The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1902-01-04
Old, Blind and Penniless, He Now
Asks For Help.
lChlcago TrIhnna

Chicago Tribune)
Jules Verne, ''he of the great imag-
nation" as the French call him. the
writer OF eighty fabulously successful
novels, lies dying at his home in
Amiens, old, blind and penniless. His
son is now in England with the hone
Of getting some OF his fathers admir-
ers to place their names on a subscrip-
ton list that the dying man may lack
neither doctors nor medicine while he
yet lives, nor decent burial when he
dies.
The worlds farewell to the novelist
must De to him a bitter contrast 10
its welcome and 20 the hospitality ne
enjoyed during his stay. From every
point Of view his life had been success
ful. He had fame in every civilized
country, money in consequence there
Of, the friendship of the great amc ne
his countrymen, health and the love of
4 devoted wife. Today the last alone
-emaiDs TO him. His fame diminished
as his writing waned. He had spent
his money and the faculty of making
more departed with the advent of old
age. His friends are dead and he has
become blind.
Nerne's books were a new sort, diff
ferent in kind from any that had been
published in France. The love motif
was entirely absent. His heroes were
Adventures, travellers, who neverthe-
less in cOntradistinction to the conven-
tional daredevil, spent none Of their
time either in getting beautiful maid
ems into distress by breaking their
hearts, or in getting them out of it by
breaking their maligners head. The
Verne adventures fight and beat other
men or more frequently nature. The
lars of time and gravity are their pet
antipathies. The tales were all pseudo
scientific. Their author succeeded in
accomplishing the previously impossi-
BILE for he made the marriage between
science and fiction, two creatures Of
Rh incompatible temperament, happy.
~ least so far as the lay world could
judge.
But he himself was not made happy
by his work. In his later days he has
been frequently melancholy, because,
as hecontinually said, he thought he
had accomplished nothing worthy in
literature. A favorite remark of his
has been: "Jene compile pas dams la
Literature Francois" Il amount to
nothing in French literature"
George Sands. the great woman nov
elist. admired his tales After reading
several stories which he wrote about
balloons and flying machines, she asked
him to take another tack. One of his
greatest novels, Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea-" followed.
Then one of Cookies tourist time ia
bles gave him an idea of Around the
World in Eighty Days" which is the
test known of his writings Even to-
-hev, h., Of f,o fr-v
tinental railroads a traveller manages
to make a circle around the earth in
less than eighty days he is wont to
boast Of having defeated the resource
ful Phineas FOgg.
Verne was not a traveller. He never
tried to visit cny of the places he wrote
about. The majority of the sites he
tells of are inaccessible to members of
this age and generation, anyhow, and
ma be their describer thought it was
not worth while to go to the rest. He
always said his hardest work came
when he had not read up about the
places he had not seen but would de-
scribe.
He worked hard. a fact shown by his
output-eighty Imaginative novels in
less .tnap forty years Arising at 4:30
in the morning, ne worked till II before
eating: then came breakfast. and in
the afternoon four or five hours more
OF work.
When the first draft Of book was
done he corrected and recorrected until
he had gone through the proof sheets
seven or eight times. His publishers
saw th1t his last correction looks en-
tireIy unlike the first draft: that the
outlines of tie plot and even the names
of the characters are unchanged.
Verne began 10 write at the age Of
II. Poetry it was then. and dreadful
foo" he says himself. When gradu-
ated from college he went on the Paris
bogrse. aid in the course of a few
months speculation lost considerable
money He was always glad of it,
hewever. because he claimed that he
was thus enabled to see at close range
that nervous energy and ligntnfng-like
thinking which MAX his heroes inter-
estinS.