"Bruce Sterling. Catscan {angl., new}" - читать интересную книгу автора

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' legion of literary groupies. After this,
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 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 wildly in a brokerage floor "buy" signal.