Le Bagne.
These 1901 updates and corrections made by Verne to his 1898 manuscript are also very important when considering another possible but less acknowledged source for The Kip Brothers: the Dreyfus Affair. As Cornélius Helling observed in 1935, “This book was written when the Dreyfus affair was causing a stir and [it] has the feel of its era.”47 In fact, if one were not familiar with the case of the Rorique/Degrave brothers or if one did not have access to copies of Verne’s correspondence from the 1890s, one would naturally assume that The Kip Brothers had been based—either partly or wholly—on this legendary case of judicial error and unjust punishment.
The problem is that, during the late 1890s, Verne was a staunch and very vocal anti-dreyfusard. In late 1898, as demands for a retrial of Alfred Dreyfus (in prison at Devil’s Island since April 1895) began to heat up because of new evidence discovered by Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart and by Emile Zola’s inflammatory letter “I Accuse,” Verne wrote to Turiello, saying: “As for the D … affair, it’s best not to talk about it. For a long time it has, for me, been judged and judged well, whatever happens in the future.”48 In a letter somewhat later to Hetzel fils, Verne mentioned in passing “I who am anti-Dreyfus in my soul …”49 And, finally, in December 1898, Verne agreed to became a founding member of a conservative, right-wing, anti-Dreyfus organization called the Ligue de la Patrie Française (the French Patriotic League), created in opposition to the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (the Human Rights League), a left-wing political group that supported Dreyfus’s cause. Throughout this period, Verne’s pro-government position on the Dreyfus Affair was very clear and well publicized, a position no doubt reinforced by his own anti-Semitic tendences.50
In dramatic contrast to his father, Michel Verne was enthusiastically pro-Dreyfus and did not hide his feelings either. Jean Jules-Verne, Verne’s grandson and family biographer, describes how his father and grandfather repeatedly clashed on the subject:
From the outset his son, Michel, a so-called reactionary with royalist tendencies, was violently outraged by the injustice of the Dreyfus case. I remember that what upset him most was the deliberate procedural error whereby documentary evidence was produced in court without being shown beforehand to the defence—particularly since the document concerned turned out to be a forgery. Obviously, Michel’s visits to Amiens at this time could not help being stormy ones. They might have resulted in a momentary breach with his father; but fortunately their affection for each other was by now such that their relationship emerged unscathed. In any case, Verne’s judgment was too sound for him not to see eventually that his son’s indignation was justified; but to admit that much he had to sweep aside a good many beliefs that he had always regarded as inviolable.
This made him all the more disposed to listen to the opinions of his prodigal son, who had turned out to have a cultivated and alert mind with which Verne could communicate.51
Could it be that, between 1898 and 1901 when he was to revise the text of The Kip Brothers, Verne slowly began to “see” his son’s point of view on this matter? Could it be that he began to acknowledge that there were profound similarities between Dreyfus’s unjust imprisonment and that of the Rorique/Degrave brothers on whom his own fictional protagonists were based? Could it be that Verne, unable or unwilling to “sweep aside a good many beliefs that he had always regarded as inviolable,” purposefully embedded in the text of The Kip Brothers certain clues that reflected his change of heart about the Dreyfus Affair as he was preparing the final version of the manuscript in 1901?
Such is the premise of Christian Porcq in a seminal two-part article on Verne’s The Kip Brothers published in the Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne in the winter of 1993–94.52 In a provocative analysis that ranges from the factual to the far-fetched, Porcq argues that Verne—a lover of riddles, puzzles, and cryptograms—hid in his text a host of references to the Dreyfus Affair. Some are lexical: repetitions of certain words such as “affair” and “proofs” (legal as well as photographic—where Dreyfus is a kind of “negative” for the Kip brothers) or phonological anagrams in the fictional characters’ names (like KAR[L]KIP which could conceivably be an inverted PIKAR, that is, Picquart, the name of the French officer who investigated Dreyfus’s case). Some are chronological: the fact that Karl Kip is thirty-five years old when he was arrested (the same age as Alfred Dreyfus at the time of his arrest) or that the three successive court trials portrayed in The Kip Brothers (that of Flig Balt in January 1886, that of the Kip brothers in February 1886, and the Kip brothers’ retrial in August 1887) parallel the timing of the court trials in the Dreyfus Affair a dozen years later (that of Esterhazy in January 1898, that of Zola in February 1898, and Dreyfus’s retrial in August 1899). And some clues can even be found in one of the novel’s illustrations: the portrait of Mr. Hawkins in chapter four bears an uncanny likeness to Edgar Demange, Dreyfus’s defense attorney. According to Porcq, despite Verne’s overt anti-Dreyfus views during the late 1890s, the author nevertheless secretly patterned much of his story on the legal tribulations of the French officer. Porcq’s reading of this novel is fascinating but, ultimately, not entirely convincing. Verne’s anti-Dreyfus views toward the end of his life seem as strong as before he published The Kip Brothers.
Finally, another source for The Kip Brothers was Verne’s own first-hand experience with the sea and the nautical life. As Jean-Paul Faivre has observed, The Kip Brothers is one of Verne’s most “oceanic” novels.53 And the Pacific Ocean is used as the fictional locale for many of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires (The Children of Captain Grant, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, The Chancellor, A Captain of Fifteen, and The Stories of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin, among others) as well as in some of the author’s very first short stories.54 From the earliest days of his youth exploring the docks of the seaport city of Nantes, Verne had a consuming passion for the sea. His grandson writes: “Undoubtedly, it was in Nantes that Verne’s love for the sea made its first mark on him, a real love that many years later led him to remark: ‘I cannot see a ship leaving port … but my whole being goes with her.’”55 Verne owned three yachts during his lifetime: the first, a nine-ton built-to-order vessel launched in 1868 and baptized the Saint-Michel I, in which he sailed out of the port of Le Crotoy (and aboard which he wrote much of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas); the second was the Saint-Michel II, bought in 1876, which he owned for less than a year; and the last, purchased in 1877, was the Saint-Michel III, a luxurious steam and sail yacht with a crew of ten, in which Verne sailed to various ports of call throughout the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea until early 1886. When Verne was writing about ships and the sea, he knew the subject well.56
Verne’s nautical expertise is often reflected in the pages of The Kip Brothers. For example, consider the following passage when Karl Kip takes command of the brig James Cook during a ferocious storm at sea: “The storm, although extraordinarily fierce, was less dangerous, since it now attacked the ship by the bow, and no longer by the stern. The crew managed to set up, not without great difficulty, a heavy-weather jib, capable of resisting the wind’s blasts. Under its storm jib and its small topsail whose reef Karl Kip had unfurled, both of which were trimmed tightly, the brig held close to shore, while seaman Burnes, an excellent helmsman, imperturbably maintained the James Cook on its proper course.” While penning this particular scene, the author was no doubt recalling some of his own early maritime adventures aboard the Saint-Michel. As Verne’s grandson Jean Jules-Verne describes it in his biography, “There can be no doubt that the thoughts of his mariner heroes were his own. … Hence, the importance of the Saint-Michel in his life and works cannot be overstated. Even though he visited few of the faraway places frequented by his heroes, he was a sailor, well versed in sailing and broken to [familiar with] the dangers of the treacherous seas between Boulogne and Bordeaux.”57
NATIONALITIES, REVOLUTIONS, AND BROTHERHOOD
Another interesting aspect of The Kip Brothers—and one that distinguishes it from most other novels in Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires—concerns how certain nationalities are portrayed. The novel’s
