The Kip Brothers. Jules Verne

the 1860s whose earliest works featured the courageous and resourceful British explorer Samuel Fergusson in Five Weeks in a Balloon and the delightfully eccentric German geologist Otto Lidenbrock in Journey to the Center of the Earth.⁶¹

      But perhaps in The Kip Brothers it is less a question of nationalities and more of nationalism. Consider, for example, Verne’s favorable portrait, late in the novel, of the Fenians, who have “the goal of freeing Ireland from the intolerable domination of Great Britain.” They also play a part in his novel about Ireland published in 1893, Lit’l Fellow, in which Verne describes the British aristocracy in the following terms: “It is nevertheless important to note that the aristocracy, which is rather liberal in England and Scotland, has shown itself to be quite oppressive in Ireland. Instead of offering a helping hand, it jerks on the reins. A catastrophe is to be feared. He who sows hatred will eventually harvest rebellion.”⁶² Throughout the Voyages extraordinaires, Verne repeatedly expresses his sympathy for oppressed peoples and his support for nationalist movements. Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870) aids the revolutionaries of Crete in their fight against the Ottoman Empire by donating to them riches taken from the sunken galleons of Vigo Bay. The French Alsatians’ hatred of their post-1870 German occupiers is a leitmotif running through The Begum’s Millions (1879). The heroic Greeks are shown battling for their independence from the Turks in Archipelago on Fire (1884). The efforts of Hungarian patriots to regain their country’s freedom from the Austro-Hungarian Empire serves as the political backdrop for Mathias Sandorf (1885). Norwegian separatists occupy center stage in The Lottery Ticket (1886), set during a time when Norway is under Swedish rule. In Family without a Name (1889), the French Canadians struggle to free themselves from their British masters; in the preface to this novel, Verne even suggests that they are setting “an example that the French populations of Alsace and Lorraine must never forget.”⁶³ And in A Drama in Livonia (1904), one of the last novels published before his death and another a novel of “judicial error” similar to The Kip Brothers, Verne focuses on the Slavic peasants and their struggle against the wealthy ruling classes, who are of German extraction. In novel after novel, Verne shows himself to be faithful to the republican ideals of the Revolution of 1848, which he experienced first-hand as a young man in Paris and whose precepts he adopted as his own. A strong believer in social justice, Verne continually embeds in his fiction a sense of brotherhood with the downtrodden peoples of the world who are fighting for their freedom.

      But The Kip Brothers stands as one of Verne’s greatest tributes to brotherhood not only because of how the author portrays the rapport between the novel’s two heroes or his solidarity with certain nationalist political movements such as the Fenians. A strong sense of brotherhood also resonates throughout this novel on a more personal level—Verne’s fraternal love for his brother Paul who died in 1897, the year before he began to write The Kip Brothers.

      Paul Verne was a year younger than Jules, and the two had always been very close. In an interview with a journalist in 1894, Jules Verne described their relationship, saying,

      My brother Paul was and is my dearest friend. Yes, I may say that he is not only my brother but my most intimate friend. And our friendship dates from the first day that I can remember. What excursions we used to take together in leaky boats on the Loire! At the age of fifteen there was not a nook or a corner on the Loire right down to the sea that we had not explored. What dreadful boats they were, and what risks we no doubt ran! Sometimes I was captain, sometimes it was Paul. But Paul was the better of the two. You know that afterwards he entered the Navy.⁶⁴

      Paul enlisted as a midshipman in the French Navy in 1850 and joined the merchant marine in 1854. He soon retired from the sea and became a stockbroker, but he and his brother continued their seafaring excursions. In 1867 they crossed the Atlantic together on the Great Eastern (a voyage that became the basis for Verne’s 1871 novel A Floating City) and visited New York and Niagara Falls. And they often voyaged together aboard Verne’s yacht the Saint Michel III—in 1881 traveling to Copenhagen, for example, a trip that inspired Paul to publish an account of their adventure, “From Rotterdam to Copenhagen,” in the Nantes newspaper L’Union Bretonne that same year. Earlier, in 1872, Paul had published a similar travel chronicle in the same paper called “The Fortieth Ascension of Mont Blanc,” which was later reprinted in Verne’s first short-story collection, Doctor Ox (1874).

      On many occasions, Paul Verne helped his brother with the technical aspects of the stories he was writing. For instance, when working on the manuscript of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea in 1868, Jules wrote to his father, saying, “In three or four months, when I have the proofs, I will try to send you and Paul the first volume so that you can clean up some of its errors or imperfections. I really want this machine to be as perfect as possible.”⁶⁵ And when working up the preliminary engineering designs for his “Standard Island” in Propeller Island (1895), Verne repeatedly consulted with Paul, asking for his technical advice. The following excerpts from their correspondence of this period are typical:

      Amiens, 5 June 1893

      My dear Paul, … Next year I will really need your help for my propeller island, so as not to make any stupid mistakes. The first volume is written. The second will be in 3 months. I’m much ahead of schedule. The island is large, 25 to 30 kilometers around. Do you think that it can be steered without a rudder by using two propeller systems on each side powered by dynamos run by machines generating a million horsepower of force? … Tell me when you can, as you’re waiting for me to send you the proofs.⁶⁶

      Amiens, 8 September 1893

      My dear Paul, I received your letter, which has crossed my own in the mail, and I will send you today the proofs of the end of volume 2, which you can return to me when you’ve looked them over. I have rewritten according to your corrections, which I am using verbatim.⁶⁷

      Amiens, 12 September 1894

      My dear Paul, … I suspect that I have made many errors, and that’s why I sent you the proofs. But it is not enough to point the errors out to me; you must indicate to me how to fix them.⁶⁸

      Amiens, [October?] 1894

      My dear Paul, I have just received your letter and the proofs. I thank you for the huge amount of work you have done. Without you, I would have never been able to manage this.⁶⁹

      It has often been argued that the pervasive and sometimes pivotal influence of Verne’s editor-publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in shaping the content of the author’s Voyages extraordinaires has been underestimated. It seems that Paul Verne’s contributions to the fundamental design of some of his brother’s legendary “dream machines” is also a story that remains to be told.

      But it was especially Paul who served as his brother’s most trusted confidant during those often-traumatic years of the late 1880s and the 1890s when Jules was repeatedly beset with a host of physical, emotional, and financial problems. As the biographer Herbert Lottman has observed, “Family correspondence, which sheds so much light on the life of the young Jules Verne, is missing for the middle years when Verne gained literary renown. But there is another rich lode of letters, beginning in 1893 to draw upon. These letters were written to one of the few people in whom Jules never ceased to confide—his brother Paul, who was now turning sixty-four.”⁷⁰ Foremost among Verne’s concerns were the continuing difficulties with his son, Michel, whose repeated career changes and bankruptcies, costly amorous escapades, divorce from his first wife, and difficulties with the law caused Verne at one point to complain to Paul “the future frightens me considerably. Michel does nothing, finds nothing to do, has cost me 200,000 francs, has three sons, and their entire upbringing is going to fall on my shoulders. I’m ending badly.”⁷¹ Verne’s growing financial worries had earlier forced him to sell his beloved yacht, the Saint-Michel III, and he would never again sail the open seas, with Paul or anyone else. Then, on March 9, 1886, he was attacked at gunpoint by his deranged nephew Gaston and shot in the lower leg; he would remain partially crippled for the rest of his life. Later that same month, his publisher and “spiritual father,” Pierre-Jules Hetzel, died. Soon thereafter, in speaking with Hetzel’s son, Verne confessed, “I have entered the dark period of my life.”⁷² The following year, his mother