Geography Society of Paris, whose newsletters had constituted one of the most important and reliable sources for his novels. The following year, he decided to no longer attend—or at least to do so much less frequently—the Amiens theater, whose performances he had enjoyed three or four times a week, not just as an enthusiast of the dramatic arts, but also as a director of the city’s cultural affairs. Verne was proud to have been a city councilman in his adopted town since 1888, and it was above all in this capacity that his fellow citizens knew their “monsieur Jules.” Most were more or less indifferent to his literary standing. The latter counted more for the notable conservatives of Amiens, whereas politicians on the left regarded Verne with a distrustful eye. Despite his involvement in the city’s cultural affairs, by 1899 Verne stood out most often by his absence at official meetings. His appearances became rare. The same was true for his attendance at street exhibitions or his participation in the organization of the charity office (of which his wife Honorine was vice president) or the town’s supplementary budget for that year.12
Nonetheless, far from inactive even when ill, Jules Verne took advantage of the opportunity to speed up the process of drafting his novels. Thus, on January 6, 1899, he started The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (1901, Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin), the story of a whaling expedition in the Pacific and the Arctic that begins rather uneventfully but then ends entirely in the fantastic—and also in a fog, as would Travel Scholarships. After a month-long break, he began Travel Scholarships on May 1, which was written in two drafts in just four months (and that for a novel of two volumes!). Travel Scholarships was then followed in September of 1899 by The Golden Volcano (posthumous, 1987, Le Volcan d’or) whose two volumes kept Verne busy for an entire year. At the same time, the author corrected the proofs of his novel then being published, The Last Will of an Eccentric, and revised the text of the next one in 1900, Second Homeland (Seconde patrie), on which he had begun working in 1896–97.
This would already seem to be an active schedule, but that was not all. The passing of his one-time collaborator Adolphe d’Ennery, who died at the age of eighty-seven on January 25, 1899, reinvigorated Verne’s playwriting ambitions, one of the great passions in his life. Verne’s two-and-a-half-decades-old collaboration with d’Ennery had already produced elaborate theater adaptations of Around the World in Eighty Days (1874, Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) and of Michel Strogoff (1880), both of which had been huge successes (and which, in France, would continue to be performed until 1941, filling the coffers of the novelist and his heirs). Two other plays, however, had seen only fleeting success. Between 1888 and 1890, Verne and d’Ennery had attempted to write another grand extravaganza, this time an adaptation of The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China (1879, Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine), one of the novelist’s more humorous masterpieces. D’Ennery, however, who had grown difficult in his old age, found the results unsatisfying. The pair ran afoul of each other and were unable to settle their differences and finish the play. Of the two manuscripts written by the novelist, the more recent remained unfinished in the desk of the deceased, who had done no further work on it. Far from Paris and restrained by illness, Jules Verne gave his son Michel—who became for this occasion his literary agent—the responsibility of recovering the manuscript and contacting the director of the Châtelet Theater, the biggest theater in Paris. The director seemed interested and arranged for a new collaboration to finish the play. This work occupied Verne throughout all of 1899, alongside the aforementioned novels. However, the effort was ultimately in vain, and the play would never be performed. The whereabouts of these manuscripts is still unknown today.
The seaside resort of Les Petites Dalles, circa 1899.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE NOVEL
Such were the circumstances in which Verne wrote Travel Scholarships. In his working documents, Verne himself carefully noted the dates of writing: “1st V[olume]. 1 May 99 (the 2 vol. drafts finished 18 June) manuscripts of the 2 13 August, finished 31 August.”13 It is worth noting that Verne would finish work on this novel during his last vacation, which he spent with Honorine and Michel’s family at the Petites Dalles beach resort on the Opal Coast from August 28 to September 3, 1899. Two rare photographs from this trip have survived, one showing the novelist, his family, and several friends seated on the beach with an imposing cliff behind as a backdrop.
Verne’s work ledgers and manuscripts provide evidence of his precise and regular work habits: how he always wrote a first version of his novels in pencil and then revised it directly in ink. The manuscript of Travel Scholarships14 reveals four successive stages of writing. First, after dividing the pages vertically into two equal parts, the author began by filling one section with select words or phrases in pencil, made up of key words, more or less complete sentences, or fragments of dialogue (stage 1). Next, or more likely in successive steps, he developed a first version of the text, still in pencil (stage 2, finished June 18). As the second rewriting in ink (stage 3, finished August 13) took only one half of the page, we can still read one of the two earlier versions on the opposing half, although it is rather difficult to decipher. The novel, once written, then underwent a careful revision wherein certain parts were deleted or elaborated (stage 4, finished August 31).
Jules Verne and family vacationing at Les Petites Dalles.
Reading the manuscripts for Travel Scholarships yields no sensational secrets. A search for “censored” passages or episodes, suppressed at the request of his publisher Hetzel as in some earlier novels, would be in vain. Rather, the document clearly shows the author’s desire to condense his text to its most essential elements, to do away with redundancies, to render the narration more elegant, to choose the most fitting expression, and to specify details (dates, distances, measures, etc.), as was his custom. This work also continued throughout the painstaking correction of proofs—which have not survived—between the customary publication of the three successive editions, to which I shall return.15
There are, however, three notable exceptions to this observation about the unremarkable nature of the manuscripts. One sequence in chapters 10 and 11 of the first part was deleted (probably because of its implausibility or cruelty) after appearing in the pre-original edition; the plays on words from the Latin phrase Rosam angelum letorum, a recurring joke in the second part of the novel, were only added in the proofs of 1903; and the denouement was also completely rewritten and expanded in the proofs. These deleted passages and the original version of the ending are reproduced in the Notes to the present edition.
In addition to these modifications, the manuscripts reveal several changes in the names of the protagonists: Kathleen Seymour, whose first name Verne definitively wrote as “Kethlen,” was named “Kathlen” in the manuscript. The names Will Corty and John Carpenter were used interchangeably at first, and that of the cook Wagah varied throughout the text between “Walah” and “Walha.” It was only when correcting the proofs that Verne adopted the final spelling. But these are variations of only secondary importance.
After having reviewed the first part of his novel, Verne presented it to his editor on September 28, 1902 (the eve of the death of his colleague Émile Zola):
I plan, unless otherwise directed, to send you the 1st volume of the new manuscript, Travel Scholarships, tomorrow. Its setting, as I mentioned to you, is the Lesser Antilles. We ought to take advantage of the fact that public attention is currently so keenly focused on that corner of our world. I will simply have to add a note to the chapter devoted to Martinique. Another reason influencing my selection of this novel is the current issue of whether Denmark will cede its islands
