Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
to Laurie’s novels. Despite its modest character, this school merits a closer look, and I will return to it shortly.
Jules Verne was not only inspired by other literary texts; for Verne, everything lent itself to being put into words and becoming text: current-events items about politics or crime, the lives of others, as well as the events and concerns of his personal and familial life. Personal memories occupied an increasingly significant place in his novels, particularly those written after 1890. “Memory is far-sighted,” Verne wrote in The Story of My Boyhood.35 Numerous working documents, where he noted the dates of the deaths of those close to him or the names of people met throughout the course of his life, bear witness to this observation. It is clear that these personal elements in his texts had a different meaning for the author than for his readers, for whom they may often pass unnoticed. But the fact of their inclusion raises several questions about the inscription of autobiography in Verne’s narratives. For example, the Assomption, a real ship on which Verne forced his son Michel to embark as a punishment in 1878, appears in The Kip Brothers (Part I, chap. 5). The village of Chantenay, in the Nantes area, where the Verne family had a country house, is recalled in a central episode of The Mighty Orinoco. In The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin there appear, among others, “two vessels, the Chantenay of Nantes, the Forward of Liverpool, that were left in great disrepair by the desertion of a number of sailors” (chap. 6). The allusion tied to the name of the first ship is already evident; the second refers to a particular episode from The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866, Les Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras) and the beginnings of Verne’s literary career.
The timing of the action of Travel Scholarships is explicitly given as 1877 in the manuscript. Although this fact is somewhat camouflaged in the published versions, this dating is confirmed by the sale of the island of Saint Barthélemy, which ends the first part of the novel, on August 10 of that year. At that moment Jules Verne was renewing his connection to Nantes, the city of his birth, and lived there for a year until the summer of 1878. His son Michel, before being sent to the Indies, attended the same high school where his father had taken his Latin courses (which were no doubt deadly boring and taught by pretentious professors—recalling the previously cited satire of The Marriage of a Marquis and also Mr. Patterson in Travel Scholarships). It was during this stay in Nantes that Honorine Verne’s grandson, Tony Lefebvre, died in Amiens at just five years of age. Michel Verne had been especially fond of his young nephew. Is it too much to see the reflection of this lost grandchild in the person of the novel’s young rascal, Tony Renault?
The other French protagonist in the story is Louis Clodion, who is “twenty years old, part of a family of ship merchants who settled in Nantes many years ago” (Part I, chap. 2). He visits an uncle in the Antilles who is “a rich and influential grower in Guadeloupe. He lived in Pointe-à-Pitre and owned vast properties surrounding the city” (Part II, chap. 2). This brief biography matches that of a friend of Verne’s—the merchant and art critic Paul Eudel (1837–1911), whom Verne had met in 1861 in Chantenay at his sister Marie’s marriage to the ship-owner Léon Guillon. According to a brief biographical sketch of him published in 1899, “Upon finishing college, he had to abandon regretfully the literary career he [Eudel] had dreamed of, for his family no longer had the resources to send him to Paris to make his start. He then went into business and left for the island of Réunion in 1857 to join one of his uncles, a rich planter and businessman in Saint-Pierre.”36 Returning to Nantes two years afterwards, Eudel later published his autobiographical Souvenirs de voyage (1864). Despite the different French colonies in question (Réunion or Guadeloupe), the facts and the ages of the persons are similar.
A few pages earlier in Travel Scholarships, as if by a surprising coincidence, Verne mentions the family name of the brother-in-law who had introduced him to Eudel: “It was one of the principal merchants of the city [of Marigot on the island of Saint Martin], Mr. Anselme Guillon, who organized this reception” (Part I, chap. 15). The character named is a secondary one, but this name—which never appears anywhere else in the Extraordinary Voyages—nevertheless recalls once more the leading character of the short story The Marriage of a Marquis, Anselme des Tilleuls. Finally, there is the ship Fire Fly that appears near the end of Part I of the novel: its name is the same as that of a ship in a novel published in 1861 by the novelist René de Pont-Jest (1829–1904). Pont-Jest claimed to have taken part in French naval campaigns with Paul Verne in the 1850s. Later, he would unsuccessfully bring a plagiarism suit against Jules Verne—a lawsuit that was first filed in 1877, the year in which the action of Travel Scholarships takes place. It certainly seems that, toward the end of his life, writing was one way for Verne to bring the past back to life and to give his literary oeuvre a personal dimension without going so far as to make it an overt autobiography.
NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM
If this autobiographical side of the novel might have passed unnoticed by the majority of Verne’s readers, such would not have been the case for the subject that gave Travel Scholarships its topicality at the end of the nineteenth century: the tension between nationalism(s) and internationalism. It was the historian Jean Chesneaux, one of the pioneers of Vernian criticism, who noted in 1971 that
Verne’s demonstration of the artificial, ephemeral and unstable character of territorial sovereignty is carried to its extreme in the case of the Lesser Antilles (and all the more forcibly because here it is a question of colonial sovereignty and therefore doubly questionable). This novel, Travelling Scholarships, is normally regarded as one of Verne’s weaker works—at least by those who do not take the trouble to seek the key to his political thinking. In point of fact, the demonstration is both vigorous and unconventional.37
From the outset, the Antillean School extrapolated a united and peaceful Europe, which was still far from being realized, as two disastrous wars would soon testify in the following decades. This utopian vision, represented by an educational institution that ensures an ideal instruction—“a very practical as well as a very complete education in all matters literary, scientific, industrial, and commercial” (Part I, chap. 1)—is neatly summarized by the organizer of the journey to the Antilles, Mrs. Seymour, who declares to the laureates: “I don’t see here any English, French, Dutch, Swedes, or Danes, no! Only Antilleans, my compatriots!” (Part II, chap. 6). In reality, of course, such an “Antillean” community has never existed, as national interests have always gotten the better of diplomatic agreements. The noble aspirations of the director of the Antillean School “to strengthen and fuse the young men’s diverse temperaments and mixed personalities, which such different nationalities present” (Part I, chap. 1) developed into the ingenious idea of imposing different languages on the students in turn and in equal measure, regardless of the relative importance of their respective nations: “One week, English was spoken; the next, French was spoken; then Dutch, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish” (Part I, chap. 1). This impressive notion recalls the linguistic talents of Professor Otto Lidenbrock, about whom the narrator of Journey to the Center of the Earth declared that “he was reputed to be a genuine polyglot: not that he spoke fluently the 2,000 languages and 4,000