VERNE, JULES (1828-1905), French author, was born at Nantes on Feb. 8, 1828. After completing his studies at the Nantes lycee, he went to Paris to study law. About 1848, in con junction with Michel Carre, he wrote librettos for two operettas, and in 185o his verse comedy, Les Pailles ronnpues, in which Alexandre Dumas fils had some share, was produced at the Gymnase. For some years his interests alternated between the theatre and the bourse, but some travellers' stories which he wrote for the Musee des Families revealed to him the true direction of his talent—the delineation, viz., of delightfully extravagant voy ages and adventures, in which he foresaw, with marvellous vision, the achievements of scientific and mechanical invention of the generation of 1900. "For the last twenty years," said Marshal Lyautey, "the advance of the peoples is merely living the novels of Jules Verne." Verne was a real pioneer in the wide literary genre of voyages imaginaires. His first success was obtained with Cinq semaines en ballon, which he wrote for Hetzel's Magazin d'Education in 1862, and thenceforward, for a quarter of a cen tury, scarcely a year passed in which Hetzel did not publish one or more of his amazing stories. The most successful include : Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) ; De la terre a la lune (1865) ; Vingt mille lieues sous les mars (1869) ; Les Anglais au pole nord (1870) ; and Voyage auto2ir du monde en quatre-vingts fours, which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The adaptation of this
last (produced with immense success at the Porte St. Martin theatre on Nov. 8, 1874) and of another excellent tale, Michael Strogoff (at the Chatelet, 188o), both written in conjunction with Adolphe d'Ennery, proved the most acceptable of Verve's dramas.
His novels delight by reason of their sparkling style, their pic turesque verve—inherited from Dumas—their good-natured na tional caricatures, and the ingenuity with which the love element is subordinated. He was a member of the Legion of Honour, and several of his romances were crowned by the French Academy, but he was never enrolled among its members. He died at Amiens on March 24, 1905. The novels of Jules Verne are dreams come true, dreams of submarines, aeroplanes, television; they look f or ward, not backward. Therefore they are still the books of youth.
See C. Lemire, Jules Verne, 1828-1925 (1908) ; M. Allotte de la Fuye, Jules Verne, sa vie et son oeuvre (1928).