The theatrical experience was not wasted either, for the storyteller adapted many of his novels for the stage, notably Around the World in Eighty Days (1874), The Children of Captain Grant (1878), Michel Strogoff (1880), and a number of others. Since théâtre was the cinema of those days, the success of his plays increased both fame and revenues; whilst, unsurprisingly, one of the first French films made, in 1902, took as its subject an 1865 adventure, From the Earth to the Moon, whose original subtitle read: "A direct crossing in 97 hours and 20 minutes. "

With a steady income assured, the family moved to Madame Verne's home town, Amiens in Picardy, to the northwest of Paris, where Jules Verne could pursue his research in comfort (by 1895 he had accumulated 20, 000 filing cards), attend the Literary Academy, stroll, and sail. Work never ceased. Like Georges Simenon, another tireless artisan of letters, the successful author used his successive boats as floating studies where much of his writing was done. He traveled. He had always dreamed of discovering faraway lands. Now he could afford even a voyage to America. But most of his traveling, as before, was done on the printed page.

In the generation before Verne's birth a great Revolution, or rather a string of revolutions going off like firecrackers, had introduced the politics of the impossible. In his own lifetime, a similar string of technological and scientific revolutions introduced the impossible into everyday life. Mankind's experience of space, time, speed, mass, movement, was radically altered. It fell to Jules Verne to bring this home to millions of readers, explain it, illustrate it, and suggest what it might mean for generations to come. Fascinated by the new world transformed by railroads and great steamers, Verne stood at the crossroads of present and future, a poet of technology, of science, of the power and the menace that they hold. In 1869, he imagined a mission to the moon that prefigured the flight of Apollo 9 one century later. "Our space vehicle," Frank Borman, the astronaut, wrote to Verne's grandson, "was launched from Florida, like [Verne's]; it had the same weight and the same height, and it splashed down in the Pacific a mere two and a half miles from the point mentioned in the novel. " In 1879 he evoked the first artificial satellite; in 1882 he wrote about the sort of cosmic rays that physicists pursued between the two world wars.

The visionary writes about balloons, helicopters, heavier-than-air machines of every sort, about the earth (1864) and its geology, about lunar travel (1865, 1870), about polar exploration (1866), about underwater travel (1869), about electricity which powers the submarine Nautilus or produces a telephote enabling people to see each other at a distance; and, of course, he writes about travel and exploration. All his stories are full of wonders, all a bit ominous, and few are more curious than the unpublished manuscript that Verne's great-grandson discovered in 1989, when the sale of a family home forced him to dispense with a great bronze safe long believed to be empty. The keys to the safe had been lost; it had to be opened with a blowtorch.

Temporarily tucked under a pile of linen, the pages discovered in 1989 were examined later, authenticated, and identified as a text that Hetzel had rejected late in 1863: "It's a hundred feet below Five Weeks in a Balloon... Your Michel is a real goose with his verses. Can't he carry parcels and remain a poet?" And the clincher: "No one today will believe your prophecy. " Verne appears to have accepted Hetzel's verdict. Not so our generation. Published in 1994, Paris in the Twentieth Century proved an unexpected success, with two hundred thousand copies sold in its first year and thirty translations under way, including this one.

From the perspective of our century's end the future that Hetzel found unconvincing appears more plausible. The young stockbroker who hated the Stock Exchange warns against capitalism running riot, the young playwright whose plays had not quite made it warns against a society where culture is at low ebb. Michel is harnessed to his bank's Great Ledger as Orwell's Winston Smith is to the Disinformation Office; Michel's bookish uncle sounds like one of the Book People barely surviving in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 45L And yet this arch-critic (and Radical city councillor of Amiens) is also an arch-conservative, especially in artistic tastes. To Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, he prefers Gounod and Offenbach. Contemporary painting, for him, is nonexistent, Courbet is a gross peasant, painting lost its soul when it abandoned form (also the literary, poetic, thematic subjects of Romanticism). Let's not forget that 1863 was the year of the Salon des refusés, where Édouard Manet showed his Déjeuner sur I'herbe: bad vintage for a Romantic palate.

As for poetry, if T. S. Eliot could work in a bank, one doesn't see why poor Michel can't manage. His taste in poetry, at any rate, is odd even for mid- nineteenth century. When his friend admonishes "Your verses must celebrate the wonders of industry, " Michel is firm: "Never.