Marriage made little difference to Jules’s régime. He continued to rise at five to write before he went off to the Stock Exchange, where he proved to be better at banter than broking, and Honorine complained to her mother-in-law ‘There are manuscripts everywhere - nothing but manuscripts! Let’s hope they don’t finish up under the cooking-pot!’[viii] Jules continued to pursue success doggedly. The pieces of scientific reportage he wrote for the Musée and other journals were always well received, but he persisted in writing undistinguished comedies and plays which drew a steady stream of rejections from publishers and producers. Jules had dreamed of being a success by the age of thirty-five; at thirty-four he had failed to make a mark in any field. Finally, even Jules’s confidence began to flag. As he wrote to his father;

It’s as if, the moment I get an idea or launch on any literary project, the idea or the project at once goes wrong. If I write a play for a particular theatre director, he moves elsewhere; if I think of a good title, three days later I see it on the billboards announcing someone else’s play; if I write an article, another appears on the same subject, etc. Even if I discovered a new planet, I believe it would at once explode, just to prove me wrong. [ix]

In 1862, Jules submitted a manuscript on hot-air ballooning to the innovative Parisian publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. In its first draft, the manuscript was an uneven combination of narrative and scientific reportage - Hetzel advised Jules to rewrite the work and ‘make a real novel of it’. [x] Two weeks later Jules returned to Hetzel with the rewritten manuscript for Five Weeks in a Balloon which Hetzel accepted for immediate publication, offering Jules a long-term contract for three books a year into the bargain. Jules accepted with alacrity, and took his leave of the Stock Exchange with a formal speech to his friends;

I have an idea, the sort of idea that... ought to come to a man once a day, but which has come to me only once in my life, the sort of idea that should make a man’s fortune. I have just written a novel in a new form, one that’s entirely my own. If it succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In that case, I shall go on writing and writing without pause, while you others will go on buying shares the day before they drop and selling them the day before they rise. I am leaving the Exchange. [xi]

Jules’s confidence was not misplaced. Five Weeks in a Balloon was an instant best-seller among readers of all ages, who recognized that a new literary genre had been created - that of the scientific novel. The response was overwhelming and sensational, as befit a unique work so ideally suited to the times. As Jules’s publisher Hetzel put it;

The novels of M. Jules Verne have come just at the right time. When an eager public can be seen flocking to attend lectures given at a thousand different places in France, and when our newspapers carry reports of the proceedings of the Academy of Sciences alongside articles dealing with the arts and theatre, it is surely time for us to realize that the idea of art for art’s sake no longer meets the needs of the time we live in, and that the day has come when science must take its rightful place in literature. To M. Jules Verne goes the merit of being the first to tread this new ground... [xii]

All Jules’s interests - previously seemingly irreconcilable - now come together. The years he had spent developing a new and simple scientific prose style made the theoretical passages of his writing accessible to all; the enthusiasm with which he outlined his theories made them fascinating. The pace and flow that had eluded him in his plays now came easily, giving excitement to the narrative and drama to the action. The wit and humour that he had been unable to convey in his comedies now came to the fore, and the moral sense that had kept him from devising convincing characters for the stage now found expression in the lofty moral idealism of his heroes.

He was a writer of genius who had finally found his true medium and over the next forty-two years he devoted himself to writing what he planned as ‘a long, imposing procession of works’[xiii] - ultimately sixty-four in number - in which the reader was led through different fields of human knowledge through the device of having the plots, the action and often the denouement turn on the proof or disproof of various scientific theories, on inventions that were extension of known scientific principles, or on confrontation with natural phenomena. All his early works were imbued with a belief in the virtue of progress and in the potential of science to improve the human condition by enabling man to master the forces of nature and harness them to his will for the general good of all, in the idealistic and humanitarian tradition of Saint-Simon.