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Extract from Catholic Encyclopaedia

From: Ralf Tauchmann <ralf.tauchmann~at~t-online.de>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 13:15:37 +0200
To: jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il

Dear fellow Vernians,

Do you know the web site of the Catholic Encyclopedia
("http://newadvent.org/cathen/") and the article regarding Jules Verne? If yes,
don't mind me reproducing it here.

Kind regards

Ralf Tauchmann
(Radebeul, Germany)


Jules Verne

Novelist, b. at Nantes, France, 1828; d. at Amiens, 1905. His first literary
venture was a little play, Les pailles rompues", which was produced on the stage
in the early fifties, but the difficulty he experience in overcoming the
ill-will of the theatre managers discouraged him, and he began to publish, in
the "Musée des Familles", novelettes after the fashion of Edgar Allan Poe. One
of them, "A Drama in the Air", attracted the attention of the public. The
subject is this: a madman embarks by mistake in the car of an aeronaut, and
while in the air he tries to kill his companion. Verne had discovered his forte
and it was his good fortune at this juncture to find in his publisher, Mr.
Herzel, a man of sound judgment, who advised him not to waste his strength, but
to limit his energies to the kind of novel he seemed to have discovered. Verne
followed this advice, and success crowned his talent and strenuous work. Most of
his novels have had a vogue that has been denied many a masterpiece of French
literature, and this vogue has not been limited to France; it has spread beyond
its frontiers. Verne was wont to show to visitors, not without a certain
legitimate pride, the translations of his works kept in his library, where they
occupied a goodly number of shelves, on which every language seemed to be
represented. This wonderful success was undoubtedly due to the charming talent
of the writer and the public's fondness for novels of adventure, but there was
another cause for it, at least in so far as France was concerned.
The French reading public had become tired of the pale copies of Dumas' stories
that were published in the early fifties, and it was Verne's good luck and merit
to revive in an attractive manner a kind of novel that seemed to be exhausted.
With no less dexterity, and, it must be said, with no greater regard to
accuracy, then that displayed by Dumas in his adaptation of history to the whims
and fancies of story-telling, he brought science into the realm of fiction, and
whatever may be the final verdict on the value of his work, he deserves the
commendation that none of his books contains anything offensive to good taste or
morals. Verne lived and died a Catholic.

The following are the best-known of his novels that have been translated into
English: "Around the World in Eighty Days"; "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea"; "Michael Strogoff"; "A Floating City, and the Blockade Runners"; "Hector
Servadac"; "Dick Sands"; "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth"; "The Mysterious
Island"; "From the Earth to the Moon"; "The Steam House"; and "The Giant Raft".

P. MARIQUE
Transcribed by Thomas M. Barrett
Dedicated to the memory of Jules Verne
Received on Wed 28 Jun 2000 - 14:17:51 IDT

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