Voyages Extraordinaires
Since 1863, Verne had been under contract with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who published each of his novels, beginning with "Five Weeks in a Balloon" (1863) and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864) and continuing through the rest of his books to form the novel sequence Hetzel called the "Voyages Extraordinaires". The arrangement gave Verne prominence as a novelist and a certain amount of financial stability, but under the terms of the contract Verne's profits barely earned him a living wage. Verne's fortunes changed markedly in 1874, when the stage adaptation of his novel "Around the World in Eighty Days" was a smash hit, running for 415 performances in its original production and quickly making Verne wealthy as well as famous as a playwright. Adapted with the collaboration of the showman d'Ennery, the play invented and codified the "pièce de grand spectacle", an extravagant theatrical genre that became intensely popular in Paris throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Verne and d'Ennery went on to adapt two other Verne novels, "The Children of Captain Grant" and "Michael Strogoff", as similarly spectacular plays.