Travel Scholarships

Jules Gabriel Verne: A Biography

{ 395 Jules Gabriel Verne: A Biography Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, to a middle-class family in the port city of Nantes, France. His mother, Sophie, née Allotte de la Fuÿe, was the daughter of a prominent family of ship owners, and his father, Pierre Verne, was an attorney and the son of a Provins magistrate. Jules was the eldest of five children. In addition to his three sisters—Anna, Mathilde, and Marie—he also had a younger brother, Paul, to whom he was very close and who went on to have a career in the navy. As a child and young man, Jules was a relatively conscientious student . Although far from the top of his class, he apparently did win awards for meritorious performance in geography, music, and Greek and Latin, and he easily passed his baccalaur éat in 1846. But his true passion was the sea. The shipyard docks of nearby Île Feydeau and the bustling commerce of the Nantes harbor never failed to spark Jules’s youthful imagination with visions of far-off lands and exotic peoples. Legend has it that he once ran off to sea as a cabin boy aboard a schooner bound for the Indies, but his father managed to intercept the ship before it reached the open sea and to retrieve his wayward son. According to this story, Jules (probably after a good thrashing) promised his parents that he would travel henceforth only in his dreams. Although this charming tale was most likely invented—or at least heavily embroidered upon—by Verne’s family biographer, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe, it nevertheless exemplifies the author’s lifelong love for the sea and his yearnings for adventure-filled journeys to distant ports of call. Young Jules also loved machines. During an interview toward the end of his life, he reminisced about his early formative years: “While I was quite a lad, I used to adore watching machines at work. My father had a country-house at Chantenay, at the mouth of the Loire, and near the government factory at InJules Verne (photo by Nadar [Félix Tournachon], ca. 1885). J u l e s g a B r i e l V e r n e 396 } dret. I never went to Chantenay without entering the factory and standing for hours watching the machines. [. . .] This penchant has remained with me all my life, and today I have still as much pleasure in watching a steam-engine or a fine locomotive at work as I have in contemplating a picture by Raphael or Corregio ” (qtd. in Robert H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home,” McClure’s Magazine [Jan. 1894]: 118). Intending that Jules follow in his footsteps as a lawyer, Pierre Verne sent him to Paris in 1848 to study law. The correspondence between father and son during the ensuing ten years shows that Jules took his studies seriously, completing his law degree in just two years. But his letters home also make quite clear that Jules had renewed his lifelong passion for literature. Inspired by authors such as Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Théophile Gautier, and introduced (via family contacts on his mother’s side) into several high-society Parisian literary circles, the young Romantic Verne began to devote himself as never before to his writing . From 1847 to 1862, he composed poetry, wrote several plays and a novel entitled Un Prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839, unpublished during his lifetime), and penned a variety of short stories that he published in the popular French journal Musée des familles to supplement his meager income: “Les Premiers navires de la marine mexicaine” (1851, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy), “Un Voyage en ballon” (1851, A Balloon Journey), “Martin Paz” (1852, Martin Paz), “Maître Zacharius” (1854, Master Zacharius), and “Un Hivernage dans les glaces” (1855, Wintering in the Ice). Some of his plays were performed in local Parisian theaters : Les Pailles rompues (1850, Broken Straws), Le Colin-Maillard (1853, Blind Man’s Bluff ), Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine (1855, The Companions of the Marjoram), Monsieur de Chimpanzé (1858, Mister Chimpanzee), L’Auberge des Ardennes (1860, The Inn of the Ardennes), and Onze jours de siège (1861, Eleven Days of Siege). During this period, Verne also became close friends with Alexandre Dumas père and Dumas fils and, through the former’s intervention, eventually became the secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique in...