Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page B

tight budget, prescribed by a father wary of the distractions available to a young man alone for the first time in the capital.
    Verne’s early life in Paris was far from easy. His father wasn’t sending him enough money to live even meagerly, and his health suffered as a result. He detailed his hardships in his letters home. The majority of the letters were spent accounting for daily expenses, detailing how much he spent on food and how much on clothes: “My accursed watch is costing me six francs in repairs, my umbrella fifteen francs, and I had to buy a pair of boots and a pair of shoes” (Lottman, p. 26). He bragged about finding a complete edition of Shakespeare for a bargain, but he complained at not having anything good to eat. “Ever since my arrival in Paris there hasn’t been a moment without a stomach ache,” he wrote to his parents (Lottman, p. 25). Occasionally, half of his face would fall into paralysis. He was tired. He was studying all the time, and, he complained to his parents, his law examinations would be “frightful.”
    These letters served two purposes. First, they convinced his father that he was living frugally and concentrating on his schoolwork. Second, they hid from his father his developing passion: Verne wanted to write for the stage.
    It was a golden age for French theater, very similar in some ways to Hollywood in the 1940s. A modestly successful playwright could expect to make enough money staging a mediocre play to support himself in style. A popular playwright would be celebrated and revered. Through a series of connections, Verne met and befriended Alexandre Dumas, author of the celebrated historical novel The Three Musketeers and one of the most successful playwrights of his time. Dumas and his son in turn introduced the young and ambitious Verne to others in their theatrical circles. They even collaborated with Verne on some of his works.
    At the same time, Verne became a periodic contributor to Musée des familles (The Family Museum), an educational magazine run by a friend from school. Verne’s work for the magazine took him to the Paris library, where he spent long hours gathering facts and culling through recent documentation on notable scientific events. He read about a hot-air balloon, Le Giant, that was three times larger than any balloon previously launched. He discovered articles on the famed 140-foot submarine Le Plongeur, the first to be powered by compressed air. He discovered Robert Fulton, who around 1800 had built a prototypical submarine, the Nautilus, which stored enough air to sustain its two-man crew for a five-hour dive.
    Through his reading, he became familiar with the major scientific and mechanical inventions of his time and developed an active interest in the quickening progress of technical discoveries. Once his research was complete, he put together fictional stories that highlighted the facts he had discovered. (He inserted bits of naval history into his story “The First Ships of the Mexican Navy” and recounted the push to discover the North Pole and the hardships of an Arctic winter in “A Winter in the Ice.”) Despite the hard work and long hours, his stories failed to bring him success; his name was even misspelled in at least two magazines. But his effort was far from wasted: Although he could not know it at the time, Musée des familles introduced him to a form of writing that would become his mainstay.
    His fiction was at best an extra paycheck once in a while, but it was also a distraction from the art of the stage. During Verne’s early years in Paris, he wrote about twenty-five plays, including comedy, farce, plays in verse, high tragedy, and musicals; while some were well received, most never made it to the stage. Still, the experience taught Verne valuable lessons. At the end of this period—what some have called his apprenticeship—he could write dialogue and invent plots, and he knew what it was to try and fail. Most importantly,