Verne did sometimes complain of “the narrow confines that I’m condemned to move around in” (quoted in Evans, p. 26), although never very vocally. The major battle between Verne and Hetzel took place over the figure of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne conceived Nemo as a political fugitive, a rebel hiding from the world by diving in the Nautilus under the sea. He intended Nemo to be a Polish freedom fighter who, after rebelling against the czar of Russia, disappears into the deep. All the clues are there: Nemo’s portrait gallery of notable revolutionaries, his exclamation “The earth does not want new continents, but new men” (p. 100), his support of the Greek freedom fighters. But Hetzel did not want Nemo to be a Pole rebelling against Russia. At the time Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was in galleys, France had freshly signed a treaty with Russia. Hetzel, once a political refugee himself, thought Nemo’s motivation would anger Napoleon. Not willing to take the risk, he ordered Verne to change Nemo’s background to something more palatable to the Emperor.
Verne refused. “If Nemo had been a Pole whose wife died under the knout and the children perished in Siberia, and this Pole found himself confronted by a Russian ship with the possibility of destroying it, everyone would admit his right to vengeance,” Verne wrote to Hetzel. “[Nemo] is a generous person.... You understand that if I were creating this character again—which I am totally unable to do because I’ve been living with him for two years, I would not be able to see him any other way.... If I can’t be allowed to explain the reasons for his hatred ... I’ll remain silent about the causes or about his entire life, his nationality, etc.” (quoted in Lottman, p. 139). In the end, Verne struck Nemo’s history from the record, leaving clues about his fight against the oppressor and for the freedom of the oppressed without explaining the cause.
Far from “generous,” the new Nemo’s vengeful motivations are left obscure; instead of being justified in striking out, he seems to gain pleasure in killing for killing’s sake. Though less politically sensitive—Hetzel got what he wanted—Nemo became far more troubling: “That terrible avenger, a perfect archangel of hatred,” as Verne describes him (p. 289). The new Nemo holds free men against their will without explanation; he is freedom fighter turned taker of freedom, oppressed turned oppressor.
But he is also a king of the seas, wealthy beyond human dreams, capable of saving a family of whales from slaughter. Nemo plants a sinister black flag etched with the letter “N” as if to claim the ice, but he also cries over his lost companion and plays classical music in the dark. Verne’s rebellion against Hetzel gave birth to this singular character: complicated, unexplained, and at last unknowable, a true genius and an enigma to the very end.
In a later book—The Mysterious Island, published in 1874—Verne had the opportunity to set the record straight. Verne’s cast of shipwrecked inventors discover Nemo in an ocean cave, the last surviving crew member of the Nautilus. Nemo tells his history: He is the Indian Prince Dakkar of Bundelkhand and a fighter in the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion against the British imperialists. The war claimed the lives of his wife and children. In response, Nemo took refuge in the sea, destroying British ships with “the right of vengeance.” At last, it seems, Nemo’s actions were justified by their cause.
From the publication of his first novel until the year of his death, Verne wrote one or two books a year, thus keeping himself at the top of the literary shortlist. He became a rich man who bought both a mansion in the provinces and a 38-ton yacht requiring a crew of ten. Although he achieved the fame and fortune he had set his sights on as a young man in Paris, the end of his life was bleak. In a series of stressful years, Verne was shot in the leg by a deranged relative; his presumed mistress died; his longtime friend and publisher, Hetzel, died; and his mother died. “I have entered into the darkest part of my life,” he wrote in a letter. “All that’s left for me ... are these intellectual distractions.... My character is profoundly changed, and I have received blows from which I will never recover.... I am rarely [happy] any more.... All told, I’m finishing up badly” (quoted in Evans, p. 81).
As an elderly man, Verne began to lose both his sight and his hearing, and he remained troubled by a delicate nervous and gastronomic system. In March 1905 the right side of his body became paralyzed. He was moved to an inside room within his mansion and prescribed absolute silence. On March 23 Verne’s left side became paralyzed. He lapsed into a coma and died on the morning of March 24, 1905. He was seventy-seven years old.
“There can never be another Jules Verne,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a dedicated reader of Verne, “for he was born at a unique moment in time” (quoted in Teeters, p. 112). Verne was present at the birth of phosphorus matches, detachable collars, double cuffs, letterheads, and postage stamps. He saw the introduction of Loire river steamboats, railroads, trams, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph. He was born into the age of Alexander Graham Bell, the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx, Darwin, the colonization of Africa, and wars of independence around the world. In his lifetime the Suez Canal opened, the Hyatt brothers invented celluloid film, an electric generator was built in the Alps, the electromagnetic theory of light was proven, and scientists for the first time ordered elements by the number of their electrons, which paved the way for the modern periodic table.
Science was, for Verne, humankind’s greatest hope. At his best, he approached science with awe and naivete, making grandiose statements like, “When Science speaks, it behooves one to remain silent” (quoted in Evans, p. 48). Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not consider the unknown aspects of the natural world beyond human understanding. “Let’s reason this out,” he wrote in The Mysterious Island (Evans, p. 52), displaying his faith in science as the great, organizing force. Verne was an optimist; he believed in the ability of the human mind to perceive and to eventually gain mastery over earth’s untamable mysteries through the discoveries of science.
His books accurately predicted many modern-day inventions, including the fax machine, the automobile, pollution, and even chain bookstores. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, he predicted batteries, searchlights, and the tasers used by America’s police force. He foresaw the importance of electricity as a source of energy and suggested methods for air travel that later helped the first pilots get their feet off the ground. He anticipated the discovery of Darwin’s “missing link” between humans and apes. He even provided the technical details of the first manned trip to the moon. When the Apollo 8 mission returned from its voyage, one of the astronauts wrote Verne’s great-grandson a letter that praised the author’s predictive abilities in From the Earth to the Moon: “Our space vehicle was launched from Florida, like Barbican’s; it had the same weight and the same height, and it splashed down in the Pacific a mere two and a half miles from the point mentioned in the novel” (quoted in Teeters, p. 62).