"Bruce Sterling - Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

cute. It was nothing of the kind. The truth of the
matter is t

hat the eleven-year-old Jules resourcefully
bribed a cabin-boy of his own age, and impersonated
his way onto a French merchant cruiser bound for the
Indies. In those days of child labor, the crew
accepted Jules without hesitation. It was a mere fluke
that a neighbor happened to spot Jules during his
escape and informed against him. His father had to
chase him down in a fast chartered steam-launch.
This evidence of mulishness seems to have thrown
a scare into the Verne family, and in years to come
they would treat Jules with caution. Young Jules never
really broke with his parents, probably because they
were an unfailing source of funds. Young Jules didn't
much hold with wasting time on day-jobs. He was
convinced that he was possessed of genius, despite the
near-total lack of hard evidence.
During his teens and twenties, Jules fell for
unobtainable women with the regularity of clockwork.
Again and again he was turned down by middle-class
nymphs whose parents correctly assessed him as an art
nut and spoiled ne'er-do-well.
Under the flimsy pretext of studying law, Jules
managed to escape to Paris. He had seen the last of
stuffy provincial France, or so he assumed: "Well," he
wrote to a friend, "I'm leaving at last, as I wasn't
wanted here, but one day they'll see what stuff he was
made of, that poor young man they knew as Jules
Verne."
The "poor young man" rented a Parisian garret
with his unfailing parental stipend. He soon fell in
with bad company--namely, the pop-thriller writer
Alexandre Dumas Pere (author of _Count of Monte
Cristo_, _The Three Musketeers_. about a million
others). Jules took readily to the role of declasse'
intellectual and professional student. During the
Revolution of 1848 he passed out radical political
pamphlets on Paris streetcorners. At night, embittered
by female rejection, he wrote sarcastic sonnets on the
perfidy of womankind. Until, that is, he had his first
affair with an obliging housemaid, one of Dumas'

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legion of literary groupies. After this