Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [169]
To gain further business, she had also capitalized on her notoriety from the balloon journey across Africa. With delight she had read Verne’s fictionalized and melodramatic account in Five Weeks, and had written him a congratulatory letter. He still kept the handwritten note in a locked drawer in his study, treasuring it. . . .
In the end, it had been Caroline who’d invited him to her offices and, despite his better judgment, Verne didn’t have the heart to refuse.
Now, striding brightly down the river walkway, past left-bank brasseries and bookshops, Verne smelled the fresh air. A brief rainstorm had passed during the previous evening, infusing the morning with a brisk dampness that made his nostrils tingle. Gulls flew above like kites. Whistling with the anticipation of seeing Caroline again, Verne could think of no more admirable place to live than Paris. The City of Light had become so beautiful since Emperor Napoleon III had rebuilt it after so much civil unrest.
When he arrived on the tulip-surrounded doorstep of ‘Aronnax, Merchant,’ he gave his name to the clerk. “Monsieur Jules Verne?” The clerk squinted at him through gold-framed spectacles. “The author? Esteemed storyteller of the Extraordinary Voyages?”
Both pleased and embarrassed, Verne nodded. His full beard, long nose, and penetrating eyes had become a trademark in Hetzel’s magazine. People often recognized him on the streets, and he still didn’t know how to respond.
In the years since Five Weeks in a Balloon, readers had come to anticipate each new Jules Verne novel. He had followed his balloon adventure with a massive epic called Captain Hatteras -- named for Caroline’s husband -- about a man’s quest to find the North Pole.
Of course, Verne had no special knowledge of what had happened to the real Hatteras, who had disappeared two decades earlier. Using an author’s license, he had made up a story about bleak and unexplored lands. In the novel, the obsessed but admirable hero had succeeded in his magnificent quest, though his incredible ordeals had driven him mad in the end.
Even believing Nemo dead, Caroline clung to her own reasons for not remarrying, preferring a life alone to a dreary marriage. By day, she ran an important business and made her decisions, while she kept evenings free for painting or sketching or composing music.
How would she react to the news he brought today? He cursed himself for having waited so long, but he had always made excuses, both intimidated by Caroline and longing to see her. Every month, he kept expecting Nemo to change his mind and come back to civilization, but now he knew that would never happen.
The enthusiastic clerk startled him by reaching out to shake his hand. “Monsieur, I have read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Simply amazing. My congratulations on your remarkable imagination.”
Pierre-Jules Hetzel couldn’t have been more pleased at the public reaction to these stories. Each holiday season, Verne’s novels were bound in illustrated gift editions, after being serialized in Hetzel’s Magasin d’Education et de Récréation. The number of readers grew with every volume.
Verne and Honorine now lived in a larger flat with a separate vacation residence on the damp seacoast he loved so well, though his wife and her daughters found it dreary and cold. Feisty Michel just seemed fussy. Even at seven years old, the boy had to complain about everything. . . .
Verne’s imagination went farther afield for his fourth novel, From the Earth to the Moon, in which he accepted Caliph Robur’s idea of a gigantic cannon that could fire a projectile with sufficient force to escape Earth’s gravity. Intrepid explorers -- super-confident Americans, in this case -- rode inside the capsule to reach the Moon. Because he’d been in a good mood, delighted to have secured a writing career at last, Verne added much