Captain Nemo

by Kevin J. Anderson

  A month later, when Verne entered the city with little spending money and an avid curiosity, he explored the alleys and byways, careful to stay clear of any danger. He saw the cluttered barricades thrown up in the streets—carts, barrels, ladders, and crates stacked on top of furniture to block the military guard. He tried to imagine the bravery, the sacrifices, the heroes and traitors. It took his breath away . . . so long as he didn’t have to be counted among the participants.

  Some nights as he lay awake, he heard gunshots in the distance. Later, he spotted white starbursts where bullets had struck the brick walls and shattered windows. He could even see the path of a cannonball down a long street, tracing the wreckage through successive balconies, balustrades, and facades. Verne stood with his hands on his narrow hips and marveled at the sight. Though others railed against the changing governments and charged off to join the continued fighting, Verne kept a low profile in Paris. It was a matter of common sense. He remained in his rooms far from the gunfire, cannon shots, or battle cries. He had no interest in seeing the excitement, did not want to place himself in danger’s path.

  His lost friend Nemo would probably have gone running in with a flag in one hand and a musket in the other, outraged at the injustice they were fighting. Verne had always admired the idea of doing the things Nemo did, but his personal safety took precedence.

  He remained on the outskirts of politics, a mere bystander, risking nothing. Outside the Paris National Assembly, he watched revolutionaries celebrating their victory in April’s elections. The shouting men wore cotton caps and raised thin sabers, no doubt stolen from fallen soldiers in the street fighting. Since February, the peasants in the militia had been allowed to carry their own weapons, and they did so with great fervor.

  At times, surrounded by turmoil and chaos, strident voices and gunshots, celebrations and parades, he longed for quiet days on the peaceful docks of Ile Feydeau. But then he would remember that Caroline was married to her sea captain, Nemo was lost at sea, and his own father wanted him to spend every hour in the dreary law offices. At least Paris was exciting, in its own way.

  To him, there was no point in going home. Verne would rather stay here to feel the excitement in the air, the thrill of liberty—a vigor that could not be matched in a provincial city like Nantes. In Paris, the world had opened up to him. He discovered the marvels of the theater and the opera. In Nantes, staged dramas had been unusual events, but in Paris Verne grew dizzy trying to keep up with the performances scheduled for every night of the week.

  Ah, if only he could afford them all! His father had given him a limited budget based upon what the country lawyer considered a fair cost of living. But the revolutions and the fighting had created extraordinary inflation in Paris, and the value of a franc had plummeted. Verne could buy barely half of what his father expected him to afford with his allowance. Meticulous Pierre Verne required his son to keep an itemized list to prove that he needed a larger monthly stipend.

  Verne worked hard in his law classes, discussed the various lecturers with his fellow students, and knew how eccentric and facetious their grading systems could be. All of his prior legal knowledge had come from a provincial practice dealing with everyday matters. Yet the professors at the Paris Academy expected him to be familiar with grand ethical arguments and obscure cases that meant nothing on Ile Feydeau.

  But Verne studied, anxious to pass, though he had no desire to become an attorney. A far worse fate, he thought, would be to fail and return home to the wrath of his father. No, he would rather face rapacious pirates or typhoons.

  Still, even when his head hurt, his eyes burned from lack of sleep, and his muscles ached from poor food and sheer weariness, Verne found time to spend in the company of stimulating intellectuals.

  For hours, he sat with musician friends and aspiring poets in bistros and sipped his coffee oh-so-slowly so as not to have to purchase another cup. They spouted verse to each other, reminding Verne of the evenings his family had challenged each other to make rhymes. He also met other writers, one of whom had even had a two-act tragedy performed in a small puppet theater, which made him a celebrity in their circle.

  His mind filled to overflowing, Verne’s imagination caught fire. He remembered his literary ambitions, which had been quashed by the bemusement of his mother and utter lack of encouragement from his father. Yet now he became more infected than ever with the dream of becoming an acclaimed dramatist—and for that he needed to search out philosophical topics and devise grand commentaries on the human condition. Forsaking Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, Verne turned to Voltaire and Balzac, Byron and Shelley, reveling in their hot-blooded romanticism.

  One day, waving a ticket that a sick friend had given him, Verne found a seat in the audience of the National Assembly, where a case was being argued. A publisher had been arrested and his newspaper, La Presse, forcibly suspended by the government. For Verne, the main attraction was when the great novelist Victor Hugo rose to speak with great passion for the cause of freedom of speech.

  As a celebrity, Hugo had been elected as a deputy of the National Assembly. “He may as well serve his country,” one of Verne’s aspiring-writer friends had commented sarcastically. “It’s been ten years since he published anything new.” Then the students had begun to argue about whether Hugo could ever surpass his literary masterpiece, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Verne hoped that with great minds such as Victor Hugo’s in the Second Republic—and the election of the enlightened Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon—Paris and France would finally embark upon a long period of stability and prosperity.

  He paid little attention to either politics or rhetoric at the Assembly, but instead nudged closer to the great Hugo. The man turned and met Verne’s eyes for the briefest of instants, which would keep the young man in happy delirium for an entire week. . . .

  Mulling over these thoughts as he left the National Assembly, Verne found a few sous in his pocket, enough for one day’s food. But he walked past the fruit carts and bakery baskets and stopped instead at a book shop. There, he found the romances of Sir Walter Scott in thirteen volumes, a collection of the poetry of Racine—and, in a single magnificent tome, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

  Verne counted the coins in the palm of his hand, studying the prices of the books. A person had to have priorities, after all. After dickering with the vendor, he settled on an amount. Verne walked home, penniless and still hungry . . . but carrying the book of Shakespeare.

  He considered it a better investment of his money than mere food.

  IV

  Nemo was a stranger in a world where no human being had ever set foot.

  Misty swamps spread out in the lost landscape, inhabited by strange and forgotten creatures. The ceiling of the incredible grotto became a sky of stone high above. Stalactites blurred in the distance, as far away as clouds, lit by a strange bright smear like a surrogate sun.

  Nemo forged a path through the virgin wilderness. The primeval paradise simmered with subdued noises, shattered by occasional roars like the carnivorous dinosaur that had attacked his island. He pushed aside curled ferns similar to the tails of caged monkeys he had seen on the docks in Nantes.

  In addition to his mushroom feast, he found brightly colored fruits and fallen nuts in this uncharted Eden. Now that he was traveling again after so many years, Nemo felt even more restless. He moved one step at a time, pushing onward in hopes of discovering a passage that led upward. Home.

  He trudged through swamps, sloshing in ankle-deep, peaty water. Huge flowers like sunbursts brightened the humid green-brown world. A dragonfly the size of a vulture ratcheted by with wings like the glider he had built. Nemo ducked to one side as the mammoth insect swooped down to the sluggish water, scooped up a thrashing fish, and made off with its meal.

  Nemo parted moss-covered branches to look out upon a dozen wading dinosaurs, immense beasts larger than any whale. Their long necks cur
led like a giraffe’s. One plump creature gazed at him with placid eyes, its mouth full of uprooted swamp weeds. It showed no intelligence, only a dull interest. The plant-eating dinosaurs dismissed him and went back to their tireless eating. He stared at them in utter amazement for the better part of an hour, until his thoughts turned again to his own survival.

  Keeping track of time and direction as best he could, Nemo slept when he was tired, ate when he was hungry. In the smoky twilight, he used his best guess to keep a regular cycle of day and night. He fashioned a makeshift compass in a small pool of water, but could not verify its accuracy. He did not know his direction . . . only onward.

  For weeks he continued through the deeper swamp into a cluster of conifers that sheltered a hoard of large, scaly bats. The startled bats took off with a thunderous flapping of wings toward the grotto ceiling, much as a flock of sparrows might have flown from a shooting party back in France.

  At one point it rained for days on end. Salty-tasting water streamed from high above. Uneasy, Nemo wondered if he’d passed beneath a porous section of the ocean floor that allowed water to trickle through. According to his best estimates, Nemo had long since passed beyond the confines of the island.

  The grotto seemed to go on forever, as if the Earth had swallowed a bubble of the past and preserved it far from the surface. Nemo proceeded for what might have been months, clinging to a thin twine of hope that if he walked far enough, searched diligently enough, he would emerge again to civilization.

  In the remaining, water-stained pages in his bound journal, he continued to document his travels, pressing a few strange leaves and flowers between sheets of dense description. Even with the daily entries and the specimens, though, he doubted anyone would believe his story—any more than he and Jules Verne had believed the tall tales told by sailors on the docks of Ile Feydeau.

  At last, the prehistoric forest thinned again, returning to low swamps that led out of the ferns to another grove of titanic mushrooms. For a gut-wrenching moment Nemo feared that the mushroom forest was the same one he had first encountered. What if he had circumnavigated the buried grotto and found no other passage to the surface?

  As he studied more carefully, though, he realized that the forest, the water, even the far-off ceiling of stalactites, looked different. This was a new place, and the strangeness of it all gave him the energy to hurry forward.

  Nemo parted the tall stems of mushrooms, disregarding the showers of spores, and came upon a sight that filled him with dismay. Where the spongy ground ended in an abrupt shore, the gray-blue waters of an incomprehensibly vast subterranean sea spread beyond the visible horizon, like spilled quicksilver. Currents stirred the water, as if from a bizarre tide in the center of the Earth.

  Nemo saw no way around the water. He looked left and right at the ocean that stretched as far as he could see. From here he had no place left to go.

  V

  Jules Verne had pressed hard to obtain an invitation to a “minor literary soiree.” However, now that he stood in a large private house among the Paris literati, pretending to belong among them, he felt as if he were walking in the clouds. Simply being here, Verne felt as if he were making progress toward his own ambitions. . . .

  He wore his only good suit of clothes, which was a bit faded and tattered from continuous wear. Self-conscious, but affecting a haughty air to imitate those around him, Verne dipped into conversation with fiery-eyed young men who had political or dramatic ambitions. Still a hungry student, Verne also made frequent trips to the buffet table and ate four times as much as the other attendees, who only nibbled at the petits fours and hors d’oeuvres.

  The months in Paris had already stretched to more than a year. During days in the Academy lecture halls, he dove into legal esoterica dating to Roman times. Although he remained uninterested, Verne knew he must do well enough to pass his exams and send appropriate reports to his parents. Otherwise Pierre Verne would bring him home, and he couldn’t think of a drearier prospect.

  He wrote regular letters, often mailing separate messages to his mother in which he complained of indigestion and various ailments, hoping she could offer a cure so that he might concentrate better. In missives to his father, he emphasized how hard he was studying and how difficult it was to survive in Paris on the meager allowance he received.

  In the evenings, feeling out of his element, Verne met with acquaintances in coffee shops along the Left Bank and at the Sorbonne. In his correspondence, though, Verne took care not to express his literary ambitions. He did not describe times spent in salons or at social parties where he hoped to meet famous personages of the French art scene. His father had little patience for such dreams and would see no connection between meeting “idlers, buffoons, or subversives” and his son’s future as a stable lawyer.

  Verne paid for his double life through lack of sleep. He stayed up late and rose early, struggling to meet both his father’s obligations and those imposed by his ambitions. Though he had no money and only a tiny attic apartment, Verne held his own in the circles of those who held rich parties in the finer quarters of Paris. His witty jokes and sarcastic puns sometimes endeared him to (and occasionally offended) his hosts.

  Now, surrounded by a buzz of conversation, he listened with giddy interest to profound debates. With passion or feigned boredom, the literati discussed the plays offered along the boulevard du Temple, farces or romantic comedies, a few one-act tragedies told in lyrical verse. Many men chatted about the new play by Alexandre Dumas, who had adapted the first part of The Three Musketeers, to a stage production performed in his own playhouse, the Theatre Historique.

  Comparable only to Victor Hugo, Dumas was the literary light of French romanticism. For almost two decades, he had produced masterpieces of historical adventure. His most recent success, The Man in the Iron Mask, had appeared in 1847, the year before revolutions had forced him to close down his theatres. Now the Theatre Historique had reopened, with the performance of a brand new play by the master.

  Verne could never afford to see such a production, though he longed to. He had loved the novels. Still, it was a wonderful time to be in Paris, the pinnacle of human civilization.

  When the topic inevitably turned from literature to politics, Verne found the conversation tedious. He wandered out of the drawing room in search of something else to hold his attention . . . and perhaps more food. He wondered how much he could hide in his pockets. Hearing a harpsichord and singing upstairs, he trotted up a long, curving marble staircase, so polished and smooth that it was like walking on wet ice.

  Dozens of people milled about below, most of whom Verne didn’t know. Their fashions dismayed him, their references to unrecognized names confused him, but he continued to wear a knowing smile and moved from one group to another before anyone could expose his ignorance.

  As he hurried up the marble steps in his worn shoes, Verne slipped and grabbed for the stone banister to keep his balance. Missing it, he fell into a tumbling roll, just as an enormous man began to climb the stairs. Verne crashed into the mountainous, dark-skinned stranger, who caught him with a loud oof. They both tumbled backward like carts crashing in a crowded street, a flurry of legs and shoes.

  While a few other party-goers tittered at the spectacle, Verne disentangled himself and mumbled his apologies, blushing as red as a sugar beet with embarrassment. He kept his gaze downcast, flustered. “Excuse me, Monsieur! I stumbled. It seems gravity has had a joke at my expense.”

  The big man laughed, and Verne raised his eyes, hoping he hadn’t bumbled into a person in a surly mood. A haughty man just might challenge a gangly young student to a duel, and then Jules Verne would have to demonstrate just how fast he could run. He could excel in a challenge of wits and humor, but not brawn or marksmanship.

  “Young man, gravity and I have had numerous disagreements of our own!”

  The stranger was one of the fattest men Verne had ever seen. He had kinky black hair that showed a strong Negro heritage
and dusky skin, though light enough in color to indicate mixed blood. His fingers were studded with rings and he sported a cravat pin worth more than Verne’s entire annual stipend. The man’s cheeks were like balloons, and his dark eyes sparkled with amusement at the incident.

  “Oh, ho! I’m delighted that I could rescue you by forming a barricade of my girth, young Monsieur.” He patted the sheer volume of stomach barely contained within his straining waistcoat. “My only disappointment is that you’ve unsettled the delicious Nantes omelet I have just consumed.”

  Verne brushed himself off, though the lint and tatters and faded spots in his clothes were not so easily whisked away. Trying not to appear such a buffoon, he remembered his mother’s secret recipe. “A Nantes omelet?” He scratched at the stubbly beard he had begun to grow in imitation of Paris literary fashion. Perhaps he could extend an appropriate apology. “You have not tasted the best omelet, Monsieur, because you have not yet eaten mine. I have a special recipe.”

  The fat man laughed. “Ho! Well then, since I have saved your life from such a terrible fall, I insist that you cook me a sample. I trust that it will be every bit as delicious as you’ve led me to believe. I am quite a gourmand . . . as you can see.” He patted the barrel of his stomach, and it made a hollow, rumbling sound. “Would next Saturday do?”

  Verne balked at what he had just suggested. He couldn’t invite this well-dressed and obviously wealthy man up to his dingy room. He didn’t have pans, ingredients, a dining table, china—not even napkins. He wanted to jump down the stairs again, and this time perhaps he would mercifully break his neck.

  The dark-skinned man, observing Verne’s distress, waved a pudgy hand to dismiss any concerns. “Young man, you need merely arrive at my chateau. I shall provide the cookware and supplies you require. I fancy myself something of a gourmet chef and would like to learn from such a master as yourself.” His eyes twinkled.