by Jules Vernes
A PHOENIX PAPERBACK
This edition first published In Great Britain by
Phoenix Paperbacks In 1999
Selection, introduction and other critical apparatus
© Phoenix Paperbacks 1999
The Humbug appears courtesy of the translator, Edward Baxter
© Edward Baxter 1990
All rights reserved
Orion Publishing Group
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication
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isbn 0 75380 870 6
a collaborative ebook
Contents
Note on the Author and Editor
Introduction
Recollections of Childhood and Youth
1 2 3 4 5 6
The First Ships of the Mexican Navy
1-From the Island of Guajan to Acapulco
2-From Acapulco to Cigualan
3-From Cigualan to Tasco
4- From Tasco to Cuemavaca
5-From Cuernavaca to Popocatepetl
A Drama in the Air
Master Zacharius
1-A Winter Night
2-The Pride of Science
3-A Strange Visit
4-The Church of Saint Pierre
5-The Hour of Death
The Humbug
Doctor Ox’s Experiment
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
An Ideal City
Dr Trifulgas
1 2 3 4 5 6
Gil Braltar
1 2 3 4
In the Twenty-Ninth Century
An Express of the Future
The Eternal Adam
Prelude
Rosario, May 24th, 2...
During the night
May 25th
On board the Virginia, June 4th
On land – January or February
At death’s door
Post-script
Sources
Acknowledgements
Notes
Note on the Author and Editor
JULES VERNE was born on 8 February 1828 at Nantes, where his father was a lawyer. When Verne left school in 1844 he too was to be a lawyer like his father, but he had already begun to write poems and plays.
Sent to Paris to finish his law studies, he was one of the generation affected by the revolution of 1848. Abandoning law he became secretary to a theatre in Paris.
In 1851 he began publishing his first stories, and in 1857 he married a widow with two daughters, by whom he had a son Michel (born in 1861). To support his family he became a stockbroker.
In 1863 he published a new kind of novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, the first in the series to be called ‘The Extraordinary Journeys’, which was an immediate success. Verne abandoned the stock exchange, and developed into one of the most significant of nineteenth-century authors, with a world-wide reputation and influence. Aside from his writing, music and sailing were his great passions.
His last years were clouded by illness and loss. He died on 24 March 1905 at Amiens, where he had lived since his marriage, and where he is buried.
PETER COSTELLO, a writer and literary historian based in Dublin, is the author of a biography of Jules Verne, among other literary and historical studies.
Introduction
Jules Verne is often called ‘the father of science fiction’, but he wrote many kinds of novels: stories of adventure, political satires, and social comedies. These aspects of his output are reflected in the short stories which he wrote from time to time over the six decades of his career.
When he died in 1905 he was one of the most popular writers in the world, and he has remained so, with new editions of his novels every year in many languages. But it is usually the earlier and better known novels, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, that are read. Large areas of Verne’s output, whole fictional continents, are unexplored territory to readers outside France. Verne’s tales have fallen victim to this Anglo-Saxon neglect.
The first piece in this selection, his own account of his childhood and its influence on his career, was intended by Verne himself to be included in a collection of his short stories which was planned at the time of his death. But it never was, and this is its first publication in its integral form in English. It makes an essential entree to his fictional world.
Verne’s first published stories were in a family magazine, for which he wrote not only the stories about the origins of the Mexican navy and a balloon flight with a madman included here, but also a short novel, Martin Paz, set in Peru, which announced Verne’s sympathies with the oppressed at a very early date in his career. There he also published ‘Master Zacharius’, a story influenced by the tales of German fantasist E.T.A. Hoffmann, a writer he invokes by name in this haunting parable of a pact with the demon of time. Another important influence on Verne from a literary point of view was the American Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he was one of the first admirers in France.
Verne relished Hoffmann’s and Poe’s tales of the fantastic and strange. But he was also fascinated by travel, geography and history. These were all-important elements in all his novels, but they are especially strong in his tales.
With the publication of his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in 1863, Verne had started on the first of a long series which was to be called ‘The Extraordinary Journeys’. Though today his named is linked with the rise of science fiction, it was the romance of travel and adventure that first established him, rather than revelations of the future. His first love was always geography, a more prominent science in the nineteenth century than it is today.
Yet even when he became an established novelist, Verne still found time for shorter pieces, though the actual dates of composition are known only approximately in some cases. ‘The Humbug’, though his son Michel dated it from 1863, seems from internal evidence to have been written no earlier than 1869, two years after Verne himself had travelled to America on the Great Eastern, and made a trip up the Hudson, along the route in the story. Verne was astonished by the new country and the style of its citizens. This story of American enterprise owed much to the legendary figure of P.T. Barnum, but also the notorious Dr Albert C. Koch, who had displayed a fake fossil sea-serpent in the 1840s, and the celebrated ‘American Goliath’, the so-called Cardiff Giant, which caused a sensation in 1869-70. So soon after the appearance of Darwin’s theory of how evolution worked, geology was a radical, even dangerous science in some eyes, and fossils dangerous symbols of change, a challenge to established belief systems.
With ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’ in 1872 Verne returned to the vein of satiric fantasy, drawing on certain ideas of contemporary physiologists about the effects of oxygen. But the theme of whether personality is innate or due to social influences, and the dangers inherent in some kinds of scientific research, while made with comic verve, were nevertheless seriously intended. Again Verne was commenting on a psycho-social debate that still continues.
The rest of the stories selected for this volume developed this theme of science and change. ‘An Ideal City’ was read to a local audience in Amiens, and is a vision of that town (of which he was an elected councillor on the Radical ticket) in the year 2000.
/> ‘Dr Trifulgas’, a fantastic tale of the grotesque, was again an elaboration of the Hoffmann or Poe themes. Along with ‘Master Zacharius’ it is my favourite in this collection. ‘Gil Braltar’, another fantastic tale, inspired it seems by Verne’s visit on his yacht to Gibraltar in 1884, satirises Verne’s dislike of British (though not French) imperialism. It was left untranslated for eighty years, as it did not fit into Anglo-Saxon conceptions of Verne.
‘An Express of the Future’ is a comic piece suggested by a contemporary idea of a tunnel under the Atlantic, an engineer’s dream typical of the nineteenth century. It is unclear what part his son Michel played in writing this story, which lifted some notions of the future from a novel by a contemporary French writer named Robida, as well as the strange schemes of the American, Colonel Pierce, whom Verne may have met on a trip to Paris.
‘In the Twenty-Ninth Century’, though it may have been suggested by conversations with Jules Verne, was written in English by his son Michel though published under Verne’s own name (as contemporary correspondence reveals). Verne’s own English was poor. But the notions in the story cannot be said to have been Michel’s alone. Some come again from Robida, for instance, and the speculations of contemporary scientists, material Verne drew on for all his books. However the French version, from which the translation here has been made, was revised by Verne himself.
Michel’s role in the novels and stories of his father’s last years has become a vexed one for some critics. In 1910 Michel edited ‘The Humbug’ for publication in a collection of stories entitled Yesterday and Tomorrow, doing no more than authors and their publishers have always done. Jules Verne was not a writer whose first draft was the last. He often needed up to eight sets of printed proofs to get the story right. The manuscripts were mere drafts of a final idea he was striving for. When he became ill and blind towards the end of his life, his son arranged for a typist to take his dictation. To work at all, Verne needed their co-operation.
When Verne died in 1905 several manuscripts remained unpublished, and these were publicly listed by Michel. In bringing them before the world, however, he took some editorial decisions that have earned him the opprobrium of censorship and of passing off his own work as his father’s. But Michel Verne never saw himself as an author in his own right. He merely wished to do what his father, or his publisher, would have done: present the stories as well as possible to the public. The texts were secondary to this.
The books as published (as his grandson and biographer Jean Jules-Verne emphasised when this controversy arose in recent years) were as Jules Verne would have intended them to be. His father had done no more than carry out the revision which his grandfather would have wanted.
Thus ‘The Eternal Adam’ is based on a draft entitled ‘Edom’ by Jules Verne; the elaborations have been seen as a distortion of Jules Verne’s views, especially his political views. But Verne had been a radical with anarchist sympathies since 1848, and this bleak piece of science fiction remains true to his intentions. Even if the final words in which they are expressed passed through his son’s hand, the vision was Verne’s own.
Verne remains one of the world’s most widely read authors, rivalling the Bible, Mao, and Lenin in this respect. He continues to surprise us, as the recent appearance of his unpublished novel Paris in the XXth Century, written in 1863 and about which there are no editorial doubts, shows. Its theme of an isolated artist in a society of the future links it thematically with these stories of Verne’s last years, completing the circle of his life’s work. We can only speculate on the direction Verne’s work might have taken if it had been published as his first novel, instead of Five Weeks in a Balloon. Be that as it may, Verne’s influence on the development of science fiction was immense, but his own work is charming and unique, as the stories in this volume will show.
PETER COSTELLO
Recollections of Childhood and Youth
1
Reminiscences of childhood and youth? You are well advised in asking them of men of my years. The things seen or done by us in childhood are more deeply impressed upon our memory than are those of maturer age.
When one has passed beyond the number of years usually allotted to man, the mind takes pleasure in reverting to early days. The images it evokes are of those that never fade. Like indelible photographs, time only serves to bring them out into clearer relief.
Thus is justified that deep saying of a French writer, ‘Memory is far-sighted.’ It lengthens as it grows older, like a telescope when the barrel is drawn out, and discovers the most distant features of the past.
But are such reminiscences likely to be interesting? I cannot say. At any rate, perhaps the young readers of The Youth’s Companion may be curious to learn how the calling of a writer, which I still follow, although more than sixty years of age, first suggested itself to me.
So, at the request of the editor of that paper, I extend the telescope of my memory, turn round and look back.
2
In the first place, have I always had a taste for stories wherein the imagination gives itself free scope? Yes, doubtless, and my family have always held arts and letters in honour; whence I conclude that inheritance accounts in a large measure for my instincts.
Then again, there is this further reason that I was born at Nantes, where I spent nearly the whole of my childhood. The son of a father who was half a Parisian, and of a mother who was quite a Bretonne, I lived in the maritime bustle of a big commercial city which is the starting-point and goal of many long voyages.
I still see the river Loire, whose numerous arms are connected by a league of bridges, its quays encumbered by freight in the shadow of huge elms, along which did not then run the double railway track and the tramway lines.
Ships two or three rows deep line the wharves. Others sail up or down the stream. No steamboats were to be seen in those days, or, at least, very few of them. But there were many of those sailing-vessels, the type of which Americans were shrewd enough to retain and improve into clippers and three-masted schooners.
In those days the only kind of sailing-vessels we had were the lubberly merchantmen. What memories they recall! In fancy I climbed their shrouds, triced their maintops, and clung to their skyrakers. How I longed to cross the swaying plank that connected them with the quay, and set foot on their deck!
But, childishly timid as I was, I did not dare. Timid? Aye, I was indeed; and yet I had already seen one revolution, the overthrow of a regime and a new royalty founded, although I was only two years old; and I still hear the rattle of the musketry of 1830 in the streets of the town where, as in Paris, the people fought against the royal troops.
One day, however, I did venture to scale the netting of a three-master, while its watchman caroused in a neighbouring wine shop.
I was soon on deck. My hand caught hold of a halyard that slid in its block. What joy was in me! The hatches were open, and I leaned over their sides. The strong odours that came from the hold went to my head: odours in which the pungent smell of tar mixes with the perfume of spices.
I rose, went back towards the poop and entered. The interior was filled with those marine scents which give to it an atmosphere like that of the ocean.
Yonder appear the cabins with their creaking partitions, where I should have wished to live for months, and those bunks, so hard and narrow, wherein I should have liked to sleep whole nights. Then there was the room occupied by the captain, a much more important personage in my opinion than any king’s minister or lieutenant-general of the kingdom.
I came out, mounted the poop, and there actually made so bold as to turn the wheel a quarter round! I fancied the vessel was about to leave its moorings; that its hawsers had been cast off.That its masts were crowded with sail, and that I, an eight-year-old helmsman, was about to steer it out to sea!
The sea! Well, neither my brother, who became a sailor a few years later, nor I had yet seen it.
In summer all our family kept within the bounds of
a large country place not far from the banks of the Loire, in the midst of vineyards, meadows and marshes.
It was the residence of an old uncle, formerly a ship-owner. He had been to Caracas and to Porto Bello. We used to call him ‘Uncle Prudent’, and it was in remembrance of him that I gave the name to one of my personages in Robur the Conqueror. But Caracas was in America – a country which fascinated me already.
Not being able to sail the sea, my brother and I drifted about the open fields and threaded the woods together. Not having any masts to climb, we spent whole days at the tops of the trees. He was the greater fellow who made his nest the higher in them. We chatted, read, or projected voyages, while the branches swayed by the breeze, gave us the illusion of the pitching and rolling on board ship. Ah, those delicious leisure hours!
3
At that time people travelled little or not at all. Oil street-lamps, breeches, the National Guard and the flint and tinder-box were then quite the fashion. Yes, I have witnessed the genesis of phosphoric matches, detached collars, cuffs, letter paper, postage stamps, pantaloons, the overcoat, the opera hat. women’s boots, the metric system, the steamboats of the Loire, which are said to be ‘inexplosive’ because they blow up a little less often than the rest, the buses, railways, tramways, gas, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph.
I belong to that generation which is comprised between those two geniuses, Stephenson and Edison. And I now witness those astonishing discoveries, at the head of which marches America, with its movable hotels, its sandwich-making machines, its movable pavement, its newspapers printed with chocolate ink, upon stiff, thin sheets of pastry, which are read first and eaten afterward!
I was not ten years old when my father bought a small place at the extremity of the town, at Chantenay -a pretty name that! It was situated on a hill which overlooks the right bank of the Loire. From my little room I could see the river winding over an extent of two or three leagues, between the meadows which it flooded when the waters overflowed in winter time. In summer, it is true, the water would be low, and from the river bed there rose strips of lovely yellow sand, an archipelago of constantly changing islets.