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the stage. His characters constantly strike dramatic poses: Ned Land with
harpoon upraised, Phileas Fogg reappearing stage-right in his London club
at the last possible tick of the clock. The minor characters - comic Scots,
Russians, Jews - are all stage dialect and glued-on beards, instantly
recognizable to period readers, yet fresh because of cross-genre effects.
They brought a protocinematic flash to readers used to the gluey, soulful
character studies of, say, Stendhal.

The books we remember, the books determined people still occasionally read,
are products of Verne in his thirties and forties. (His first novel was
written at thirty-five.) In these early books, flashes of young Jules'
student radicalism periodically surface for air, much like the Nautilus.
The character of Captain Nemo, for instance, is often linked to novelistic
conventions of the Byronic hero. Nemo is, in fact, a democratic terrorist
of the period of '48, the year when the working-class flung up Paris
barricades, and, during a few weeks of brief civil war, managed to kill off
more French army officers than were lost in the entire Napoleonic
campaigns. The uprising was squelched, but Jules' generation of Paris '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
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