Michel Dufrénoy's prize for Latin verse brands him as an anachronism condemned to the same uselessness and rejection as his beloved teacher of rhetoric; and Verne's opening chapter joins in a debate that would not be resolved until 1902, when rhetoric was dropped from the curriculum.

Science, too, stood at the center of educational debates under a Second Empire which sought to encourage studies that would orient the young towards careers in useful industry. A degree in letters was more prestigious; but scientific training, the Emperor's Minister of Education asserted, would provide the non-commissioned officers of the industrial army. "Honor the concrete!" Let modern languages replace dead ones, let geography and modern history prepare young minds for contemporary living. Imperial lycées introduced "industrial classes" that did not call for Latin, offered commercial courses, installed laboratories and "electromagnetic apparatus. " By the beginning of the twentieth century more students preferred "modern humanities" to the classics; by 1962 twice as much time was spent on the sciences, three times as much on modern languages, as in the century past. For a long time, however, the numbers involved remained pitifully small. In 1860 the national secondary system taught 35, 000 students; in 1930, 67, 000. Nevertheless, in the end Jules Verne proved right. By 1960 their number had risen to 343, 000—more than double the Academic Credit Union's awesome 157, 000; and only a few years later they passed the half million mark.

Extrapolating from the present can lead to error or to oversight. Fictional Parisians of the 1960s use copiers, calculators, and fax machines, but know no typewriters or even steel-nibbed pens. The bankers Michel hates write with quills, and keep accounts in a

Great Ledger inscribed in a fine hand by a calligrapher. Even Jules Verne's imagination needed a starting point; and typewriters, invented in 1867, patented in 1868—in the United States, of course—were simply not envisaged when he wrote. In the same vein, our author conceives garments of spun metal, but not the polyesters that chemical industry developed later; a bookstore like a warehouse, but no access to merchandise, stacks, or shelves; a multipurpose piano that can be used as bed, dresser, and commode, but not a world where servants do not serve at table.

All nations would be brothers, Hugo had predicted, and Verne agreed because the world had become one market and the links of commerce drew nations ever closer (Chapter VII). "No more events, " meant no more sensational or discomforting happenings; no more wars, revolutions, crises; no more of what Verne called infernal politics. "All will be happy, " Hugo had concluded. One has to doubt whether Verne agreed. Still, some of his forecasts brought grist to Hugo's mill. In Jules Verne's 1960s politics have withered and, since gazettes were about politics, not news, nobody bothers to read the press: "journalism has had its day. " So have medicine which ran out of diseases, and lawyers who, now, would rather settle than go to court. Worst of the book's errors, war has vanished, armies are no more, armies of businessmen have replaced them. "When soldiers become mechanics, wars become ridiculous. " Would it were so. Jules Verne could not know that, by the time he died, the budget of industry and commerce accounted for 1. 7 percent of national expenses, the Army for 23. 4 percent. He could not know but, surely, might have guessed.

When Jules Verne died in 1904, at seventy-seven, his world fame was a little worn, his name on a title page no longer sold books like hot cakes. But for two or three decades after his first triumph in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon, few French novelists, if any, enjoyed comparable world success. A bestseller in his lifetime, with 1. 6 million copies of his French editions sold by 1904 and still more after his death, he remains the most translated of French authors: 224 translations in twenty-three countries.

Son of a comfortable provincial family, the lad grew up in Nantes, the great port on the Loire, studied law as his lawyer father wanted, but soon followed his literary inclinations into the théâtre, writing comedies and operettas (one with music by Offenbach), then helping to manage the théâtre founded by his friend and patron, Alexandre Dumas. Married in 1857, he bought into a financial agency, worked as a broker on the Stock Exchange, but continued to write poems, stories, lyrics, and plays until Dumas introduced him to his own publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, editor of Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, and George Sand, who was to serialize and edit the sixty-four-volume series of Verne's "Extraordinary Voyages" over some forty years.

After the triumph of Five Weeks, Hetzel offered Jules Verne a contract for three books a year, paid roughly at the same rate that he paid George Sand, and also hired him as a regular contributor to a young people's magazine, the Review of Education and Recreation, where many of Verne's novels would be published in serial form.