The Begum's Millions. Jules Verne

was most concerned, however, with the scientific accuracy of the novel. As someone who researched every detail of even his most extraordinary of Voyages extraordinaires, he was appalled by what he considered to be Laurie’s lack of understanding of the mechanics inherent in the weapons he was discussing. Since Verne thought that the novel’s main focus was on Schultze’s giant cannon and missile, he had little patience for any sloppiness on Laurie’s part:

      If l’abbé proves one thing, it is that he doesn’t know what a cannon is, and that he is unversed in the simplest rules of ballistics. I’ve spoken to some competent people about this subject! It’s just a rag of absurdities, from top to bottom. Everything has to be redone. Not even the invention of an asphyxiating gas shell is new. Can you see Mr. Krupp reading this novel. He would just shrug his shoulders! That we mock the Germans, so be it, but let’s not let them mock us even harder. Believe me, when I imagined the cannon in The Moon,¹² I stayed within the realm of what is possible, and I said nothing that was not exact. Here, everything is wrong, and yet, that’s what is at the heart of the novel (290).

      Verne goes on to repeat his claim that all of Laurie’s descriptions were mathematically and scientifically erroneous and further criticizes the absurdities of the plot, which he felt ended too abruptly: “It is as though it were being performed on stage and the hero had been hit on the head with a chimney in order to clumsily end the play” (290).

      For his part, Hetzel was stunned at Verne’s harsh criticism: “I knew that there would be parts of the novel that you would want to bypass or that would really bother you as you came across them. But I didn’t expect this complete demolition” (293). Yet, Hetzel, in his continuing role as fatherly mentor and pragmatic editor, was nevertheless able to nudge Verne into reconsidering this project for reasons that Verne might have overlooked in his first reading of the novel. In terms of the narrative, for example, Hetzel urged Verne to see the novel in political and philosophical terms rather than simply scientific ones. For Hetzel, the crux of the story was centered on the notion of the two cities: a totalitarian state revolving around an all-powerful tyrant, and the other, a free, open society based on reason and democracy. “The cannon is everything in the first state,” Hetzel remarked, “the torpedo is just an in case of in the second” (292). Hetzel was especially fascinated with the political structure of Stahlstadt and disagreed with Verne’s assertion that the ending, in which Schultze is frozen just as he is about to launch a devastating attack on France-Ville, was too sudden. As Hetzel explains, when Schultze accidentally auto-destructs, it is an “explosion of both the machine and the man. Everything dies with him, precisely because of that abuse of the concentration [of power in the hands of one individual]. It’s the despotic ideal that collapses, that necessarily had to abort, and that logically aborts. Not because a brick falls on his head, but because, in that system, the brick is inevitable and logical” (292).

      Hetzel also disagreed with several other narrative points that Verne critiqued in the original version. While Verne thought that Marcel’s initial entry into Stahlstadt was boring, and his escape ludicrous, Hetzel maintained that they were both important, and that his entry into the evil city, far from being tedious, was essential. While agreeing that the manner in which Laurie presented his ideas needed a great deal of improvement, Hetzel argued that Marcel’s penetration into Stahlstadt could be not only effective but also crucial to the novel as a whole. “On the contrary,” Hetzel maintained, “[Marcel’s entry into Stahlstadt] was the part that seemed to me the most worthy of what readers might consider to be particularly Vernian” (292). While Hetzel also pointed out some of Verne’s other criticisms that he disagreed with, such as the scene of little Carl in the mines (“As for the episode of the little worker — which is just one episode — it can’t harm the novel at all because it’s quite nice — and let me add that it existed in its own right, without any changes, in the first manuscript [of The Langevol Inheritance] which preceded The Black Indies” [292–93]), he ultimately gave Verne carte blanche to do as he pleased: “If, after all of this, you conceive of an entirely different book that would be better and in which the premise reduced to a question of science would be more apt to give you a good story […] the abbot’s book would be no more than a fifth wheel in the carriage of your affairs” (293). In an odd sort of coda to his letter, Hetzel felt obliged to condense his ideas into two sentences, which underline the intensity of the nationalistic Franco-German dialectic that would be at the core of Verne’s novel: “Summary: Germany can break up by too much force and concentration. France can quietly reconstitute itself by more freedom” (293).

      While Verne and Hetzel would exchange further letters regarding the technicalities of the novel, each of them made certain compromises that enhanced the final version. Verne, for example, dropped his obsession with the scientific veracity of the cannon and the missile, and ended the novel with Schultze’s accidentally asphyxiating himself in his laboratory just as he is preparing an even more lethal attack against France-Ville (Verne was insistent on this point, much to Hetzel’s delight as he thought it made the text more Verne-like). Although Verne initially wanted to drop the romantic side story of Marcel and Jeanne, which he thought added nothing to the novel, Hetzel persuaded him to include it in at least a perfunctory manner because he considered Marcel too important an opponent to Schultze not to be sufficiently fleshed out as a character. While there are no traces of Laurie’s original version (besides its ending, which has been published in the Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne), ¹³ it was apparently presented in two volumes, which both Verne and Hetzel agreed to condense into one. The only other point of contention between Hetzel and Verne revolved around the novel’s title, which Verne thought “said nothing” about the story. Verne juggled several titles in his mind, in fact, in order to arrive at the best “philosophical” definition of the novel: “Parisius or another title like that would work well, but it would have to be in contrast to Berlingotte or another — which is hardly possible. I would like a title along these lines: Golden City and Steel City, A Tale of Two Model Cities” (301). Hetzel, for his part, suggested Steel City (as Verne thought it was more interesting than Good City), but was not convinced that the title could stand on its own. He finally arrived at The Begum’s Inheritance but not without reiterating that the fundamental thesis of the novel had to be grounded on the idea that “steel, force, do not lead to happiness” (302). In the end, what counted the most for Hetzel was that the novel be true to the Vernian spirit and that no one should suspect that another had written it. “Finally, my dear friend,” Hetzel wrote, “it all rests on the idea of not publishing a book that would appear to the public as a book that you could have written but in fact didn’t” (296).

      Although The Begum’s Millions did not turn out to be one of Verne’s most successful novels financially, it nonetheless proved to be one his most potent. But did the majority of Verne’s readership consider it to be sufficiently Vernian? According to Charles-Noël Martin, The Begum’s Millions sold only 17,000 copies as compared with most of his previous novels, which averaged around 35,000 and 50,000 in first-run sales.¹⁴ Hetzel himself sensed this novel represented something new in Verne’s writing — a new “taste” that he felt confident would add some spice to Verne’s corpus, saying: “My Dear Verne, everything that you have sent me from Begum’s Millions seems to work very well and I believe that it will become a good book, as it has a particular little taste that will do no harm to your (literary) landscape as a whole” (303). What kind of “particular little taste” did Hetzel have in mind? Now with Stanford Luce’s accurate twenty-first-century translation, a new generation of English-speaking readers will be able to judge for themselves how unique and riveting Verne’s complete overhaul of Laurie’s idea truly was. As the old saying goes, a genius can rewrite a lesser writer, but no one can rewrite a genius.

      Verne’s “Thanatopia”

      “We are sick, that is absolutely certain, we are sick from too much progress,” Emile Zola wrote in Mes haines (1866, My Hatreds). “This victory of nerves over blood has decided our mores, our literature, our whole era.” ¹⁵ Can Zola’s famous statement be applied to Jules Verne’s vision of the nineteenth century as well? Although Verne’s most famous works, such as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts