Summary:
A 'Celebrity at Home' profile of Jules Verne on his 70th birthday, covering his legal training, early literary partnerships, his prolific novel-writing contract with publisher Hetzel, his travels by yacht and abroad, and his working habits as a novelist.
Jules Verne
This week’s “Celebrity at Home” in the World is M. Jules Verne, and in the course of the article the writer says:—
M. Jules Verne shares—in a minor degree, with Shakespeare the gift of being able to form a faithful conception of things he has not seen, and thus to avoid the errors into which so exuberant a fancy as he possesses might well have led him. It is not easy to say whence he derived this gift, for he comes of a family which had belonged to the noblesse de robe at Nantes for many generations; and Jules Verne, who completed his 70th year not long ago, was himself educated for the Bar, and came up to Paris to read for it.
But he had from a boy been fond of literature, and having made the acquaintance of Alexandre Dumas fils, who was a few years his senior, they wrote a piece in verse entitled “Pailles Rompues”, and this brought him into connection with Alexandre Dumas père, then in the zenith of his fame, through whose influence he obtained the place of secretary at the Théâtre Lyrique, where he met dramatic authors and composers such as Scribe, Adam, and Auber. At the same time he wrote several short tales for a family magazine, and it was one of these, entitled A Drama in the Sky, where a madman gets into the car of a balloon and attempts to kill his companion, which led to his writing his first novel, Cinq Semaines en Ballon, this having such a run that Hetzel, the publisher, proposed a contract by the terms of which he undertook to publish two volumes a year, and it is not less remarkable than true that the terms of this contract have been observed for nearly 40 years, 76 volumes (the last being Le Sphinx des Glaces, which he wrote as a mark of his esteem for the Americans, to whom he dedicated it) having already appeared; while M. Verne is so well ahead with his work that, if illness overtook him, he has enough ready to carry him over the year 1903; so that there is fair reason for hoping that, as he has an excellent constitution, he will live to complete his hundredth volume or more. He has found time, moreover, to write several other works apart from his series of tales, including a history of famous travellers and an illustrated series of magazine articles on the different regions of France; while, in conjunction with that skilful dramatist, D’Ennery, he has prepared for the stage several of his best romances, such as Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours, Michel Strogoff, and Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, to mention only three of the most famous, which have been among the greatest melodramatic successes on the French stage for the last 25 years.
It must not be supposed, however, that M. Jules Verne has at no period of his life been a traveller, for he has had several yachts, all named St. Michel, the latest of which is represented in a water-colour over the fireplace of his study; and in these he has twice made the tour of the Mediterranean with his wife and son (the latter of whom now lives in Paris and writes a little), to say nothing of having cruised to the Shetlands and down the west coast to Oban. He has often visited England, the Lake District, and Scotland; while he went to Sweden and Norway before there were any railways there, and has a vivid recollection of journeying from Stockholm to Gothenburg by canal, passing through more than 150 locks. He recorded some of his experiences during this voyage in Mathias Sandorf and the Billet de Loterie. In 1867 he went to the United States on board the Great Eastern, and got as far as Niagara. His last journey beyond the borders of France was to Rome in 1884, and he recalls with manifest satisfaction how he and his family were most graciously received by Leo XIII., the venerable Pontiff saying that he had read several of his books, and going on to complain of his captivity in the Vatican and of the inequity wrought by secular schools. It was about this time that M. Verne used to spend a month each summer at the pretty watering-place of Le Tréport, not far from Amiens; and close to the Chateau d’Eu, where the Comte de Paris was then residing, and the latter used often to ask him over to spend the day, the Duc d’Orléans being at that time about 15, and having impressed him as a lad of great promise. The author of Michel Strogoff, which he is inclined to regard as the most popular of his many works, never begins to write a story until he has settled in his own mind what the denouement is to be, and he confesses that he forgets after nine or 10 years what he has written; so that there must, as one would think, be some danger of his repeating himself. He trusts, however, to his publisher to prevent anything of this sort from happening, and he has such a varied and far-reaching imagination that he is never at a loss for a subject. He writes, too, of shooting, hunting, and fishing as one to the manner born, though he looks upon the two latter as barbarous sports; while on the only occasion on which he fired a gun he sent the charge through the cocked hat of a gendarme, and was prosecuted in consequence.