Biographie  Jules Verne et Nantes  Souvenirs d'enfance  Repères chronologiques  Les statues

Jules Verne's world and life Jules Verne, a Native of Nantes Pierre Verne, from Provins, in the country surrounding Paris, purchased a solicitor's practice in Nantes in 1826, and married Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe the following year. Their marriage produced five children: Jules, on February 8th, 1828, Paul, Anna, Mathilde and Marie. Jules Verne was born in Nantes's Ile Feydeau neighbourhood, a real island back then, isolated across an arm of the Loire River. For the first fourteen years of his life, he lived at 2, Quay Jean-Bart, in a building overlooking the confluence of the Erdre and Loire rivers. As for the family's country house in Chantenay, it afforded a vantage point over the entire port's facilities and traffic, all the way to the heart of the city. It wasn't until Jules Verne was twelve that he saw the ocean for the first time. However, islands, ports and ships were already familiar sights and fantasies, and were to become favourite themes in many of his works. Poet at fifteen Occasional verse was customary practice in the Verne family. Weddings and births were celebrated with love and family-themed poetry. Jules Verne began writing verse at a young age. Indeed, he told a journalist in 1904: "Beginning age twelve or fourteen, I carried a pencil at all times and, in the days when I attended school, I wrote endlessly, chiefly practising verse". He was a teenager when he began filling the pages of a pair of notebooks with poetry, to which he kept adding as long as he was alive and which remained unpublished until 1989. Every genre is represented side by side in the books, from lyricism to satire, from romantic fervour to cabaret rhymes. He later turned lyricist when he had his composer friend Aristide Hignard set his poems to music. A compilation of the resulting songs was published in 1857 with the title Rimes et Mélodies. The Tribulations of a Native of Nantes in Paris Jules Verne had moved 'up' to Paris to finish his law degree. In the early 1850s, though, while unaware that he was to become a novelist, he knew he'd never practice law. Indeed, he never would go back and take over from his father as a solicitor. Hoping for eventual fame and fortune from his works, he delighted in whatever Parisian pleasures he could afford, with odd jobs supplementing his father's modest allowance. His correspondence with his parents focused on his daily life and on-going predicament: how could a young man considering a literary career possibly be seen around the salons in a tattered shirt? How to resist the temptation of buying (on credit) a piano or a book collection in perfect condition? However, he soon began publishing material in Musée des familles, whose editor was Pitre-Chevalier, a fellow native of Nantes. The stage, from the Graslin in Nantes to the Châtelet in Paris Jules Verne had always thought of himself as a playwright. While, at age 17, he was already imitating Victor Hugo in romantic plays, success came initially with light comedy and operetta. Thanks to Alexandre Dumas, he had Les pailles rompues (later played in Nantes at the Graslin theatre) and Le Colin-maillard, set to music composed by his faithful Aristide Hignard, performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique, where he would later be secretary. Many years later, success went from mild to huge with Verne and D'Ennery's stage adaptations of Around the World in Eighty Days, Michael Strogoff and The Children of Captain Grant. Allied with the pomp of lavish productions, the playwright's expertise drew crowds and the performances sold out every night for months at the Châtelet and Porte-Saint-Martin theatres. Along with the novels, indeed, it was the theatre, his first calling, that earned Jules Verne fame and fortune. On January 31st, 1863, A novelist was born. On that date, an unknown writer's first novel went on the market, published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, namely Five Weeks in a Balloon, by Jules Verne. While two thousand copies were initially printed, 76,000 would sell in the author's lifetime. The title was only outsold by Around the World in Eighty Days, with 108,000 copies.B Under the terms of an agreement with Hetzel, the following year, Jules Verne was committed to deliver two books per year. From 1865 on, their collaboration yielded three volumes every year. When Hetzel passed away, in 1886, his son took over and kept publishing the Extraordinary Journeys, reaching 62 titles in 47 volumes. Within the publishing house, Jules Verne was more than a prolific writer. He also co-edits the Magasin d'éducation et de récréation, a periodical created by Hetzel and Jean Macé with the purpose of offering families "a serious and attractive learning tool, agreeable to parents as well as beneficial to children". The Publishing House on Rue Jacob, Paris Prior to setting up a publishing house at 18, rue Jacob, Hetzel had been thoroughly involved in the worlds of publishing and politics. A committed republican, he had taken part in the February 1848 revolution and held office in the interim government as Foreign Minister Lamartine's head of staff. As a result, he had to flee abroad to Belgium when Napoleon III took power, and could not return to France until 1859. In 1844, he had started Le diable à Paris, a journal gathering contributions from Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, George Sand, Stendhal et Eugène Sue, and illustrations by Gavarni, Grandville and Bertall. Later, further prestige came to the group when it was joined by Erkmann-Chatrian, Victor Hugo and Jules Sandeau. Publishing was not Hetzel's sole activity; he was also a translator and a writer. Under the pen name of P.-J. Stahl, he helped fill the pages of the Magasin d'éducation et de récréation, and he was responsible for the stories in the children's books he published. Amiens, pop. 61,063 Jules Verne's life can be broken up into twenty years in Nantes, twenty-three in Paris and thirty-four in Amiens, pop. 61,063, as highlighted in his "Geography of France". Married in 1857 to Honorine de Viane, from Amiens, he moved to his wife's hometown in 1871, with their son Michel and Honorine's two daughters from her first marriage. While he led a well-ordered bourgeois existence and, abiding by his wife's wishes, entertained the high society, the study's lonesome toil had more appeal to him than polite small talk around the drawing room. A crowning achievement for such a leading citizen, he was voted in as town councillor in 1888. He was in charge of theatre activities and spent considerable time there. He delivered speeches at the secondary school on prize giving day, and officially opened the circus in 1889. Sailing, from the Coralie to the Saint-Michel Verne family lore has it that eleven-year old runaway Jules boarded the Coralie, an India-bound three-masted schooner, as a stowaway. That event has not been confirmed in the least, but Jules Verne's passion for ships and seafaring was real. T he many novels inspired by the author's real life travels dispel a second widespread belief, claiming the Extraordinary Journeys to be the works of a homebody at heart. His first journey, to Great Britain in 1859, gave rise not only to Backwards to Britain, first published in 1989, but also to The Black Indies and The Green Ray. A Floating City amounted to a romanticised account of his Atlantic crossing aboard the largest steamship in the world, the Great-Eastern. He successively owned three boats, all three of them named Saint-Michel. He took the third on several extended Mediterranean cruises, which provided inspiration for Mathias Sandorf and Clovis Dardentor. Slave of Longhand Newly settled in Picardy and overburdened by Hetzel's assignments, Jules Verne humorously signed off a letter to his publisher with "yours grindfully". As Balzac did with La comédie humaine, or contemporary Zola with Les Rougon-Macquart, he put together a vast body of novelistic fiction. While their size was impressive, however, his Extraordinary Journeys merely amounted to a fraction of his production. His manuscripts, most of which are kept at the City of Nantes Library, were the fruit of nearly sixty years of relentless toil, from the first attempts at playwriting, on odd-sized notebooks criss-crossed with emendations, to the mature novelist's works, methodically and systematically laid out. There were obvious changes in the theme selection and the work method, but it took both the visionary's dazzling inspiration and the writer's daily toil at the desk to produce From the Earth to the Moon and Round the World in Eighty Days. Not satisfied with his relentless correcting and repeated rewriting, Jules Verne wrote to his publisher several times every week, often ending his letters with a pressing request for new proofs, which never came soon enough! * Biographie extraite du fascicule Le monde de Jules Verne - bibliothèque municipale de Nantes 2001. Version française Plus de repères chronologiques sur Jules Verne >> Plus d'infos sur les souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse Jules Verne à Nantes >> Plus d'infos sur les trésors de manuscrits nantais >> Plus d'infos sur les voyages extraordinaires >>