Robur the Conqueror. Jules Verne

Society was soon swarming with scientists, researchers, writers, and musicians, everyone from George Sand to Jacques Offenbach. In December 1863, Verne did his own part to raise publicity for the work, pointing out the advantages of helicopters and the drawbacks of balloons in the short essay “À propos du Géant” (“About the Géant”).

      But the Society produced no workable results in its few years of activity, and after a brief flare of interest, flying machines faded from the popular imagination. Balloons served heroically during the Siege of Paris in 1870–71, carrying mail and people over the entrapped city walls. Nadar himself was a leading player in the heroics.⁷

      But Verne was not finished with the heavier-than-air aspirations of the 1860s. He nearly wrote an aircraft into the Extraordinary Voyages in 1875, when he planned to gather the heroes of his previous books—Samuel Fergusson, Pierre Aronnax, Phileas Fogg, and so forth—and send them on an aerial trip around the world.⁸ Before he could develop the project further, he was beaten to the punch by another novel on a similar theme, Alphonse Brown’s La Conquête de l’air (The Conquest of the Air [Paris: Glady, 1875]). Verne concluded reluctantly that he would have to postpone the concept for the moment.⁹ Indeed, by 1882 he had apparently given up the idea, for that year he extracted the concept of gathering past heroes and used it for quite a different work: a stage spectacular, Voyage à travers l’impossible (Journey through the Impossible), written with Adolphe d’Ennery.¹⁰

      Two years later, flight returned to the news. On August 9, 1884, the French captains Charles Renard (1847–1905) and Arthur Krebs (1850–1935) flew twenty-three minutes in an electric dirigible, La France. The flight was an obvious and celebrated success—so much so that the polymathic aeronautical brothers Gaston (1843–1899) and Albert Tissandier (1839–1906), who had been tinkering with their own electric aerostat since 1881 and flown in it in 1883, decided to abandon their work completely. Flight historian Richard Hallion sums up La France’s journey as “the first completely controlled, powered flight of any sort … in all of human history.”¹¹ All previous problems with lighter-than-air designs seemed solvable using electricity; accumulators and dynamos promised lighter sources of power than any invention involving steam. In the popular imagination, experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines now seemed both outmoded and unnecessary.¹²

      Verne—now fifty-six, a frequent yachter, and a very busy writer—thought otherwise. Though in the thick of working on one of his longest novels, Mathias Sandorf, he whipped up a fresh plot involving heavier-than-air flight and pitched it to Hetzel. By February 2, 1885, he had completed the outline for the book and written the first chapter of a manuscript he titled simply Robur.¹³

      With his characteristic panache for research, Verne plunged into every possible source. “My actual experience for [Robur] was one balloon ascent,” he later claimed with a touch of exaggeration to Sadakichi Hartmann, “while I had to look over about five hundred books on aeronautic inventions.”¹⁴ Written sources are indeed abundant in the novel; many of its facts and figures, as well as numerous incidental details, can be traced back to the helicopter propaganda published by Nadar and his colleagues at the Heavier-Than-Air Society.¹⁵ Further written inspiration came from Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) calls the albatross the “prince of the clouds” and makes it a symbol for both flight and poetic imagination. Verne paid Baudelaire tribute not only by writing a few passages of Robur as allusions to his poems, but also by naming his own fictional aircraft Albatross.¹⁶

      At the same time, Verne’s debt to personal experience was larger than he claimed. In addition to his 1873 ascent, described the same year in the essay “24 Minutes en ballon” (“24 Minutes in a Balloon”), Verne drew freely on his experiences at Nadar’s Society, whose chaotic meetings likely influenced the portrayal of the Weldon Institute.¹⁷ He also added at least one allusion to his own childhood, naming the novel’s Uncle Prudent after his great-uncle Prudent Allotte de la Fuÿe.¹⁸ It is even possible that the Albatross was modeled in part on Verne’s own beloved yacht, the Saint-Michel III.¹⁹

      Verne’s aim was to combine all these inspirations to create a memorable, multilayered tribute to the unpopular concept of heavier-than-air flying machines. As he wrote to Hetzel on March 18: “I hope to bring in everything there is to say on the subject. In any case, it’s great fun to do. But just wait until we hear the outcry from everyone who supports balloons!”²⁰ His enthusiasm was unabated a month later: “I’ve never attacked a book with such energy and pleasure!” he reported on April 12. “May the buyers feel the same way!”²¹ In early May, he sent Hetzel the completed manuscript, now fortunately preserved at the Bibliothèque municipale de Nantes.²²

      The ensuing correspondence reveals that Verne, who had begun the Extraordinary Voyages as an unknown writer happy to accept Hetzel’s advice, had developed twenty years later into a poised professional ready to reject any suggestions he disliked. Many of Hetzel’s ideas for revising Robur, ranging from major character changes to specific plot points, went unused.²³

      Verne did, however, take several important suggestions to heart. He condensed the book markedly by cutting out irrelevant statistics and other superfluities; he modified the manuscript’s tone somewhat (more on this later); he added several dramatic incidents and passages of dialogue to the middle of the book; and, seizing one of Hetzel’s ideas with unusual enthusiasm, he traded his original abrupt ending for a gentler and more thematically provocative one.²⁴ In general, the published text is less rough-edged, more tightly focused, more sophisticated, and more satisfying to read. As Verne summed up:

      I’ve gone back over the characters, dramatized the scenes, imagined new episodes, made the journey more interesting, I hope, chased away all the altitudes, latitudes, longitudes, etc., which weren’t necessary, modified the ending as agreed…. And despite all of that, the volume, which was long, is now a good fifth shorter.²⁵

      Verne and Hetzel also finalized the title of the book during the revision process. Verne’s preferred title, The Conquest of the Air, was un available, as it had already been used by Brown and Ponton d’Amé-court.²⁶ Robur and His Albatross (Verne: “Albatross in italics, of course”) seemed a possibility, but Hetzel pointed out that they would have to add “The Captain or The Commander of the Albatross, so people don’t think we’re talking about a bird.”²⁷ Finally Verne, wanting the conquest of the air to be alluded to somehow, hit upon Robur the Conqueror. “That recalls William the Conqueror, Robert the Conqueror … [and] has the advantage of piquing curiosity and not saying what the book is about …”²⁸

      To illustrate the book, Hetzel called on Léon Benett (1839–1917), a prolific artist who worked on almost half the Extraordinary Voyages.²⁹ Surviving letters reveal that both Verne and Hetzel coached Benett for the book;³⁰ Verne even sketched the Albatross’s front elevation as a rough guide. “As for the general effect, which is fantastical and cloudy, I think it’s excellent,” Verne wrote about one of the illustrations. “You’re right to show [the Albatross] only in those conditions, so it can’t be examined too closely.”³¹ Verne similarly warned Hetzel of the aircraft’s implausibility: “This kind of novel cries out to be read in one sitting, for—between ourselves—I advise you never to get into such a machine.”³²

      Verne intended Robur to be published in book form immediately, without the usual serialization, so as to join the flight debate while it was still fresh in the public mind. Hetzel, in much less of a hurry, toyed with the idea of serializing the book in a newspaper.³³

      Before he could do so, Verne’s life turned upside down. On March 9, 1886, a beloved but mentally disturbed nephew shot him in the leg, laming him permanently. Verne was still recovering when, on March 17, Pierre-Jules Hetzel died. It was the end of an era for the Extraordinary Voyages, and the beginning of a new one in which Verne’s novels would slide into pessimism about humankind and its use of scientific