“I came to Paris as a student just about the time when the grisett [prostitute] and all that she meant was disappearing from the French Quarter,” Verne wrote in his memoir (quoted in Lottman, p. 20). He also arrived on a tight budget, prescribed by a father wary of the distractions available to a young man alone for the first time in the capital.
Verne’s early life in Paris was far from easy. His father wasn’t sending him enough money to live even meagerly, and his health suffered as a result. He detailed his hardships in his letters home. The majority of the letters were spent accounting for daily expenses, detailing how much he spent on food and how much on clothes: “My accursed watch is costing me six francs in repairs, my umbrella fifteen francs, and I had to buy a pair of boots and a pair of shoes” (Lottman, p. 26). He bragged about finding a complete edition of Shakespeare for a bargain, but he complained at not having anything good to eat. “Ever since my arrival in Paris there hasn’t been a moment without a stomach ache,” he wrote to his parents (Lottman, p. 25). Occasionally, half of his face would fall into paralysis. He was tired. He was studying all the time, and, he complained to his parents, his law examinations would be “frightful.”
These letters served two purposes. First, they convinced his father that he was living frugally and concentrating on his schoolwork. Second, they hid from his father his developing passion: Verne wanted to write for the stage.
It was a golden age for French theater, very similar in some ways to Hollywood in the 1940s. A modestly successful playwright could expect to make enough money staging a mediocre play to support himself in style. A popular playwright would be celebrated and revered. Through a series of connections, Verne met and befriended Alexandre Dumas, author of the celebrated historical novel The Three Musketeers and one of the most successful playwrights of his time. Dumas and his son in turn introduced the young and ambitious Verne to others in their theatrical circles. They even collaborated with Verne on some of his works.
At the same time, Verne became a periodic contributor to Musée des familles (The Family Museum), an educational magazine run by a friend from school. Verne’s work for the magazine took him to the Paris library, where he spent long hours gathering facts and culling through recent documentation on notable scientific events. He read about a hot-air balloon, Le Giant, that was three times larger than any balloon previously launched. He discovered articles on the famed 140-foot submarine Le Plongeur, the first to be powered by compressed air. He discovered Robert Fulton, who around 1800 had built a prototypical submarine, the Nautilus, which stored enough air to sustain its two-man crew for a five-hour dive.
Through his reading, he became familiar with the major scientific and mechanical inventions of his time and developed an active interest in the quickening progress of technical discoveries. Once his research was complete, he put together fictional stories that highlighted the facts he had discovered. (He inserted bits of naval history into his story “The First Ships of the Mexican Navy” and recounted the push to discover the North Pole and the hardships of an Arctic winter in “A Winter in the Ice.”) Despite the hard work and long hours, his stories failed to bring him success; his name was even misspelled in at least two magazines. But his effort was far from wasted: Although he could not know it at the time, Musée des familles introduced him to a form of writing that would become his mainstay.
His fiction was at best an extra paycheck once in a while, but it was also a distraction from the art of the stage. During Verne’s early years in Paris, he wrote about twenty-five plays, including comedy, farce, plays in verse, high tragedy, and musicals; while some were well received, most never made it to the stage. Still, the experience taught Verne valuable lessons. At the end of this period—what some have called his apprenticeship—he could write dialogue and invent plots, and he knew what it was to try and fail. Most importantly, his experience showed him that despite his father’s wishes, he felt a true passion for writing. “There are serious studies to be done on the present genre of literature,” Verne wrote in a letter, “and especially on that of the future” (quoted in Evans, p. 17).
When he graduated from law school, he had to make a choice: either return to Nantes to take over his father’s law practice and lead what he saw as a comfortable but bloodless life, or remain in Paris to write. After years spent trying to convince his father of his commitment to the law, Verne took a new direction. Even while asking for his father’s continued economic support, Verne admitted he had no passion for law. “My dear father,” Verne wrote, “whether I do law for a couple of years or not, if both careers are pursued simultaneously, sooner or later one of them will destroy the other.... And in my opinion, the bar would not survive” (Evans, p. 17). He went so far as to warn his father that if forced to return to Nantes, he would ruin his father’s practice. Eventually his father agreed to let him stay in Paris to write.
By 1856, after five years spent trying unsuccessfully to make a living from writing—and five years’ begrudging economic support from his judgmental father—Verne started to doubt his prospects. “It is as if the moment I get an idea or launch any literary project, the idea or project at once goes wrong,” Verne wrote to his father. “If I write a play for a particular theater director, he moves elsewhere; if I think of a good title, three days later I see it on the billboards announcing someone else’s play; if I write an article, another appears on the same subject. Even if I discovered a new planet, I believe it would at once explode, just to prove me wrong” (quoted in Teeters, p. 45). Faced with failure, Verne indicated he might be ready to return to a professional life. “While I tend to my art, I am quite capable of devoting time and energy to another job,” he wrote in a letter home (quoted in Lottman, p. 69).
To complicate matters, Verne wanted to find a wife. “I want to marry, I must marry, I should marry,” he wrote in a letter home (Lottman, p. 67). “It’s the perfect time to get married, my dear mother, so I ask you to get to work. Find the way to present me as a good husband” (Lottman, p. 55). In order to attract a wife, Verne knew he needed to find steady employment and so, in 1856 when he met a wealthy, twenty-six-year-old widow named Honorine Morel, he chose a new career. Asking his father for seed money to invest in a stock brokerage firm, he proposed to Honorine, secured a job, and was soon married. The wedding ushered in another five years of hard work for Verne. In addition to supporting a family by buying low and selling high on the Paris stock market, he rose every morning at dawn to write for five hours before going to work. This period lasted until 1862, when Verne’s manuscript Five Weeks in a Balloon found its way into the hands of publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and his successful career as a writer of scientific fiction began. “My friends, I bid you adieu,” Verne is reported to have said to his stock exchange friends. “I’ve had an idea ... an idea which should make me rich. I’ve just written a novel in a new style, truly my own. If it succeeds, it will be a gold mine. So, I’ll continue to write and write ...” (quoted in Evans, p. 21)
That, of course, is exactly what he did.
Major cultural forces contributed to Verne’s success. In 1850 a French law (Le Loi Farroux) declared that all scientific education in the nation’s secondary schools was to be controlled by the Catholic Church. The law had a devastating effect on two generations of French students. At a time when European and American scientists were discovering steam and electricity, as the phonograph and the telephone were created, while tram and railroad tracks were laid down the world over, the French government closed its eyes and stuffed its ears. “Any retreat from classical studies has the effect of shaking the very foundations of Christianity,” wrote Archbishop Kopp (Evans, p. 13), summarizing the reactionary sentiments of the time. In France science became an instrument of politics, and education vacillated between the Romantic ideal of classics-based studies and the religious ideal of the Bible. The backlash against science was profound and harsh. Romantic poets, watching the plundering of nature to feed the industrial revolution, wrote love songs to nature and recommended a return to a “natural” way of life.