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Nemo wandered through the palatial halls of the Louvre, studying magnificent works of art -- most particularly the Mona Lisa, an exquisite portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings and notebooks had so captivated him aboard the Coralie. He also loved to travel to Versailles to admire the architecture of the “palace that was a city” built by Louis XIV.

A single man with no social aspirations, Nemo’s tastes did not run to the extravagant. His greatest indulgence was to subscribe to the Parisian science magazines that young Jules Verne had shared with him so many years before. Nemo read voraciously to keep up with new scientific developments, reveling in the tales of explorers seeking wild paths across the globe. With only his memories of distant lands, he traveled in his mind, living vicariously through the other great men of the century.

He thought often of Caroline, though he didn’t dare see her more than once every month or two, when business took him back to Nantes. He longed for her and mourned the circumstances that had built a barrier between them. The two of them did, however, exchange a regular correspondence, and he read and reread every note she sent. He would smell the faint scent of her stationery, look at her brisk but delicate handwriting, and imagine her slender fingers holding the pen as she gathered her thoughts.

By now, her husband Captain Hatteras was almost certainly lost at sea . . . but Nemo would not pressure her to file for a death certificate, as Verne had suggested. He would wait and think about her, and when his longing grew too intense, Nemo plunged with greater vigor into his daily work.

After the interminable seven years had passed, things might change for the two of them. He and Caroline had waited for each other so long. . . .

#

One gloomy day in the Paris civil engineering offices, Baron Haussmann presented Nemo with a new assignment. The short-statured man had a cherubic face, and harried, bloodshot eyes. He spoke with a thick German accent. “I now require of you a supreme effort, Monsieur Nemo. It is my intention that you develop a plan for expanding the ancient, overburdened system of storm drains and sewers in Paris.” He handed the young engineer a thick roll of oversized papers. “These are the blueprints. Please study them meticulously.”

Nemo found it difficult to tap into his reservoir of enthusiasm for such a dreary job. But he took the blueprints, gave a formal nod to the powerful baron, and marched out of the government offices.

That evening, with the dizzying labyrinth of Parisian sewers hammering at his brain, Nemo sank into his reading chair with a cold meal of roast mutton at his side. He buried himself in his scientific magazines. A new issue of the proceedings from Britain’s Royal Geographic Society had arrived. Since the articles were all written in English, Nemo kept up his proficiency in the language.

For more than a century, the exploration of darkest Africa had been an obsession of European explorers. Nemo had read with great interest the memoirs of James Bruce, a big-shouldered and tempestuous Scotsman who had traveled through Ethiopia and discovered the source of the Blue Nile in 1771. He also studied the 1799 journals of Mungo Park, who explored the interior of Africa and perished under a native attack on the Niger River.

Now, Nemo read a speech given at the Royal Geographical Society by an eccentric and vociferous -- and possibly learned -- doctor of biology named Samuel Fergusson. In an uproarious lecture to the Society, Dr. Fergusson had proposed the preposterous yet intriguing scheme of taking a hydrogen balloon from the east coast of Africa across the unexplored continent all the way to its western shores. Other travelers tramped through clogged jungles and fever-ridden swamps, tried to navigate crocodile-infested rivers or negotiate foaming cataracts. Fergusson’s idea, on the other hand, was to drift calmly over the African landscape, as if taking a quiet carriage