Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  “There they are,” said Greaves, and Bly quickly scanned the platform. Jules Verne looked like one of his own characters, a ship’s captain perhaps, with wavy white hair swept back from his forehead and a thick gray beard, barrel-chested and still powerful-looking at the age of sixty-one. He was of average height, standing about five foot five; beside him Honorine was several inches shorter, and stout, wearing a sealskin jacket over a dark watered silk skirt, a small velvet bonnet on her head. Though her hair was as white as her husband’s she had a youthful face, with a clear complexion and very red lips. Bly waited with Greaves for the porter to come unlock their compartment, then she gathered up her bag and stepped down from the train. The Vernes strode toward them, calling their greetings; Bly shyly said hello and thanked them for agreeing to meet her. The thin blond man behind the Vernes introduced himself as Robert Sherard, who had arrived earlier from Paris to act as translator. Sherard was twenty-seven years old; he had been educated at Oxford and was a friend of Oscar Wilde and Victor Hugo. In his memoir he did not mention Bly by name, describing her only as “a girl reporter.”

  Two carriages were waiting for them at the station. Verne turned and led the way (he walked surprisingly quickly despite the evident limp), helping Bly and his wife up into one of the carriages before joining Greaves and Sherard in the other. Though she didn’t say anything, Bly felt awkward about being left alone in the carriage with Mrs. Verne—as Honorine Verne’s English vocabulary consisted simply of the word “no” and her own French simply of “oui,” there was little for them to do during the drive but admire the scenery and occasionally smile apologetically at each other. They were riding on a tree-lined boulevard through the center of town, far removed from the large, noisy factories down along the canals of the Somme, where water-powered looms turned out bolts of linen, silk, and velvet. Here was the France that Bly had always imagined: brightly lit shops, a charming park, uniformed nursemaids pushing baby carriages or calling after children who ran ahead on the path. In the distance she could see the immense bulk of the Amiens cathedral glowing a pinkish white in the late-afternoon sun; more than three hundred feet high and nearly as wide, the cathedral dominated the sky the way no single building in New York ever could.

  Jules Verne in 1888 (Illustration Credit 7.1)

  After twenty minutes the carriages pulled up before a high stone wall. Verne opened a door in the wall, revealing a large fieldstone house with a turret running up one side. Honorine led them up a flight of marble steps and through a glass-walled conservatory, filled with beautiful flowers, into the house. Entering the sitting room, she knelt and lit a fire in the open fireplace, then indicated that Nellie Bly should sit closest to the fire, in one of the five easy chairs that formed a semicircle around the hearth. The others sat down as well. On the wall above them hung matching oil portraits of the Vernes. The room had a rich, dark beauty; the chairs were upholstered in brocaded silk, the windows draped with velvet. Two years earlier Bly had been shivering with fear and cold inside a women’s insane asylum; now she was sitting in an easy chair by a comfortable fire talking with Jules Verne about her work.

  “Many of Monsieur Verne’s books have American locales,” she said to Robert Sherard. “Has Monsieur Verne been in America?”

  He had been there once, Verne answered, but for only a few days. He had managed to see Niagara Falls, though, which was a sight he had never forgotten. He tried to keep up with all the latest news from America, and greatly appreciated the hundreds of letters he received each year from his readers there, many of them addressed simply to Jules Verne, France. He had always longed to return, but the state of his health prevented him from taking any long journeys. It had been four years since he had even boarded a train. “I used to keep a yacht,” he explained, “and then I traveled all over the world studying locations; then I wrote from actual observation. Now, since my health confines me to my home, I am forced to read up on descriptions and geographies.”

  Verne was sitting forward at the edge of his chair, his hair artistically disordered, his eyes dark and brilliant beneath heavy white brows. He spoke in a rapid voice, and as he spoke his hands fluttered around his head like birds. When he was especially interested in a subject his nostrils flared; he had, an observer once remarked, “the nose of a sleuth.” Now, through Sherard, he asked Bly what her line of travel around the world was to be.

  “My line of travel is from New York to London, then Calais, Brindisi, Port Said, Ismailia, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York.”

  Verne considered this for a moment. “Why do you not land at Bombay and travel across India to Calcutta, like Phileas Fogg?”

  “Because,” Bly replied, “I am more anxious to save time than a young widow.”

  The Vernes laughed. “You may save a young widower before you return,” said Jules Verne.

  The room was momentarily quiet. Honorine gently stroked a white Angora cat that had jumped into her lap. Verne said, addressing no one in particular, “It really is not to be believed that this little girl is going all alone round the world. Why, she looks a mere child.”

  “Yes, but she is just built for work of that sort,” remarked Honorine approvingly. “She is trim, energetic, and strong. I believe, Jules, that she will make your heroes look foolish. She will beat your record. I am so sure of that that I will wager with you if you like.”

  Verne shook his head. “I would not like to risk my money,” he said, “because I feel sure, now that I have seen the young lady, that she has the character to do it.” He did not address his wife’s remark about his heroes being made to look foolish, but he could not have been pleased by it. This warmly furnished sitting room was where, in the evenings, Honorine entertained guests in whom her husband had no interest, where she had given interviews to journalists that ended up embarrassing or upsetting him, as, for instance, when she pointed out how few women characters he had included in his books. Over time it had become clear to him that she did not understand his literary ambitions. At eleven each morning they had lunch together in the small breakfast room next to the kitchen, usually eating in silence while Jules brooded about his latest book. He was increasingly withdrawn; his wife frequently burst into tears, often for reasons he did not comprehend. She resented that he did not like to take her into Amiens society, and complained to friends that “he piles the problems produced by his discouragement onto me.” Always on Sundays she wanted him to accompany her to Mass; he had gone at first to appease her and then, after a while, he gave it up for good. Marriage, Verne once wrote in a letter to his brother—meaning the institution in general and his own in particular—constituted “an immense and irreparable folly.” Still, the two worked hard to keep up appearances, to be in public the couple the world wished them to be.

  It was a pity, said Jules Verne, that Nellie Bly was traveling in winter rather than summer; in the warmer weather she would doubtless have better sea passages and would likely gain an additional day or two. Bly told the Vernes about the rough passage across the Atlantic and the mad scamper, as she put it, around London. It had been only that morning, but it felt like ages ago. She glanced at her wristwatch: the time, she saw, was already growing short. There was only a single train from Amiens to Calais; missing it meant a week’s delay, in which case she might just as well turn around and head back to New York the way she had come. She said, “If Monsieur Verne would not consider it impertinent I should like to see his study before I go.”

  He was only too happy to show it to her, Verne said, and even as his reply was being translated Honorine was standing and had lit a candle. With the candle in hand she led the way out of the room, her husband limping behind her, back through the conservatory to the house’s turret, then up a narrow spiral staircase three flights to the top floor. There Honorine paused to light the gas jet in the hallway; Verne opened the door of his study and Bly and the others stepped inside after him.

  She was astonished; based on
the many descriptions she had read of the studies of famous authors (each time filled with envy, thinking of how scarce and expensive space was in New York), she had imagined a large, richly furnished room, perhaps a hand-carved desk covered with expensive trinkets, rare paintings on the wall. This study, though, was not much larger than her own back in New York. On the desk an ink bottle and a penholder sat alongside a neat stack of white paper—the manuscript of the novel on which he was then at work, Sans dessus dessous, about a group of Americans who try to shift the axis of the earth in order to warm the North Pole and gain access to its mineral reserves. “A purely imaginary story,” Verne said to her, as though in apology. With a sense of awe Bly picked up a page of the manuscript, and was immediately struck by the exquisite penmanship: the writing looked as much like poetry as prose. Several sentences had been carefully blotted out, but no new ones had been put in between the existing lines; the great author improved his work, she noted to herself, always by cutting, never by adding.

  It was, Verne told her, the tenth draft of the novel. “Often,” he said, “I entirely rewrite the whole work when completed. I copy and re-copy even then and make as many corrections as you see there. I don’t believe in dashing off things. One can’t attain anything in the world without labor and fatigue. I think you will be fatigued, Mademoiselle, before you get to the end of the journey you are undertaking. That picture,” he said, pointing to the watercolor on the wall, “is my yacht entering the Bay of Naples. I used to cruise about the Mediterranean a great deal and wish I could do so still.” There, again, the flared nostrils: how hard it must be to endure that diminishment, to watch from home as others traveled the world, to be regularly interrupted in his imagining of faraway lands by the whistle of a train he was not allowed to ride. He said, “If you will come into the next room I will show you my books.”

  Adjoining the study was an enormous library, lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases filled with handsome leather-bound volumes, among them the collected works of Homer and Virgil, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Balzac, and his favorite author, Charles Dickens. There were countless foreign editions of his own novels, translated into languages including Arabic and Japanese. One wall was covered with pigeonholes containing all of the reference notes he had gathered over the years, some twenty-five thousand of them, arranged according to subject. The visitors, all writers, marveled at the literary treasures arrayed before them, until Verne asked the group to follow him out into the hallway, where he stopped before a large map of the world that hung on the wall. Holding up a candle for illumination, he pointed out to Nellie Bly a sequence of blue lines that had been inscribed on the map. This, she immediately understood, was the very map on which he had traced out Phileas Fogg’s journey before beginning work on his novel. Now with another pencil Verne lightly marked the places where Bly’s route diverged from that of his world traveler. Bly studied the map, comparing the lines of travel. Fogg’s moved southeast through the Middle East and across India, veered sharply south to Singapore, and then proceeded northeast to Hong Kong and northwest again to Shanghai, the line resembling the long handle and rectangular bowl of the Big Dipper. Her own was a straighter, more direct path. Aden, Colombo, Penang, Yokohama: all of those unfamiliar names, she knew, would soon enough be made real to her.

  Back downstairs, the table had been set with plates of cookies and glasses of wine. Through Sherard’s translation Jules Verne explained that although he rarely drank alcohol, on this afternoon he would take a glass of wine so that they might have the pleasure of drinking together to the success of her undertaking. “If you do it in seventy-nine days,” Verne told Bly, “I shall applaud with both hands.” He reached over to clink glasses with her, and in doing so endeavored, in English, to wish her success. “Good back,” he said, “good back.”

  Everyone laughed and clinked glasses and drank, and Nellie Bly took a moment to tell Jules Verne how much she had enjoyed meeting him and his wife. As they stood up to go, Honorine told Robert Sherard that she would like to kiss Miss Bly goodbye; Sherard translated her request for Bly, adding that it was considered a great honor in France for a woman to ask to kiss a stranger. Nellie Bly was not used to this kind of formality, but she was flattered by the request, and she leaned forward—for she was a good deal taller than Mrs. Verne—as Honorine kissed her in the Gallic fashion, on both cheeks. Bly had a sudden impulse to surprise Honorine with a kiss right on those red lips, but, as she wrote later, “for once I was able to control my mischievousness, which often wrecks my dignity, and take my farewell after her own sweet way.”

  In spite of the cold weather the Vernes insisted on following their visitors outside to see them off, and they waved and called their farewells as Bly and Greaves got into the carriage that would take them to the nearby train station. When Bly turned for a last look she could still see them waving, the wind tossing their white hair.

  The following month, in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette of London, Jules Verne said of Nellie Bly that “what took the hearts of both myself and Mrs. Verne was the complete modesty of the young person,” and called her “the prettiest young girl imaginable.” In private, he had other thoughts. “My God, what a shame to see such a clever woman treated so badly by nature,” Verne wrote about Bly in a letter to a friend, “as thin as a match, neither bottom nor bosom!”

  THE INTERVIEW IN the Pall Mall Gazette was by no means the only news story about Nellie Bly’s meeting with Jules Verne. As the editors of The World had anticipated, the visit with the famous novelist brought new attention to Bly’s trip throughout the world—not only in France but all around Europe, and eventually as far as Japan. The World’s own article about the Amiens meeting, written by Tracey Greaves, appeared on the paper’s front page less than forty-eight hours after Bly took her leave of the Vernes. There would subsequently be a second article by Greaves, as well as a World editorial that declared, hyperbolically, that Jules Verne “gave the plucky little traveller no end of encouragement and pronounced her undertaking one of the marvels of American journalism.” In the editorial The World avowed once more that Bly would employ no special trains or chartered ships during her trip, and noted, in an unmistakable reference to The Cosmopolitan, “Imitators may spring up in various quarters, but the fact remains that THE WORLD was the first to put into execution this plan of circumnavigating the globe against time which has excited the admiration and won the unstinted praise of the famous JULES VERNE.”

  “The Young Lady’s Undertaking,” The World proclaimed in a headline, was “a Constant Subject of Comment,” and every day the paper reprinted items about the trip from other newspapers around the country, taking special care to include the items that praised The World for its journalistic daring. Much of the time that daring involved the newspaper’s supposed insistence that its female reporter travel light. Observed the Long Island Times, “The New York World has just surpassed all the former achievements of men by inducing a woman to start off on a journey around the globe without a big trunk and with only one dress to wear. Completing the journey in seventy-five days will not eclipse the feat of getting a woman to travel with so little toggery.” In a similar vein, Cooley’s Weekly of Norwich, Connecticut, praised Bly’s “heroic work,” which consisted mainly of not bringing along “a four-story Saratoga trunk, such as a lady needs for a three weeks’ millinery exhibition at Newport or Long Branch,” while the Reporter of Towanda, Pennsylvania, chimed in that “the most remarkable feature of this progressive undertaking is that Miss Bly takes only one dress and no trunk.”

  Less than two weeks into Bly’s trip, The World appointed an “Excursion Editor” (later called the “European Trip Editor”) to oversee the publicity surrounding, as the paper liked to call it, “Nellie’s Rush Around.” The editor, who was never identified by name, first appeared in a published response to a letter signed “Five Girls in Mount Vernon.” It was an unabashed fan letter, containing the sort of breathless prose far more often meant for
singers or actresses than newspaper reporters. “Will you tell us about Nellie Bly personally?” the girls pleaded.

  We have read so much about her that we are very anxious to know. Everything she writes is so good and her descriptions of the places she has visited are so perfect and we admire her so much for that ability that we want to know all about her. She is about how old? Tall or short? Dark or light? Handsome, ordinary or plain? (She is so smart she could not possibly be homely.) Tell us all about her. She is a wonder in our minds, and we are waiting to read her description of her trip around the world. The fact is, Mr. Editor, we five girls think we must know more about Nellie Bly. Will you tell us and oblige?