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

, young Jules
loosened up to the point of moral collapse and was
soon, by his own admission, a familiar figure in all
the best whorehouses in Paris.
This went on for years. Young Jules busied
himself writing poetry and plays. He became a kind of
gofer for Dumas, devoting vast amounts of energy to a
Dumas playhouse that went broke. (Dumas had no head
for finance--he kept his money in a baptismal font in
the entryway of his house and would stuff handfuls
into his pockets whenever going out.)
A few of Jules' briefer pieces--a domestic
farce, an operetta--were produced, to general critical
and popular disinterest. During these misspent years
Jules wrote dozens of full-length plays, most of them
never produced or even published, in much the vein of
would-be Hollywood scriptwriters today. Eventually,
having worked his way into the theatrical
infrastructure through dint of prolonged and
determined hanging-out, Jules got a production job in
another playhouse, for no salary to speak of. He
regarded this as his big break, and crowed vastly to
his family in cheerful letters that made fun of the
Pope.
Jules moved in a fast circle. He started a
literary-artistic group of similar souls, a clique
appropriately known as the Eleven Without Women.
Eventually one of the Eleven succumbed, and invited
Jules to the wedding. Jules fell immediately for the
bride's sister, a widow with two small daughters. She
accepted his proposal. (Given Jules' record, it is to
be presumed that she took what she could get.)
Jules was now married, and his relentlessly
unimaginative wife did what she could to break him to
middle-class harness. Jules' new brother-ln-law was
doing okay in the stock market, so Jules figured he
would give it a try. He extorted a big loan from his
despairing father and bought a position on the Bourse.
He soon earned a reputation among his fellow brokers
as a cut-up and general weird duck. He didn't manage
to go broke, but a daguerreotype of the period shows

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his mood. The extended Verne

family sits stiffly
before the camera. Jules is the one in the back, his
face in a clown's grimace, his arm blurred as he waves