Back to the Present in a Long-Lost Novel by Verne
By ALAN RIDING,
Published: September 27, 1994
PARIS, Sept. 26— Jules Verne's publisher said it pained him to write so blunt a letter but, after the success of the young storyteller's first book, "Five Weeks in a Balloon," he felt obliged to warn that publication of his new manuscript would be "a disaster" for his name.
"I did not expect something perfect," the disappointed publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, wrote the author in late 1863, "but I expected better." And as if testing fate, Hetzel added, "My dear Verne, if you were a prophet, no one would believe your prophecies today."
After all, in that new manuscript, "Paris in the 20th Century," Verne looked ahead to 1960 and imagined an unlikely place where people traveled by subway and in gas-driven cars, where they communicated by fax and telephone, where they used calculators and computers, where "electric concerts" provided entertainment.
It was also a world in which everyone could read but no one read books, where Latin and Greek were no longer taught in schools, where the French language had been bastardized by "disagreeable" English words. It was a society dominated by money where destitute homeless people roamed the streets.
Fortunately, Verne was not discouraged by the rejection and kept on writing. And within a decade, still in his mid-40's, he had gained fame and fortune as a science-fiction writer through novels like "A Journey to the Center of the Earth," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "Around the World in 80 Days."
Verne held on to the little yellow notebook containing "Paris in the 20th Century"; when he died, in 1905, his son, Michel, mentioned the novel among his father's unpublished works. After that, the handwritten manuscript disappeared. In truth, it was not lost. It had simply not been found.
Verne's 31-year-old great-grandson, Jean Jules Verne, recalls how a large -- and locked -- bronze safe was passed down through the family. "It was my obsession as a child," he said recently. "Everyone thought it was empty, but in my imagination it was full of precious stones, gold and fabulous jewels and strange objects given to or collected by my great-grandfather."
One day in 1989, Jean Jules Verne called a locksmith to his home in Toulon and the safe was opened. Instead of a hidden treasure, he found fragments of an unfinished play, some Russian texts and the manuscript of "Paris in the 20th Century." Now, 131 years after it was turned down by Hetzel, the novel has finally been published here by Hachette/Le Cherche Midi Editeur. The English rights have not been sold yet.
Laurence Nissou, a spokeswoman at Hachette, said there was no doubt the work was by Jules Verne. "After it was found, some people wondered whether it had been written by his son, Michel," she said. "But experts authenticated Verne's handwriting as well as Hetzel's handwriting in the annotations he scribbled on the manuscript."
She also pointed out that it had long been known that the work existed, and that the manuscript was written on "original paper and in Verne's ink." Further, Piero Gondolo della Riva, a Verne expert, had Hetzel's rejection letter to Verne in his private collection. "The arguments Hetzel uses in his letter are the same as are annotated on the manuscript," she said.
Inevitably, the appearance of the book has caused a stir, principally among the legion of Verne students, for whom a mystery has at last been solved, but also in the French press, which is once again celebrating the astonishing ability of France's most widely translated author to predict the shape of things to come.
In a preface to "Paris in the 20th Century," Mr. Gondolo della Riva said he was most struck by its dark mood. Until now, he said, critics attributed the pessimism of Verne's later works to personal problems and the deaths of his mistress and Hetzel. "But the pessimism is present at the start of his career," Mr. Gondolo della Riva noted.
In the book, Verne records the travails of a young poet, Michel Dufrenoy, who becomes homeless in a hostile and overcrowded society that is driven by finance and technology and is totally indifferent to culture. It is also, to all intents and purposes, a police state run by all-powerful bureaucrats.
But the book also displays Verne's fascination with technology. Although the first car using the combustion engine wasn't built until 1889, he describes a Paris crowded with cars. "An invisible force with a gas-powered motor made them move," he writes. "It was clear and simple to handle: the mechanic, sitting in his seat, turned a steering wheel; a pedal at his foot allowed him to change the speed of the vehicle instantly."
He describes an instrument "resembling a piano" that serves as a sophisticated calculator in a brokerage house. Stock exchanges across Europe are linked by telegraph. "Further, the photographic telegraph permitted the dispatch over long distances of the facsimile of any writing, signature or design and permitted contracts to be signed at a distance of 5,000 leagues," he writes.
He also imagined a city dominated by electricity, even to the point of describing street advertisements in lights. And he came up with his version of a synthesizer: an "electric concert," in which 200 pianos were linked by electric current to a single piano being played by a musician.
In one grim passage, Verne forecasts the electric chair, which did not make its appearance until 1888, in the United States. "What a sinister sight," he writes. "Singing workers were already building the platform. Michel wanted to avoid the sight, but he bumped into an open crate. As he stood up, he saw an electric generator. He understood. People were no longer being beheaded. They were being electrocuted."
Here and elsewhere, it is apparent that Verne disapproved of many of the social changes that he described, and in that sense, the book is as much a warning as it is a prophecy. The technological wonders of 1960 did not make people happier, he wrote, because "in their hurried walk, their rushed bearing, their American impetuosity, one felt the demon of money was driving them without respite or mercy."
For good measure, he even noted that laughter could be punished with death. But he did add a few inside jokes for his fellow writers whose books, he said, were no longer available in 1960. "I'd like the complete works of Victor Hugo," Michel asks in one bookstore. "Victor Hugo?" the employee replies. "What did he do?"
Photo: Jules Verne's novel "Paris in the 20th Century" was rejected by his publisher in 1863. Last week, it finally appeared, with this book jacket. (Associated Press)