Paris in the Twentieth Century Read Free

his writing was done. He
traveled. He had always dreamed of discovering faraway lands. Now he could
afford even a voyage to America. But most of his traveling, as before, was done
on the printed page.
    In the
generation before Verne's birth a great Revolution, or rather a string of
revolutions going off like firecrackers, had introduced the politics of the impossible.
In his own lifetime, a similar string of technological and scientific
revolutions introduced the impossible into everyday life. Mankind's experience
of space, time, speed, mass, movement, was radically altered. It fell to Jules
Verne to bring this home to millions of readers, explain it, illustrate it,
and suggest what it might mean for generations to come. Fascinated by the new
world transformed by railroads and great steamers, Verne stood at the
crossroads of present and future, a poet of technology, of science, of the
power and the menace that they hold. In 1869, he imagined a mission to the moon
that prefigured the flight of Apollo 9 one century
later. "Our space vehicle," Frank Borman, the astronaut, wrote to
Verne's grandson, "was launched from Florida, like [Verne's]; it had the
same weight and the same height, and it splashed down in the Pacific a mere two
and a half miles from the point mentioned in the novel. " In 1879 he
evoked the first artificial satellite; in 1882 he wrote about the sort of
cosmic rays that physicists pursued between the two world wars.
    The
visionary writes about balloons, helicopters, heavier-than-air machines of
every sort, about the earth (1864) and its geology, about lunar travel (1865,
1870), about polar exploration (1866), about underwater travel (1869), about
electricity which powers the submarine Nautilus or produces a telephote enabling people to see each other
at a distance; and, of course, he writes about travel and exploration. All his
stories are full of wonders, all a bit ominous, and few are more curious than
the unpublished manuscript that Verne's great-grandson discovered in 1989, when
the sale of a family home forced him to dispense with a great bronze safe long
believed to be empty. The keys to the safe had been lost; it had to be opened
with a blowtorch.
    Temporarily
tucked under a pile of linen, the pages discovered in 1989 were examined later,
authenticated, and identified as a text that Hetzel had rejected late in
1863: "It's a hundred feet below Five Weeks in a
Balloon. .. Your Michel is a real goose with his verses. Can't he
carry parcels and remain a poet?" And the clincher: "No one today
will believe your prophecy. " Verne appears to have accepted Hetzel's verdict.
Not so our generation. Published in 1994, Paris in the
Twentieth Century proved an unexpected success, with two hundred
thousand copies sold in its first year and thirty translations under way,
including this one.
    From the
perspective of our century's end the future that Hetzel found unconvincing
appears more plausible. The young stockbroker who hated the Stock Exchange
warns against capitalism running riot, the young playwright whose plays had not
quite made it warns against a society where culture is at low ebb. Michel is
harnessed to his bank's Great Ledger as Orwell's Winston Smith is to the
Disinformation Office; Michel's bookish uncle sounds like one of the Book
People barely surviving in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 45L And yet this arch-critic (and Radical city councillor of Amiens) is also an
arch-conservative, especially in artistic tastes. To Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, he
prefers Gounod and Offenbach. Contemporary painting, for him, is nonexistent,
Courbet is a gross peasant, painting lost its soul when it abandoned form
(also the literary, poetic, thematic subjects of Romanticism). Let's not
forget that 1863 was the year of the Salon des refus é s, where Édouard Manet
showed his D é jeuner sur I'herbe: bad vintage for a Romantic palate.
    As for
poetry, if T. S. Eliot could work in a bank, one doesn't see why poor Michel
can't manage.