Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
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to come from another source. In Travel Scholarships Verne uses a relatively large cast of characters, which is unusual for most of his Extraordinary Voyages. There are, in fact, three groups of eleven people each, although the first of these groups is eliminated early on when the pirates murder the legitimate crew of the Alert in order to steal their ship. The third group then enters, consisting of nine high school students about to travel to the Antilles on the three-master, accompanied by their mentor, the Latinist Horatio Patterson, and later joined by the sailor Will Mitz for the return journey home. In order to lay their hands on a large sum of money that will be given to the students at the end of their excursion in Barbados, the pirates temporarily delay their deadly intentions and play the part of the murdered crew, paradoxically ensuring their passengers an exemplary voyage.
These elements of suspense, which drive and structure the story, concentrate on two questions. First, will the pirates manage to keep their real identity and sinister intentions secret, or will they be found out? Second, will the students, who suspect nothing and obviously have the reader’s sympathy, manage to escape the horrific fate planned for them? It is out of the question for a Jules Verne novel not to have a happy ending—the public could be assured of that. So the novelist’s art is to sustain readers’ doubts and feed their fears by creating situations that put the two groups’ interests in peril. That the characters’ goals are so diametrically opposed clearly constitutes a weakness of the story’s dramatic action.30
“I cannot give you a hero every year. It is impossible,”31 Verne had written to his publisher, Hetzel père, in reference to North Against South (1887, Nord contre Sud), his novel about the American Civil War then in development. This remark could apply just as well to Travel Scholarships. The two competing groups both feature individual characters who are more elaborately portrayed than the others, but none really fits the role of hero. Among the pirates, Captain Harry Markel, head of the gang, makes an impression with his sangfroid and his capacity to get his band of criminals out of risky situations. Because of his very criminality, however, he is exactly the opposite of a person who would attract the reader’s sympathy; he completely lacks the dark grandeur of a Robur or the fascinating ambiguity of a Captain Nemo.
Among the group of students, only the two French boys, Louis Clodion and Tony Renault, stand out somewhat from the ensemble; but Tony, the joker of the group, distinguishes himself more with clever words than by actions, which is insufficient for a real hero. What about Horatio Patterson, the students’ mentor? Although he is by far the best-described character—his introduction into the story is carefully prepared, he is regularly used for comical scenes, and he is responsible for the final “surprise ending” of the novel—he is nevertheless ridiculous, with his various tics and his obsession with tacking Latin quotations onto every situation, whether fitting or not. Evidently, Verne had tried to create a humorous character in the mold of his geographer Paganel in The Children of Captain Grant (1867–68, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant), but the result is not all that convincing.
The only character who could possibly lay claim to being the true hero of the story, Will Mitz, does not enter the narrative until relatively late in the novel, and he owes his heroism to several twists of fate that happen to play out in his favor. Perhaps significantly, he also stands out from the other characters because of his strong religious convictions. As in previous novels, the various threads of the story prepared since the beginning are destined to converge in the end, where Verne uses all of his narrative tools—suspense, horror, surprise, mystery, plot reversals, and finally humor—to provide his readers with a satisfying denouement.
INTERTEXTUAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS
In 1974, a European television miniseries was broadcast under the title of A Two Years’ Vacation (Deux ans de vacances).32 In fact, it drew its inspiration not only from the Verne novel of that title, published in 1888, but also from several other Verne novels, including A Captain at Fifteen (1878, Un Capitaine de quinze ans) and Travel Scholarships. The adaptation combined the characters Dick Sand and Captain Hull from A Captain at Fifteen, the “robinsonade” of the shipwrecked young boys on a remote island from A Two Years’ Vacation, and the pirate band that boards and seizes a ship from Travel Scholarships. What might seem at first glance to be an iconoclastic approach to Verne’s work actually shows to what extent many of the Extraordinary Voyages share common elements and lend themselves quite well to amalgamation, at least in a visual format. I would go further and claim that this practice, used in numerous cinematographic adaptations of Verne’s works, reflects the author’s own writing methods, as he filled his novels with intertextual allusions to his own fictional works.
Travel Scholarships is not exempt from this rule, and not only because of its many similarities to A Two Years’ Vacation. Travel Scholarships opens with the awarding of a prize, as did Paris in the Twentieth Century (Paris au XXe siècle) forty years earlier—although that novel remained unpublished until 1994—wherein the main character, the young man Michel Dufrénoy, receives an award for his Latin poetry. Latin is ubiquitous in Travel Scholarships through the students’ chaperone, Horatio Patterson, who fulfills his duties as accountant of the Antillean School with conscientious seriousness. Michel Dufrénoy tries his hand at this same profession, though he fails miserably at it. As for Patterson, he is a reincarnation of the Latin professor Naso Paraclet, who appears in the early short story The Marriage of a Marquis (Le Mariage de M. Anselme des Tilleuls, also unpublished in the author’s lifetime), for which Verne drew on his schoolboy memories.33 Other elements are typical of Verne’s later novels, such as the role of pirates (appearing in The Kip Brothers [1902, Les Frères Kip], with a very similar episode in a tavern at the beginning of the story, and in The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World [1905, Le Phare du bout du monde]) or of the presence of fog at the end (as in The Sphinx of the Ice [1897, Le Sphinx des glaces] and The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin).
In a more general way, by featuring an idealized school in its pages, Travel Scholarships alludes to the work of a fellow author and rival who was also associated with the Hetzel publishing house and who wrote under the pseudonym of André Laurie. Born Paschal Grousset (1844– 1909), he had played an important role in the Commune of Paris in 1871 and had been exiled, with ten thousand other Communards, to Nouméa in New Caledonia, from where he had managed to escape, taking refuge first in the United States and then in London. During his exile in England, which lasted from 1874 to 1881, he contacted Hetzel and sent him a number of manuscripts, including several scientific-adventure novels. With the twofold aim of helping an exile and avoiding giving Verne an undesirable competitor, Hetzel decided to have some of Grousset’s novels rewritten by Verne. From this collaboration came The Begum’s Millions (1879, Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum) and The Southern Star (1884, L’Étoile du Sud), published under the name of Jules Verne alone, as well as The Wreck of the Cynthia (1885, L’Épave du Cynthia), signed by both authors even though Verne’s contribution was limited to shortening the text, revising the style, and other minor tinkering. This arrangement was only temporary, however, and could not prevent Laurie from striking out on his own and becoming a serious competitor to Verne with a series of scientific-adventure novels that were published in the Magasin d’Education et de Récréation. When the Magasin was featuring Travel Scholarships in 1903, for example, one of Laurie’s novels, The Giant of the Sky (Le Géant de l’Azur) about a magnificent flying machine, appeared alongside. Curiously, Verne reprised the same subject the following year in Master of the World (1904, Maître du monde).
Laurie showed more originality in a series of novels also published by Hetzel in which he presented his readers with different education systems from Europe and around the world.34 In writing A Two Years’ Vacation, Verne had already made use of the first of Laurie’s works, School Life in England (1881, La Vie de collège en Angleterre). Laurie’s attitude in his books is marked by a pronounced nationalism approaching jingoism that placed the “Celtic race” above all others, though he considers other education systems relatively objectively. Although Verne only touches on the question of education in Travel Scholarships,