetzel had already devoted a large part of issue number 179 of his Magasin d’Education et de Récréation (December 1, 1902) to Martinique, including a piece by the illustrator Léon Benett, among others.
Léon Benett (1839–1916) was by profession a civil servant and had traveled extensively in that capacity between 1861 and 1874, visiting Algeria, Cochinchina, Martinique and New Caledonia, among other locations. The sketches he made during these trips prepared him to illustrate, beginning in 1873, a large number of Verne’s novels. He especially excelled at drawing theatrically arranged landscapes. This was certainly the case for Travel Scholarships.17 The photographs that Verne mentioned in his letter were indeed added to the text,18 and these, in addition to twelve large colorized plates, demonstrate an effort on behalf of the publisher to increase the attractiveness of his author’s books after 1899. These two approaches modernized Verne’s works while also accentuating their documentary and educational aspects.
The pre-original edition of the novel was published serially in Hetzel’s Magasin d’Education et de Récréation in two issues a month from January 1 to December 15, 1903. The edition called “in-18” (in two small-format volumes with a limited number of illustrations) came out on June 2919 and on November 9, 1903,