Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [68]
To him, there was no point in going home. Verne would rather stay here to feel the excitement in the air, the thrill of liberty -- a vigor that could not be matched in a provincial city like Nantes. In Paris, the world had opened up to him. He discovered the marvels of the theater and the opera. In Nantes, staged dramas had been unusual events, but in Paris Verne grew dizzy trying to keep up with the performances scheduled for every night of the week.
Ah, if only he could afford them all! His father had given him a limited budget based upon what the country lawyer considered a fair cost of living. But the revolutions and the fighting had created extraordinary inflation in Paris, and the value of a franc had plummeted. Verne could buy barely half of what his father expected him to afford with his allowance. Meticulous Pierre Verne required his son to keep an itemized list to prove that he needed a larger monthly stipend.
Verne worked hard in his law classes, discussed the various lecturers with his fellow students, and knew how eccentric and facetious their grading systems could be. All of his prior legal knowledge had come from a provincial practice dealing with everyday matters. Yet the professors at the Paris Academy expected him to be familiar with grand ethical arguments and obscure cases that meant nothing on Ile Feydeau.
But Verne studied, anxious to pass, though he had no desire to become an attorney. A far worse fate, he thought, would be to fail and return home to the wrath of his father. No, he would rather face rapacious pirates or typhoons.
Still, even when his head hurt, his eyes burned from lack of sleep, and his muscles ached from poor food and sheer weariness, Verne found time to spend in the company of stimulating intellectuals.
For hours, he sat with musician friends and aspiring poets in bistros and sipped his coffee oh-so-slowly so as not to have to purchase another cup. They spouted verse to each other, reminding Verne of the evenings his family had challenged each other to make rhymes. He also met other writers, one of whom had even had a two-act tragedy performed in a small puppet theater, which made him a celebrity in their circle.
His mind filled to overflowing, Verne’s imagination caught fire. He remembered his literary ambitions, which had been quashed by the bemusement of his mother and utter lack of encouragement from his father. Yet now he became more infected than ever with the dream of becoming an acclaimed dramatist -- and for that he needed to search out philosophical topics and devise grand commentaries on the human condition. Forsaking Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, Verne turned to Voltaire and Balzac, Byron and Shelley, reveling in their hot-blooded romanticism.
One day, waving a ticket that a sick friend had given him, Verne found a seat in the audience of the National Assembly, where a case was being argued. A publisher had been arrested and his newspaper, La Presse, forcibly suspended by the government. For Verne, the main attraction was when the great novelist Victor Hugo rose to speak with great passion for the cause of freedom of speech.
As a celebrity, Hugo had been elected as a deputy of the National Assembly. “He may as well serve his country,” one of Verne’s aspiring-writer friends had commented sarcastically. “It’s been ten years since he published anything new.” Then the students had begun to argue about whether Hugo could ever surpass his literary masterpiece, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Verne hoped that with great minds such as Victor Hugo’s in the Second Republic -- and the election of the enlightened Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon -- Paris and France would finally embark upon a long period of stability and prosperity.
He paid little attention to either politics or rhetoric at the Assembly, but instead nudged