# Works of Jules Verne/Volume 1

This is to certify that the
Edition de l'Académie
of the
Works of Jules Verne
is limited to three hundred numbered copies of fifteen volumes each; and that this set is registered as
No. 159
Registrar
A DANGEROUS MOMENT
The "Victoria" was flying almost above the troop of horsemen who were riding with loose reins after Joe. The doctor in the front of the car held the ladder extended, ready to launch it at the proper moment. Joe still kept about fifty feet ahead of his pursuers. The "Victoria" passed them.
"Attention!" cried Samuel to Kennedy.
"I am ready."
"Joe, look out!" cried the doctor in a ringing voice, as he threw down the ladder, whose lowest rounds dragged up the dust as they fell.
At the doctor's summons, Joe, without checking his horse, turned round. The ladder was close to him, and in a moment he had caught it.—Page 367.
WORKS
of
Jules Verne
EDITED BY
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
Professor of English, College of the City of New York;
Author of "The Technique of the Novel," etc.
Vincent Parke and Company
NEW YORK :: :: LONDON
Copyright, 1911,
by Vincent Parke and Company.
JULES VERNE
HE expander of horizons," is what a noted critic called Jules Verne. He was the prophet, the foreseer and foreteller of our great mechanical age. He belongs to-day not to France, but to the world. Widely as his works have been read in his own country, their popularity has been yet wider in America and England. Much as he has been honored at home, even higher glory has been accorded him, we are told, in far Japan. His books have been translated not only into all the usual languages, but into Hebrew, Japanese, Polish and even Arabic.
Jules Verne Verne was a universal teacher, both of youth and age. From him the whole world garnered knowledge without effort; for all listened with pleasure while he spun his tales. He was a supreme master of imagination, ​and without imagination man is nothing; for all greatness is but a phase of imagination. It is the creative force of the world. Under Verne's guidance his readers travel in every land, examine every mode of life and labor, view all the strangest wonders of the universe.
The educators of youth have been swift to recognize the high value of the masterworks of this mighty magician. His simpler tales are used as text-books in our American schools, both in French and English. And the conscience of the moralist can here approve the eager pleasure of the reader, and bid youth continue to bask in this glorious light of wonder and adventure. There is not an evil nor uncleanly line in all the volumes. Never did anyone lay aside one of Verne's books without being a better, broader, nobler human being because of their perusal.
Surely the time is ripe when a definitive edition of the master's works should be given to American readers. Jules Verne died in 1905; and, though he left behind him in the hands of his Paris publishers an unusually large number of unissued works, the last of these has now been given to the public. Moreover we can now estimate his work calmly, unconfused by the tumultuous and very varying opinions pronounced upon it by the French critics of his own day.
​ Verne's Home Their obituary reviews of his work differed widely as to its value. On the one hand, the noted critic, Morel, in the authoritative "Nouvelle Revue" declared Verne to be the leading educator and perhaps the most read author of the new twentieth century. At the other extreme were the unsigned assaults of those who could only make a mock of what was too open and too honest for them to comprehend.
Verne was no intricate analyst, elaborating such subtleties of thought and ethics as only subtle folk can understand. He spoke for the great mass of men, giving them such tales as they could follow, upholding always such a standard of courage and virtue, simple and high, as each of us can honor for himself and be glad to set before his children.
It is not only "boy's literature" that began with Verne. One might almost say that man's literature, the story that appeals to the business man, the practical man, began then also. The great French "Encyclopédie Universelle" sums up his books by saying, "They instruct a little, entertain much, and overflow with life."
​Jules Verne was the establisher of a new species of story-telling, that which interweaves the most stupendous wonders of science with the simplest facts of human life. Our own Edgar Allen Poe had pointed the way; and Verne was ever eager to acknowledge his indebtedness to the earlier master. But Poe died; and it was Verne who went on in book after book, fascinating his readers with cleverly devised mysteries, instructing and astonishing them with the new discoveries of science, inspiring them with the splendor of man's destiny. When, as far back as 1872, his early works were "crowned" by the French Academy, its Perpetual Secretary, M. Patin, said in his official address, "The well-worn wonders of fairyland are here replaced by a new and more marvelous world, created from the most recent ideas of science."
More noteworthy still is Verne's position as the true, the astonishingly true, prophet of the discoveries and inventions that were to come. He was far more than the mere creator of that sort of scientific fairyland of which Secretary Patin spoke, and with which so many later writers, Wells, Haggard and Sir Conan Doyle, have since delighted us. He himself once keenly contrasted his own methods with those of Wells, the man he most admired among his many followers. Wells, he pointed out, looked centuries ahead and out of pure imagination ​embodied the unknowable that some day might perchance appear. "While I," said Verne, "base my inventions on a groundwork of actual fact." He illustrated this by instancing his submarine, the Nautilus. "This," said he, "when carefully considered, is a submarine mechanism about which there is nothing wholly extraordinary, nor beyond the bounds of actual scientific knowledge. It rises and sinks by perfectly well-known processes. . . . Its motive force even is no secret; the only point at which I have called in the aid of imagination is in. the application of this force, and here I have purposely left a blank, for the reader to form his own conclusion, a mere technical hiatus."
So it comes that Verne's prophecies already spring to realization on every side. He foresaw and in his vivid way described not only the submarine, but also, in his "Steam-house," the auto-mobile, in his "Robur the Conqueror," the aeroplane. Navigable balloons, huge aerial machines heavier than air, the telephone, moving pavements, stimulation by oxygen, compressed air, compressed food, all were existant among his clear-sighted visions. And to-day as we read those even bolder prophecies, accounts that excited only the laughter of his earlier critics, it is with ever-increasing wonder as to which will next come true.
His influence has been tremendous, not only ​upon story-telling, but upon life. One French commentator cries with profound admiration that Verne "wholly changed the conversation of the drawing-rooms." Another, with perhaps broader understanding, declares that he revolutionized the thought of the young men of his earlier days. "He taught us that the forces of nature, enemies to man in his ignorance, stood ready to be our servants once we had learned to master and control them."
For a writer so much read, Jules Verne has been very little talked about. His personality became submerged in his work. Moreover he was not a Parisian, not a member of the mutual admiration club which exists perforce in every artistic center, where the same little circle of able men constantly meeting, and writing one about the other, impress all their names upon the public. Verne early with-drew from the turmoil and clamor of the French capital to dwell in peace at Amiens. To ignore Paris, to withdraw deliberately from its already Verne's Tower Workroom won caresses! Could any crime have been more heinous in Parisian eyes? It explains the rancor of at least some of the French critics in their attitude toward our author.
Known thus only through his books, yet by them known ​ The Saint Michel so universally, Verne has already become a myth. Legends have gathered around his form. In Germany writers have ponderously explained—and believed—that he was not a Frenchman at all, but a Jew, a native of Russian Poland. They gave him a birthplace, in the town of Plock, and a name, Olshewitz, of which Vergne or Verne was only a French translation, since both words mean the alder tree. In Italy about 1886 the report became widespread that he was dead, or rather that he had never lived, that he was only a name used in common by an entire syndicate of authors, who contributed their best works and best efforts to popularize the series of books whose profits they shared in common. Even in France itself men learned to say, for the sake of the antithesis, that this, the greatest of all writers of travel, had gained all his knowledge out of books and never himself had traveled beyond Amiens.
Lest to American readers also, the man, the truly lovable man, Verne, should become wholly lost behind his books, let us make brief record of him here. He was born in Nantes, the chief city of ​Brittany, on February 8, 1828. His father was a lawyer in good circumstances, and Jules' early training was also for the law. The chief pleasure of his youth lay in a battered old sailing boat, in which he and his brother Paul, taking turns at being captain, played all the stories of the sea, and explored every reach of the River Loire, even down to the mighty ocean. That sloop still echoes through his every book.
Sent to Paris to complete his studies, Jules soon drifted away from the law. He became part and parcel of all the Bohemian life of Paris, a student, artist, author, poet, clerking all day that he might live and dream and scribble all the night. A typical "son of the boulevards," they called him in those days. He became a close friend of the younger Dumas, and was introduced to his friend's yet more celebrated father, the Alexander Dumas of romance. The father guided and advised him; the son collaborated with him in his first literary success—if literary it can be called—a little one act comedy in verse, "Broken Straws," produced at the "Gymnase"' in 1850. Then came librettos for comic operas, short stories for little-known story papers; and young Verne was fairly launched upon a career of authorship.
In 1857 he journeyed eighty miles to Amiens, so the story is told, to act as best man at the ​wedding of a friend. Before this he had long vowed himself to a single life. Art, he said, and woman were two different mistresses, and no man could truly serve both. But at Amiens he arrived late, the bridal party was already gone, and no one was left to receive the laggard but a sister of the bride, a young widow who had stayed at home to keep from casting her gloom upon the festivity. Within the hour both Jules and the young widow, Mme. de Vianne, had abandoned all their former views, and recognized each other as life companions. This sounds like another legend; but it seems well vouched for. Verne married Mme. de Vianne within the year.
In 1860 or shortly after, Verne met the one other person who was most to influence his life, the great Parisian publisher, Hetzel, who had issued the works of Hugo, of Georges Sand, and of DeMusset. Hetzel, who had been in exile in Brussels, returned to Paris in 1860: and our author soon began writing for him. The two became warm friends.
Verne's first full length novel or story was issued by Hetzel in 1863. This epoch-making book was "Five Weeks in a Balloon." In it the young author attained for the first time his characteristic vein of explorations into unknown regions, intermingling the new science with adventures and heroism as old as man.
​The book was a tremendous success. The whole world read, and was delighted. Hetzel started a "Magazine of Education and Recreation," which was chiefly supported by Verne's writings. Author Verne's Tombstone and publisher made a twenty year contract, under which Verne was to produce two books a year; and being thus assured of financial independence, Verne in 1870 withdrew with his wife to her native Amiens. There he lived in quietude for over thirty-five years, until his death.
The legend that he never quitted Amiens at all is, however, false. Twice at least he journeyed to the British Isles, and once, though before his retirement to Amiens, to America and once to Scandinavia. Moreover his youthful love for sailing clung to him. In a little ten ton boat, he cruised much in summer along the French coast; and later in life he owned a handsome hundred foot steam yacht, the "Saint Michel," in which he visited Mediterranean Africa, Malta and much of the European coast.
​Chiefly, however, Verne's later life was devoted to his books, and to the civic world of Amiens. He was a member of the town council, an active and earnest member, who won the devoted regard of his fellow townsmen.
He and the grand cathedral of Amiens were the city's twin celebrities, their pictures standing side by side in shop-windows and decorating postal cards. The Verne homestead was on one of the principal boulevards, a handsome house with, at its rear, a tower, the topmost room of which formed a secluded den where the writer worked.
In this tower room, he continued steadily producing his stories. As far back as 1872 he had been a candidate for the celebrated French Academy, with strong chances of election. But the Academy, while it crowned his individual books, refused membership to their author, though after that first candidacy he in the course of his later life watched the entire membership of the Academy pass and be renewed twice over. His friends, especially his Amiens townfolk, declared that his exclusion was due to Parisian jealousy, and that the Academy lost far more honor than the author by ignoring him. "Paris," said one of them, "had nothing worthy of this great man. He sought a place for work; Paris offers its great men only lounging places."
​Yet, in no spirit of unfairness, we must admit that Jules Verne's claim upon the Academy rather decreased with added years. Most of his later books by no means equal his earlier ones. A man over seventy may well be pardoned if he no longer writes with the fresh fancy and confident vigor of thirty-five. To present all Verne's later work to American readers would be fair neither to the fame of the author nor to the pocket of the public. Therefore a labor of selection has been necessary. All the works that have made Jules Verne beloved, all that present his imaginary inventions, his prophecies of the future, every work that honest critics have thought worth preserving, is included in this edition. It presents not only those books crowned by the French Academy, but all those crowned by the verdict of that final judge, that best of judges when long years run full, that judge to whom all our work must be submitted in the end, the general public.
To them this work is dedicated.
CONTENTS Volume One
Illustrations
Volume One
Layout 2
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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