DEATH OF JULES VERNE

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12853, 29 April 1905, Page 2 (Supplement)

DEATH OF JULES VERNE

HIS NOVELS OF THE ROMANCE OF

SCIENCE. Jules Verne, the famous novelist, who died on March 24, was a Frenchman of a rare typea man of letters who did not want to live in Paris, but considered the provinces good enough for him. Born in 1828, at Nantes, he has died at Amiens, where most of the intervening portion of his life had been spent, and where, for many years, lis served his fellow citizens as a town councillor. Like most men of letters, he tried mora than one profession before discovering his true vocation. He qualified as a barrister, but never practised, deserting the law to become secretary to Emile Perrin, manager of the Theatre Lyrique, and, throwing up this appointment to seek fortune, bub by no means to find it, on the Bourse. His first literary compositions were tragedies, which still remain unacted. Then followed comedies which did get. produced : " Les Mailles Itompucs" at the Gymnase, and "Onze Jouxi de Siege" at th- Vaudeville ; some short stories, in the vein of Edgar Allan l'oe, contributed to Le Musee des Families;" and a libretto lor a comic opera at the Bouffes, containing th.> spirited refrain Ah! me voilla finge! Que tela me tliimge: The first of his work. 1 ,, however, which the world in general knows was "Five Weeks in a Balloon." Its success was such that the author felt tempted to " faire grand" in the sense of Balzac and Zola, but was deterred by a publisher';? advice. " You are a specialist," said M. Hetzel; "specialise." And he offered a contract whereby the writer undertook to write and the publisher To publish two volumes annually in the romantic vein. The agreement was accepted, and M. Jules Verne went on writing for incle than half a century, and put his name to at least a hundred novels, of which the best-known are " The Blockade Runners," " Twenty Thousand' Leagues under the Sea," "Dr. Ox's Experiment," "Round the World in Eighty Days," Front the Earth to the Moon," "The Clipper of the. Clouds," and "Michel Strogoff." It may be mentioned that the last-named st-./y lost the Petit Journal, which publishe it serially, eighty thousand subscribers in a week. The readers of that popular newspaper preferred dark stories of mystery and crime, such as were supplied by Emile Richebourg, and insisted upon having them. Jules Verne was ever their heads. Jules Verne, who has written so many stories of travel, is not himself a traveller. He has been yachting in the Mediterranean, but that is pracfucally all. Instead of displacing himself, he studied geography and topography, and found thai that served his turn as well. " You must have lived in Roma for years," an Italian once said to him, at the close of a long conversation in the coursc of which he hud shown himself intimately acquainted with the streets of the Eternal City. " I have never been there at all," was Jules Verne's reply. Most of the studies which mady such " tours de force" jmssibl# were pursued in the Amiens public library. There the author read all sorts of things, but in particular read the scientific periodicals, getting through about twenty of these on every day of his life, and scissoring such paragraphs as seemed likely to be useful in the future. He read the English novelists— "in translations, —and was very enthusiastic about Dickens and Sterne, Of the former he exclaimed, " How the figures seem actually to live, and their printed utterances to become transformed into audible speech. 1 have read and reread his masterpieces again and again, and so has my wife." And,, on another occasion, " You have everything in Dickens—imagination, love, charity, pity for the poor and oppressed, in tact everything." There are few civilised languages into which the principal romances of Jule* Verne have not been translated, and in which they have not achieved popularity.