29) and a courtesan. These were changed to a Leonardo da Vinci virgin and a portrait by Titian, respectively.

At other times Hetzel attacked his star author. “Where’s the science?” Hetzel wrote when Verne presented him with a manuscript of what would become The Mysterious Island. “They [the characters] are too dumb! … 82 pages of text and not a single invention that a cretin couldn’t figure out! … It’s a collection of totally listless beings; not a one of them is alert, lively, witty…. Drop all these guys and start again, from scratch” (Evans, p. 27).

Verne, eager to keep his name at the top of Hetzel’s literary roster, compromised himself to please his editor. After Hetzel presented Verne with a laundry list of edits on his manuscript of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Verne responded in a letter, “I promise you that I will take them into account, for all your observations are correct…. I have not yet achieved total mastery over myself…. Have you ever found me to be recalcitrant when it came to making cuts or rearrangements? Didn’t I follow your advice in Five Weeks in a Balloon by eliminating Joe’s long narrative, and without pain?” (Evans, p. 27).

These influences—Hetzel’s pedantic morality along with the proven formula of Verne’s previous successes—gave rise to the Jules Verne Novel, a mold from which most of his works were cast. In later years especially, his formula sometimes became wooden; his plots hung like cloaks on the frames of his familiar characters. Whether a tale of adventures under the sea, scientific discoveries circling the moon, or a race against time around the earth, nearly all of Verne’s novels track the adventures of a scientist-turned-hero, from Phileas Fogg to Professor Aronnax. The scientist-hero is aided by a worthy servant, and this pair is complemented by a “common man,” a figure like Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There is usually a library or a museum somewhere in the story—as in Nemo’s paintings, books, and display shelves—as well as an obsessive desire to take bearings and locations, as in Aronnax’s consultation of the naval charts for longitude and latitude or a group of people clambering up a mountain in The Mysterious Island to read the land. In addition, Verne’s adventures nearly always take place in microcosmic societies: on a ship, in a balloon, in a submarine, on a space projectile, on an island, on the ice. The scientist-hero always returns to his departure point—for Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea it is to dry land—to publish the discoveries made during the course of his trip. This recurring structure provided Verne a ready-made narrative arc that proved useful. Not only did it excuse the sometimes endless categorizing of scientific knowledge—“ I end here this catalogue, which is somewhat dry, perhaps, but very exact, with a series of bony fish that I observed,” Aronnax writes (p. 260)—it also lent credence to the claims made in the course of the tale. By couching his findings in a book that serves the greater good of science, it is as if the fictional Professor Aronnax says, “It really did happen. We really did see an army of gigantic squid.” Verne’s novels are fiction presented as fact, and fact presented in fiction. The structure, formulaic as it was, served its author well.

Verne did sometimes complain of “the narrow confines that I’m condemned to move around in” (quoted in Evans, p. 26), although never very vocally. The major battle between Verne and Hetzel took place over the figure of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne conceived Nemo as a political fugitive, a rebel hiding from the world by diving in the Nautilus under the sea. He intended Nemo to be a Polish freedom fighter who, after rebelling against the czar of Russia, disappears into the deep. All the clues are there: Nemo’s portrait gallery of notable revolutionaries, his exclamation “The earth does not want new continents, but new men” (p. 100), his support of the Greek freedom fighters. But Hetzel did not want Nemo to be a Pole rebelling against Russia. At the time Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was in galleys, France had freshly signed a treaty with Russia. Hetzel, once a political refugee himself, thought Nemo’s motivation would anger Napoleon. Not willing to take the risk, he ordered Verne to change Nemo’s background to something more palatable to the Emperor.

Verne refused. “If Nemo had been a Pole whose wife died under the knout and the children perished in Siberia, and this Pole found himself confronted by a Russian ship with the possibility of destroying it, everyone would admit his right to vengeance,” Verne wrote to Hetzel.