Only the last of these was still in the early stages. Regrettably, under pressure from the publisher Jules Hetzel, Michel Verne began tampering with these with unfortunate results! He completely rewrote his father's works-including The Golden Volcano-and introduced new characters, wrote new chapters, and invented new endings. The entire spirit of the original works was misrepresented.

Up until the present time, these posthumous novels were known only in their disfigured form. But now the Societe Jules Verne has discovered copies of Jules Verne's manuscripts in the possession of the publisher's descendants. After an initial private, limited edition, now out of print, it now offers to the public at large the original and only authentic version of Le Volcan d'or. A hundred years after it was written, this novel has now been restored to its true form.

The Manuscript of Le Volcan d'or

In 1896, prospectors were rushing to the banks of streams in the Klondike area of the Yukon Territory after the discovery of an inexhaustible deposit of gold had been reported. Jules Verne's own son tried his hand at prospecting. The author at once described the disastrous gold fever brought on by the metal that he had held in contempt ever since he had worked at the Stock Exchange in 1857-the same gold that provided material for In the Magellanes and The Hunt for the Meteor and to which he would refer again in i9oo in Second Fatherland.'

In October 1899, Verne wrote to Jules Hetzel: "I am now deep in the mines of the Klondike. Will I find a precious nugget there? We will see. In any case, I am swinging my pick like a miner!"'

A powerful and pessimistic work, The Golden Volcano was kept in reserve after its completion. It would be his only posthumous novel to consist of two volumes, an indication of the author's interest in it.

Once it was finished and revised, the work did not need to be cor rected or altered. But that was the fate in store for it. The manuscript of The Golden Volcano is a finished text, although the final revision of the proofs had not been done. As was his custom, Verne had not decided definitely on the names of his characters. In the course of the story, he sometimes changed the spelling of them, either as a trial run or through absentmindedness, for Verne worked on several novels at the same time. Aware that he made errors of this kind, he put off correcting them, placing a question mark beside an uncertain name, distance, or date to draw his attention to it later. We have corrected mistakes as the author would have done. There remain only a few awkward turns of phrase, repetitions, and missing words; we have respected those and indicated gaps in the text by suspension points in parentheses. A few missing words have also been supplied. All other corrections are indicated by endnotes. Proper names that have been changed maintain their original spelling, but the variants are given in the endnotes. As for geographical names, we have kept their spelling as they were in Jules Verne's time. This new edition has also been revised and corrected.

The Theme of the Work

The Golden Volcano can be summed up in a single phrase: "Death and misery in the Far North." Two themes are developed in the novel: gold fever and travel through a wild and inhospitable land.

Gold fever is described as an illness, using medical terms:

Ben has definitely not escaped the current epidemic. I hope to God I don't become infected too! What a disease this gold fever is! It isn't a sporadic illness that can be cured with quinine of some sort. No one ever recovers from it, I see.s

At the end of the eighteenth century, when getting rich was the goal of the entire middle class, it required a certain audacity to attack the Golden Calf, the capitalists' god. This burden probably compelled Verne to postpone the publication of his novel and explains some of the changes introduced by his son and Jules Hetzel, who were frightened by the writer's contempt for the "vile metal" and afraid that it might have a negative effect on book sales.

While the hatred of gold remained hidden in three posthumous novels (In the Magellanes, The Hunt for the Meteor, and The Golden Volcano), it made its appearance during the author's lifetime in Second Fatherland, where there is a brief reference to the discovery of gold nuggets as a scourge that threatens to wipe out the castaway's island colony:

I f people find out about the existence of these gold fields, if it becomes known that New Switzerland is rich in nuggets, hordes of gold-seekers will come rushing in, followed by all the evils, all the disturbances, all the crimes that the fight to acquire this metal brings in its wake!'

Probably as a result of pressure from the publisher, the "ferment of trouble and ruin" disappears from the story as if by magic; the nuggets cease to exist, and the text reads: "the colony was not invaded by those gold seekers who leave nothing behind them but disorder and misery." 7

These were the same gold seekers who were described in In the Magellanes, swooping down on the colonists' island like a swarm of grasshoppers, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake, and in The Hunt for the Meteor, where the golden comet takes on the form of a parody, arousing an outburst of passions and the maddest of speculations.

The Golden Volcano is entirely devoted to this ill-fated quest. In it, Verne describes precisely the methods used in prospecting as well as the living and working conditions of the miners, their setbacks, their moral decline, even their deaths. As if to reinforce his point, he introduces a secondary plot, the story of Jacques Laurier, an unfortunate prospector who believes he has won a fortune but ends his life in the grim Dawson City hospital from which patients "would only leave in a hearse, drawn by a dog team, on the way to the cemetery."' This tragic confession seemed to give Verne's son Michel pause for thought. Jacques Laurier was born into a good family. Like Verne-whose name is a synonym for "alder" his name was also the name of a tree.