The Kip Brothers. Jules Verne

to risk surgery so long as he could see enough to continue reading and writing, the cataract operation would never take place.

      The main source for the plot of Verne’s The Kip Brothers is the true story of the Rorique (sometimes spelled Rorick) brothers whose trial became a highly publicized news story in France in the mid-1890s. On June 20, 1894, Verne wrote a letter to his brother Paul in which he confides: “A story that has always touched me is the one about the Rorique brothers, [whose death penalty is] now commuted. There is perhaps something to think about there.”⁴¹ Thus, the idea of fictionalizing what came to be known as the “Rorique Affair” was clearly on Verne’s mind as early as 1894. During the final decade of his life, Verne had an Italian correspondent named Mario Turiello and, in three letters to him (written on January 15, May 25, and November 24, 1902), the French novelist links the Rorique Affair directly to The Kip Brothers, saying: “My new novel, The Kip Brothers, which was inspired by the story of the Rorique brothers, has two volumes”; “It’s the story of the Rorique brothers that inspired The Kip Brothers, of which the first volume will soon be available”; and “You say that you didn’t grasp what I meant about the story of the Rorique brothers. Obviously, you don’t read a lot of newspapers. About ten years ago, these fine gentlemen were judged in France and sent to prison for having murdered their captain.”⁴²

      Here is the story of the Rorique/Degrave brothers, as summarized by Marcel Moré in his Le Très curieux Jules Verne (120–23):

      In July 1892 in Ponape, Micronesia, two brothers from Ostend, Belgium, Léonce and Eugène Degrave (sometimes spelled Degraeve), but better known under their assumed name of Rorique, were accused of having fomented a mutiny on board a French schooner named Niuorahiti, belonging to a Tahitian prince. After having allegedly killed the captain, at least one passenger who represented the cargo company (a certain Mr. Gibson) and several of the crew, the brothers then took command of the ship, modified her, and used her for piracy in the South Seas. Their principal accuser was the (mulatto) cook aboard the vessel named Hippolyte Mirey, a very suspicious character himself and one who was probably involved in the mutiny. After their arrest, the Rorique/Degrave brothers were transferred to France where they were put on trial for murder and piracy.

      During the proceedings, it was discovered that, earlier in their career, they had once been recognized and celebrated as true heroes: during a storm at sea, they had single-handedly saved the captain and crew of a Norwegian three-master called the Pieter. But there were also reports of their having lied about having been castaways while in the Cook Islands in 1891. To the charges against them, the Rorique/Degrave brothers repeatedly proclaimed their innocence, saying that the murders had indeed been the result of a mutiny among the crew but one that they had helped to put down. As for the charges of subsequent piracy, they refused to confess to any wrongdoing. Many French citizens who followed the case, including Verne, believed them innocent. Their conduct during the trial was deemed praiseworthy; the brothers remained stoic to the end and asked only to stay together, whatever their fate.

      Despite the fact that the prosecution’s case was based on highly questionable witnesses, on December 8, 1893, the Rorique/Degrave brothers were judged guilty on all counts. The tribunal condemned them to death—a sentence that was commuted a few months later by French president Carnot and changed to life imprisonment at hard labor. Léonce died in prison on March 30, 1898. Eugène, who was pardoned the following year, went back to France and wrote his memoirs, which were published in 1901 as Le Bagne (At Hard Labor).⁴³

      Perplexingly, a few years later, Eugène abandoned his wife and child and again took up a life of travel and adventure. In 1907 he was seen in Trinidad working as a local policeman. He died in 1929, murdered in a jail cell in Pamplona apparently after having become involved with smuggling a large number of Colombian emeralds out of South America. And, in a final bizarre twist to this tale, the French writer Alfred Jarry demonstrated that portions of his book, Le Bagne, were actually plagiarized from the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe.⁴⁴ Here ends Moré’s account of this tale.

      Were the Rorique/Degrave brothers, in truth, the innocent victims of conspiracy and judicial error that Verne and others believed them to be? Probably not. But it is clear, not only from his correspondence but also from the strong similarities in plot, names, and characterization, that Verne patterned The Kip Brothers directly on their story, both idealizing and immortalizing them.⁴⁵ Of course, at the time of the novel’s initial composition in 1898, Verne could not have known that Eugène would eventually be pardoned, return to France, write and publish Le Bagne, and then have his life end tragically amid very suspicious circumstances. But—and this point is crucial—Verne did revise his manuscript during the summer and fall of 1901 before submitting the first part (volume 1) to Hetzel fils on September 2 and the second part (volume 2) to him on October 27. And he was still correcting proofs as late as March 1902.⁴⁶ During both periods when revisions to the text were being made—along with changing its title from Les Frères Norik to Les Frères Kip—Verne no doubt updated his story in the light of contemporary developments in the case and perhaps even consulted Degrave’s book, Le Bagne.

      These 1901 updates and corrections made by Verne to his 1898 manuscript are also very important when considering another possible but less acknowledged source for The Kip Brothers: the Dreyfus Affair. As Cornélius Helling observed in 1935, “This book was written when the Dreyfus affair was causing a stir and [it] has the feel of its era.”⁴⁷ In fact, if one were not familiar with the case of the Rorique/Degrave brothers or if one did not have access to copies of Verne’s correspondence from the 1890s, one would naturally assume that The Kip Brothers had been based—either partly or wholly—on this legendary case of judicial error and unjust punishment.

      The problem is that, during the late 1890s, Verne was a staunch and very vocal anti-dreyfusard. In late 1898, as demands for a retrial of Alfred Dreyfus (in prison at Devil’s Island since April 1895) began to heat up because of new evidence discovered by Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart and by Emile Zola’s inflammatory letter “I Accuse,” Verne wrote to Turiello, saying: “As for the D … affair, it’s best not to talk about it. For a long time it has, for me, been judged and judged well, whatever happens in the future.”⁴⁸ In a letter somewhat later to Hetzel fils, Verne mentioned in passing “I who am anti-Dreyfus in my soul …”⁴⁹ And, finally, in December 1898, Verne agreed to became a founding member of a conservative, right-wing, anti-Dreyfus organization called the Ligue de la Patrie Française (the French Patriotic League), created in opposition to the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (the Human Rights League), a left-wing political group that supported Dreyfus’s cause. Throughout this period, Verne’s pro-government position on the Dreyfus Affair was very clear and well publicized, a position no doubt reinforced by his own anti-Semitic tendences.⁵⁰

      In dramatic contrast to his father, Michel Verne was enthusiastically pro-Dreyfus and did not hide his feelings either. Jean Jules-Verne, Verne’s grandson and family biographer, describes how his father and grandfather repeatedly clashed on the subject:

      From the outset his son, Michel, a so-called reactionary with royalist tendencies, was violently outraged by the injustice of the Dreyfus case. I remember that what upset him most was the deliberate procedural error whereby documentary evidence was produced in court without being shown beforehand to the defence—particularly since the document concerned turned out to be a forgery. Obviously, Michel’s visits to Amiens at this time could not help being stormy ones. They might have resulted in a momentary breach with his father; but fortunately their affection for each other was by now such that their relationship emerged unscathed. In any case, Verne’s judgment was too sound for him not to see eventually that his son’s indignation was justified; but to admit that much he had to sweep aside a good many beliefs that he had always regarded as inviolable.

      This made him all the more disposed to listen to the opinions of his prodigal son, who had turned out to have a cultivated and alert mind with which Verne could communicate.⁵¹

      Could it be that, between 1898 and 1901 when he was to revise the text of The Kip Brothers, Verne slowly began to “see”