Frères Kip], with a very similar episode in a tavern at the beginning of the story, and in The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World [1905, Le Phare du bout du monde]) or of the presence of fog at the end (as in The Sphinx of the Ice [1897, Le Sphinx des glaces] and The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin).
In a more general way, by featuring an idealized school in its pages, Travel Scholarships alludes to the work of a fellow author and rival who was also associated with the Hetzel publishing house and who wrote under the pseudonym of André Laurie. Born Paschal Grousset (1844– 1909), he had played an important role in the Commune of Paris in 1871 and had been exiled, with ten thousand other Communards, to Nouméa in New Caledonia, from where he had managed to escape, taking refuge first in the United States and then in London. During his exile in England, which lasted from 1874 to 1881, he contacted Hetzel and sent him a number of manuscripts, including several scientific-adventure novels. With the twofold aim of helping an exile and avoiding giving Verne an undesirable competitor, Hetzel decided to have some of Grousset’s novels rewritten by Verne. From this collaboration came The Begum’s Millions (1879, Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum) and The Southern Star (1884, L’Étoile du Sud), published under the name of Jules Verne alone, as well as The Wreck of the Cynthia (1885, L’Épave du Cynthia), signed by both authors even though Verne’s contribution was limited to shortening the text, revising the style, and other minor tinkering. This arrangement was only temporary, however, and could not prevent Laurie from striking out on his own and becoming a serious competitor to Verne with a series of scientific-adventure novels that were published in the Magasin d’Education et de Récréation. When the Magasin was featuring Travel Scholarships in 1903, for example, one of Laurie’s novels, The Giant of the Sky (Le Géant de l’Azur) about a magnificent flying machine, appeared alongside. Curiously, Verne reprised the same subject the following year in Master of the World (1904, Maître du monde).
Laurie showed more originality in a series of novels also published by Hetzel in which he presented his readers with different education systems from Europe and around the world.34 In writing A Two Years’ Vacation, Verne had already made use of the first of Laurie’s works, School Life in England (1881, La Vie de collège en Angleterre). Laurie’s attitude in his books is marked by a pronounced nationalism approaching jingoism that placed the “Celtic race” above all others, though he considers other education systems relatively objectively. Although Verne only touches on the question of education in Travel Scholarships, his fictional Antillean School is an internationalist utopia that serves as a kind of a retort to Laurie’s novels. Despite its modest character, this school merits a closer look, and I will return to it shortly.
Jules Verne was not only inspired by other literary texts; for Verne, everything lent itself to being put into words and becoming text: current-events items about politics or crime, the lives of others, as well as the events and concerns of his personal and familial life. Personal memories occupied an increasingly significant place in his novels, particularly those written after 1890. “Memory is far-sighted,” Verne wrote in The Story of My Boyhood.35 Numerous working documents, where he noted the dates of the deaths of those close to him or the names of people met throughout the course of his life, bear witness to this observation. It is clear that these personal elements in his texts had a different meaning for the author than for his readers, for whom they may often pass unnoticed. But the fact of their inclusion raises several questions about the inscription of autobiography in Verne’s narratives. For example, the Assomption, a real ship on which Verne forced his son Michel to embark as a punishment in 1878, appears in The Kip Brothers (Part I, chap. 5). The village of Chantenay, in the Nantes area, where the Verne family had a country house, is recalled in a central episode of The Mighty Orinoco. In The Tales of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin there appear, among others, “two vessels, the Chantenay of Nantes, the Forward of Liverpool, that were left in great disrepair by the desertion of a number of sailors” (chap. 6). The allusion tied to the name of the first ship is already evident; the second refers to a particular episode from The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866, Les Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras) and the beginnings of Verne’s literary career.
The timing of the action of Travel Scholarships is explicitly given as 1877 in the manuscript. Although this fact is somewhat camouflaged in the published versions, this dating is confirmed by the sale of the island of Saint Barthélemy, which ends the first part of the novel, on August 10 of that year. At that moment Jules Verne was renewing his connection to Nantes, the city of his birth, and lived there for a year until the summer of 1878. His son Michel, before being sent to the Indies, attended the same high school where his father had taken his Latin courses (which were no doubt deadly boring and taught by pretentious professors—recalling the previously cited satire of The Marriage of a Marquis and also Mr. Patterson in Travel Scholarships). It was during this stay in Nantes that Honorine Verne’s grandson, Tony Lefebvre, died in Amiens at just five years of age. Michel Verne had been especially fond of his young nephew. Is it too much to see the reflection of this lost grandchild in the person of the novel’s young rascal, Tony Renault?
The other French protagonist in the story is Louis Clodion, who is “twenty years old, part of a family of ship merchants who settled in Nantes many years ago” (Part I, chap. 2). He visits an uncle in the Antilles who is “a rich and influential grower in Guadeloupe. He lived in Pointe-à-Pitre and owned vast properties surrounding the city” (Part II, chap. 2). This brief biography matches that of a friend of Verne’s—the merchant and art critic Paul Eudel (1837–1911), whom Verne had met in 1861 in Chantenay at his sister Marie’s marriage to the ship-owner Léon Guillon. According to a brief biographical sketch of him published in 1899, “Upon finishing college, he had to abandon regretfully the literary career he [Eudel] had dreamed of, for his family no longer had the resources to send him to Paris to make his start. He then went into business and left for the island of Réunion in 1857 to join one of his uncles, a rich planter and businessman in Saint-Pierre.”36 Returning to Nantes two years afterwards, Eudel later published his autobiographical Souvenirs de voyage (1864). Despite the different French colonies in question (Réunion or Guadeloupe), the facts and the ages of the persons are similar.
A few pages earlier in Travel Scholarships, as if by a surprising coincidence, Verne mentions the family name of the brother-in-law who had introduced him to Eudel: “It was one of the principal merchants of the city [of Marigot on the island of Saint Martin], Mr. Anselme Guillon, who organized this reception” (Part I, chap. 15). The character named is a secondary one, but this name—which never appears anywhere else in the Extraordinary Voyages—nevertheless recalls once more the leading character of the short story The Marriage of a Marquis, Anselme des Tilleuls. Finally, there is the ship Fire Fly that appears near the end of Part I of the novel: its name is the same as that of a ship in a novel published in 1861 by the novelist René de Pont-Jest (1829–1904). Pont-Jest claimed to have taken part in French naval campaigns with Paul Verne in the 1850s. Later, he would unsuccessfully bring a plagiarism suit against Jules Verne—a lawsuit that was first filed in 1877, the year in which the action of Travel Scholarships takes place. It certainly seems that, toward the end of his life, writing was one way for Verne to bring the past back to life and to give his literary oeuvre a personal dimension without going so far as to make it an overt autobiography.
NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM
If this
