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

'48, like that of May '68, never truly forgot.
Jules did okay by his "new form of the novel."
He eventually became quite wealthy, though not through
publishing, but the theater. (Nowadays it would be
movie rights, but the principle still stands.) Jules,
incidently, did not write the stage versions of his
own books; they were done by professional theater
hacks. Jules knew the plays stank, and that they
travestied his books, but they made him a fortune. The
theatrical version of his mainstream smash, _Michael
Strogoff_, included such lavish special effects as a
live elephant on stage. It was so successful that the
term "Strogoff" became contemporary Paris slang for
anything wildly bravissimo.
Fortified with fame and money, Jules lunged
against the traces. He travelled to America and
Scandinavia, faithfully toting his notebooks. He
bought three increasingly lavish yachts, and took to
sea for days at a time, where he would lie on his
stomach scribbling _Twenty Thousand Leagues_ against
the deck.
During the height of his popularity, he
collected his family and sailed his yacht to North
Africa, where he had a grand time and a thrilling
brush with guntoting Libyans. On the way back, he
toured Italy, where the populace turned out to greet
him with fireworks and speeches. In Rome, the Pope
received him and praised his books because they
weren't smutty. His wife, who was terrified of
drowning, refused to get on the boat again, and
eventually Verne sold it.
At his wife's insistence, Jules moved to the
provincial town of Amiens, where she had relatives.
Downstairs, Mme. Verne courted local society in

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drawing rooms crammed

with Second Empire bric-a-brac,
while Jules isolated himself upstairs in a spartan
study worthy of Nemo, its wall lined with wooden
cubbyholes full of carefully labeled index-cards. They
slept in separate bedrooms, and rumor says Jules had a
mistress in Paris, where he often vanished for weeks.
Jules' son Michel grew up to be a holy terror,
visiting upon Jules all the accumulated karma of his
own lack of filial piety. The teenage Michel was in
trouble with cops, was confined in an asylum, was even