PEOPLE ❘ JULES VERNE


JULES VERNE In the fotsteps of...


Chloe Govan reveals the remarkable adventures of world-famous novelist Jules Verne, whose literary ambitions first took shape in beguiling Nantes


S


ay the name Jules Verne and most people will think immediately of Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But this master


of adventure was also a poet and a playright and one of France’s most prolific authors of all time, whose works have been translated more often than Shakespeare’s. Dubbed ‘the father of science fiction’, only Agatha Christie beats him to the title of most translated author in the world.


His life began in 1828 on L’île Feydeau in Nantes – then an idyllic little island set in the Loire river. He was educated at a local boarding school, where his teacher told romanticised tales of her sea-captain husband, who had gone missing on a voyage 30 years earlier. According to her, he was not dead, but had been shipwrecked on a paradisiacal desert island and one day – just like Robinson Crusoe – he would return. The six-year-old Verne listened avidly, wide-eyed


with excitement. Perhaps this was the moment when his father’s ambitions for him to become a corporate lawyer melted away and the feverish imagination that would later transform him into an adventure writer was first sparked into action.


TALL TALES Within five years of hearing these stories, the young Verne was ready for his own adventure. Secretly gaining employment as a cabin boy, he managed to set sail for the West Indies before his parents noticed his absence. He had set his heart on discovering buried treasure and bringing back a coral necklace for the cousin he hoped one day to marry. In modern times, it would be inconceivable for a child to gain employment without their parents’ permission, but back in the 1800s, no one batted an eyelid. The young adventurer sailed as far as Paimboeuf on the southern banks of the Loire before his distraught father caught up with him. He made his son promise never to travel again,


unless in his imagination. Whether or not this legend was true, for a time, Verne substituted exploration of the real world with a passion for conjuring up fiction. Later, he reluctantly attended a Parisian law school during the maelstrom of the 1848 French Revolution. Yet Verne, it seems, was oblivious to the political upheaval surrounding Napoleon’s election, instead losing himself in the works of Victor Hugo. Before long, he had read Notre-Dame de Paris so many times that he could recite by heart huge chunks at a time.


Despite passing his law exams with flying colours, he shunned all expectations that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Even when an increasingly desperate Verne Senior offered his son ownership of the family’s law firm, he refused point-blank, simply quipping, “literature above all else”. Verne produced a play with Alexandre


Musée Jules Verne in Nantes, where you can learn all about the life of this visionary writer and ‘father of science fiction’ 56 ❘ FRANCE TODAY Apr/May 2020


Dumas’s son called Les Pailles Rompues, which appeared at Paris’s Théâtre Historique. To his father’s horror, he accepted the position of secretary at the theatre in return


Clockwise from above: Fantasy writer Jules Verne; Nantes’s monument to the author; don’t miss this mural celebrating Verne on the rue de l’Échelle; the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery is a reminder of Nantes’s dark past; a 1916 film version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; one of the 54 novels published in the Voyages Extraordinaires series


IMAGES © WIKIMEDIA/OLGA MACH, JJHER, PJ44300, UNIVERSAL FILM, FRANÇOIS DE DIJON, ÉTIENNE CARJAT


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