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Atlanta Constitution--1902

From: <1001~at~atlanticbb.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:24:47 -0400
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Jan 28, 1902

Verne Dying in Poverty

ChicagoTribune: Jules Verne, "he of the great imagination," as the French call him, the writer of eighty fabulously successful novels, lies dying aat his hoje in Amiens, old, bllind, and penniless. His son is now in England with the hope of getting some of his father's admirers to place their names on a subscription list that the dying man may lack neither doctors nor medecine while he yet lives, nor a decent burial when he dies.

The world's farewelltothe novelist must be to him a bitter contrst to its welcome and to the hospitality he enjoyed during his stay. From every point of view his life has been successful. He had fame in every civilized country, money in conseequence thereof, the friendship of the great among his countrymen,hearth,, and the love of a devoted wife. Today the last alone remains to him. His fame diminished as his writing waned. He had spent his money, and the faculty of makine more departed with the advent of old age. His friends are dead, andhe has become blind.

Verne's books were a new sort, different in kind from any thaat had been published in France. The love motif was entirely absent. His heroes were adventurerors, travelers, who nevertheless in contradistinction to the conventional daredevil, spent some of their time either in geteting beautiful maidens into distress by breaking theirhearts or in tetting them out of it by breaking their maligner's h----. The Verne adventurers fight and beat other men or more frequently nature. The laws of time and graviityare their pet antiipathies. the tales were all pseudo-scientific. their author succeded in accomplishing the previously imossible, for he made the marriage between science and fiction, two creatures of an incompatible temperament, happy. At least, so far as the lay world could judge.But he himself was not made happy by his work. In his ater days he has been frequently melancholy, because, as he continually said, he thought he had accompllished nothing worthy in literature. A favorite remark of his has been: 'Je ne compte pas dans la literature Francais."

to be continued.
nwolcott2~at~post.harvard.edu
Received on Thu 19 Jun 2008 - 07:27:43 IDT

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