Michael Strogoff arrives too late at Irkutsk, and The Star of the South51 is not a synthetic diamond. We see Maston failing Topsy-Turvy,52 as does Robur the Conqueror,53 as do the engineers of Propeller Island'54 and Orfanik's inventions for The Castle in the Carpathians are all destroyed. In most of the novels, however extraordinary the voyage, a reader might come to feel as if an angel with a flaming sword had risen before the writer and called out to him, "No farther! Ahead is the unknown, forbidden to humans-the realm of the impossible." After "Master Zacharius," Verne almost stopped writing fantasy and horror stories, a domain that would later occupy writers such as H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Sloane, and many others.

Nevertheless, to such a forbidden realm we are taken by the hero of Journey Through the Impossible, by way of the madness inherited from his father. The other characters created by Verne move through the extraordinary world of scientific realities. George Hatteras wishes to go beyond. "This is simply the extraordinary, not the impossible," he exclaims to himself. Verne does not reject characters previously created in his novels; they are, moreover, incarnations of the goodeven Nemo, the rebellious anarchist, the pirate who destroys innocent vessels. This play doesn't contradict previous works; rather, it is an extension of them, setting forth the limits beyond which lie the unknowable and the inaccessible. This flamboyant subject, paradoxically, is quite modern in its "fantasy" concepts, rather than futuristic science fiction, even though the reader is distracted repeatedly by breaks in the tone or tension of the action by the goings-on of two comic characters-a Shakespearean effect that also influenced the comic interludes of Neapolitan opera-bouffe. Constructed like a signpost at the border between the possible and the impossible, this play is, more than any other of the novelist's manuscripts, required reading for all of those, in ever-growing numbers, who study him. Verne's works are now classics in world literature, and he is a subject so complex as to be understood only from a multi-disciplinary approach.

Verne wrote two trilogies; the first includes The Children of Captain Grant, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Mysterious Island; the second comprises From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, and Topsy-Turvy (also known as The Purchase of the North Pole). Journey Through the Impossible is the only piece where so many characters from other works-including both trilogies-appear together. The first half of Jules Verne's life and work culminates with journey Through the Impossible, a mantle atop the two trilogies.

In 1882 all plays were checked by a governmental office before a work was produced; the manuscripts were manually copied by anonymous civil servants and archived. In 1978 Francis Lacassin searched the archives of the Censorship Office of the French Third Republic and discovered a copy of Journey Through the Impossible, ending nearly a century of speculation. The text was published in 1981 by the great Vernian specialists Francois Raymond and Robert Pourvoyeur.55 Until the archived copy came to light, Vernian scholars had only the reviews of the play to know what it was about and to imagine the text. To give an idea of what the play was like when staged in 1882, we have added two contemporary reviews. One, anonymous, was printed in the New York Times a few days after the play opened in Paris. The other is by French reviewer and playwright Arnold Mortier. Year after year, Mortier published a book where he reviewed the plays of the previous season. The two reviews we have included give a good idea of the set, the music, the ballets, and the public reception of the work.

Even in 1969, a former president of the Societe Jules Verne published an article about the Journey Through the Impossible, based only on the reviews.56 And in 1978, Robert Pourvoyeur, just before Lacassin's discovery, published a long article also based on the reviews,57 where he pointed out the importance of the music in Journey Through the Impossible. Ballets characterize these pieces a grand spectacle, making them predecessors of modern music theater. Oscar de Lagoanere51 wrote the music for The Impossible; the first ballet concludes Act I (the center of the Earth) and features a profusion of red costumes and fireworks. The second ballet takes place in Atlantis, where the indefinable sets mix many styles: Egyptian, Indian, Syrian, Roman, Greek, and Arab. The last ballet shows Altorians dancing and singing in brief costumes. According to the reviews, the third ballet was the best of the three.

The play can be read in two ways. The first and easiest-wellreceived by Parisian spectators-focuses on the music, the colors, the journey through diamond caves, the Nautilus, and the colossal cannon (for travel from Earth to Altor).