The Begum's Millions. Jules Verne
to take control of the world through his new invention, The Terror. Curiously, as if to remind his readers of the terrible lesson of The Begum’s Millions, Schultze is alluded to at the very beginning of Robur-le-conquérant (1886, Robur the Conqueror), when Robur’s mysterious airship is mistaken for the huge missile-satellite that Schultze had launched into orbit and that circles continuously around the Earth.
That Verne painted more sobering pictures of the world later on in his career comes as no surprise, however, for readers of his early novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which he portrays a stifling hegemony in a Paris of the 1960s where creativity is frowned upon while greed and business reign. It took over a hundred years for Paris in the Twentieth Century to find the light of day because Hetzel had rejected it for being too drab and depressing. Perhaps an older Verne, grown weary of the world’s wars and out-of-control capitalism, could no longer suppress the more cynical inclination that was growing within him.4 As he would write to his brother, “All gaiety has become intolerable to me, my character is profoundly altered, and I have received blows in my life that I will be unable to recover from” (August 1, 1894).5
Although different in many ways from his earlier endeavor, The Begum’s Millions remains one of Verne’s most intriguing and exciting novels. And it came at a time (after France’s humiliating defeat to the Prussians in 1870) when Verne’s young and older readers alike desperately wanted a moral boost. Who better than Verne to lift the morale of a nation in dire need of inspiration? Certainly the Nazis were aware of the novel’s potential power to stir an enemy nation when they had it removed from German libraries during World War II. Similarly, as the Germans began remilitarizing the Ruhr in the 1930s, Gaston Leroux knew that The Begum’s Millions could serve as a “wake-up call” for his countrymen, when he referred to Verne’s novel at the beginning of Rouletabille chez Krupp (1933, Rouletabille at Krupp’s). As France urgently required a reminder of the horrors of World War I, Leroux warned of another Schultze rising on the other side of the Rhine. When one of his characters dismisses reports of a new German secret weapon similar to the one Schultze creates in The Begum’s Millions, “But that’s a Jules Verne yarn you’re telling me there, my dear genius … I read it when I was in school! It’s called The Begum’s Millions!,” the narrator feels compelled to interject: “We live in a time when all of Jules Verne’s imaginings — on earth, in the air, and beneath the seas — are being realized so accurately and so completely that one can no longer be surprised if that novel enters the realm of reality as well!”6 Alas, if only Verne could have been wrong in his predictions for The Begum’s Millions, perhaps our twentieth century would not have been so bloody! Yet, just as Verne had been prescient in his description of Stahlstadt, the evil “City of Steel” of the novel, he hardly seems to endorse his utopia in the end either, as it too is a state governed by constraints and obsessions.
When asked by a reporter toward the end of his life if he believed in “progress,” Verne could only give a rather “Zen” response. As The Begum’s Millions demonstrates, progress can be a very subjective term indeed. “Progress toward what end?” Verne asked, before answering:
Progress is a word that can be abused. When I see the progress the Japanese have made in military affairs, I think of my novel The Begum’s Millions, one half of a colossal fortune went to the founders of a virtuous community, while the other half went to the followers of a dark genius whose ideal was expansion through military force. The two communities were able to develop within the possibilities made available through modern science — one aiming for harmony and knowledge, the other going in a different direction altogether. And so, in which direction will our own civilization go?7
While, unfortunately, only the future will be able to answer Verne’s question, history has already decided the direction that the twentieth century has gone. And one can only hope that the twenty-first century will heed the warnings contained in works such as The Begum’s Millions and evolve toward a more harmonious, peaceful world.
The Novel within the Novel: The Story Behind The Begum’s Millions
How did Verne get the idea for The Begum’s Millions, a novel that is traditionally seen as a “turning point” in his work, as he slowly began to shift from being a sunny optimist to a guarded pessimist? In fact, the story surrounding the novel’s origins would be worthy of a novel in and of itself.
The first version, which was originally called L’Héritage de Langévol (The Langevol Inheritance), was written by a certain Paschal Grousset, a Corsican author, reporter, and revolutionary who wrote under numerous aliases such as Philippe Daryl, Leopold Viray, and Tomasi, but was best known as André Laurie, a pseudonym he used to write a series of successful young adult adventures. Grousset led an exciting and colorful life in his own right. He had been sent to prison in 1870 for attacking Pierre Bonaparte with his friend Pierre Rochefort but was released six months later during the Second Empire. Soon after, he fought alongside the Paris Commune, was arrested once again, and was sent in 1872 to a penal colony in Noumea, New Caledonia, from which he escaped with his friend Rochefort in a daring and perilous breakout. After living in the United States for a while, he went to London where he wrote The Langevol Inheritance. Through the auspices of the abbé de Manas, who served as his agent, he managed to sell his manuscript to Hetzel for 1,500 francs in a series of clandestine transactions, since Grousset was still a wanted man. In turn, Hetzel asked Verne to rework and rewrite the novel, as it had some serious flaws. Hetzel knew that Verne’s “magic touch” would be able to make the novel into a success. Grousset/Laurie would go on to ghostwrite two other novels under this arrangement: L’Etoile du sud (1884, The Southern Star), set in South Africa and originally called “The Country of Diamonds,” and L’Epave du Cynthia (1885, The Salvage of the Cynthia), for which Laurie was finally able to share credit publicly with Verne because the Communards had been pardoned and he no longer needed to stay in hiding.
Verne’s Imprint
Although Laurie was delighted and honored to have his manuscript be a part of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires,8 Verne thought the book needed a lot of work and proposed several changes in his correspondence with Hetzel. As Verne describes it himself, he considered The Langevol Inheritance to be both unbalanced and unrealistic:
Above all, I have to tell you that in my opinion, the novel, if it is indeed a novel, is in no way complete. The drama, the conflict, and consequently the interest are absolutely missing. I have never read anything so poorly put together, and at the moment when our interest could be developing, he suddenly drops the ball. There is no doubt about it, the interest is in the conflict between the cannon and the torpedo;9 and yet one is never launched and the other doesn’t explode. It’s a complete failure. L’abbé10 drives me crazy with his new weapon system, which I’ll discuss later, and I don’t see anything working at all. This is a big mistake as far as the reader is concerned.11
Among Verne’s many comments to Hetzel about what was wrong with the original manuscript, he said that he was especially concerned with the passages he thought were not believable or accurate. From a purely narrative point of view, he did not believe that the contrast between the French utopia, which he referred to as “The City of Well Being” and the Steel City worked because Verne thought that Laurie’s French city was really too American. Verne complained that “[The City of Well Being], which is hardly described at all except as part of a journal article, which is very boring, does not seem like a French city to me, but an American one. That Dr. Sarrazin [sic] is really a Yankee. A Frenchman, as opposed to a German, would have operated with more artistry than that” (Correspondance, 289). Moreover, in the same letter, Verne refers to the City of Well Being as “that Franco-American” city rather than the nationalistic French one. He also had harsh words for what he considered Laurie’s awkward scenes, such as Marcel’s death sentence and subsequent escape from Stahlstadt, which “should have been superb” but remains “pathetic,” as well as the episode of little Carl in the mines, which Verne thought was tedious because he had already written similar scenes in the Les Indes noires (1877,