Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [85]
“Running ‘Aronnax, Merchant’ requires all of my energy, Jules. I am quite content with my life and not anxious to take another husband just yet,” Caroline said, but the troubled look on her face and the quick glance she sent Nemo suggested otherwise. “I never gave up hope on you, André.”
Verne saw the look and tried to cover his frown, suddenly flustered. “There’s no hurry.”
Though he continued to dabble at writing plays and poetry, along with his stage-manager’s job at the theatre, Jules Verne still had too little success to justify any career other than to follow in his father’s footsteps. It looked as if it would be an attorney’s grave for him. “I’ll be required to return home in another year or two after I finish at the Academy. And André, you’ll be here at Nantes working on your engineering projects.” Verne forced a bittersweet smile. “It could be like old times for the three of us. A world of adventure is waiting.”
Nemo heard a ship’s bell clanging on the distant quays, sailors shouting to each other as they cast off mooring ropes. His heart felt heavy again, and he looked across at Verne. “I’m not sure we can ever go back to those days.”
ii
The old stone bridge had been damaged by cannonfire during the Revolutions of 1848, but moss, water, and time had weakened the supports long before.
Intent on his work, Nemo stood in knee-deep slimy mud beneath the pilings, searching for cracks, rapping with a steel hammer to listen for soft spots. Waving his hand in front of his face to scatter biting flies, he waded deeper to assess which repairs might be needed.
On the shady bank sat his designated work party, chewing on grass blades. Pieces of wooden scaffolding lay all around them, unassembled; a stonemason mixed a new batch of mortar, though it would probably dry before Nemo came back and told the laborers what to do. . . .
While his plans to modernize the Nantes shipyards ground through the endless bureaucracy, he had been recalled to Paris. His sketches and ideas fought for notice among hundreds of worthy projects while the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, juggled proposals to make Paris the most magnificent capital in Europe.
In the interim, Nemo dutifully designed reinforcements to weakening bridges or church steeples, and even outlined improvements to the expanding railway network. Though many of his innovative ideas were too strange to be accepted by formally trained engineers, Nemo did his best to find the most efficient way to accomplish each task. He recalled the inspirational words of Napoleon III: “March at the head of the ideas of your century, and those ideas will strengthen and sustain you; march behind them, and they will drag you after them; march against them, and they will overthrow you.”
Nemo marched to the rhythm of his own imagination, though often his work crews didn’t want to march at all. He slogged dripping out of the water and began to issue orders, already eager to face the challenge of the next job.
#
Nemo lived alone in a small room at the heart of Paris and often went to operas and the theatre, including several entertaining little farces that Jules Verne had written or staged. Sometimes, he made a point of meeting his redheaded friend, but their lives had diverged enough that the lost years became a gulf between them.
Verne himself had never yet managed to set foot outside of France. The struggling writer was enthralled by parties and literati, but Nemo preferred the silence of his own company to the posturing and naive “intelligentsia” who spouted opinions as if they were facts. The challenge of complex engineering projects was a better fuel to Nemo’s imagination. Though the Emperor’s architectural repairs did not make use of his full abilities, the work