Turning travel into an imaginary world
Family legend has it that the 11-year-old Jules Verne ran away from home and stowed away aboard the three-master La Coralie, which set sail from Nantes’ port bound for India. Doubt has since been cast as to whether this actually happened, but Jules Verne’s passion for the sea and ships is well and truly founded.
Although the image of a sedentary author who only travelled in his books still lingers, the reality was rather different and the many novels and scenes in Extraordinary Voyages inspired by Jules Verne’s own travel experiences are more than enough to refute it.
Jules Verne mainly travelled by sea, aboard one of his own yachts or as a passenger on cruise ships.
In 1894, he told the journalist Robert Sherard “I have yachted for my pleasure, but always with an eye to getting information for my books. This has been my constant preoccupation, and every one of my novels has benefited by my voyages.”
Jean Bruneau
Portraits of Jules Verne
Pencil drawings on paper, 1978
MJV C579 (donated by Jean-Michel Bruneau, 2022)
Benoît Vieillard
The Saint Michel II
Watercolour, ink and pencil drawing on paper, 2020
MJV C561 (purchased from the artist, 2021)
Benjamin Guyet
The Saint Michel II
Linocut on paper – No. 2/32
Les Éditions de l’Étau, Nantes, 2015
MJV C521 (purchased from the artist, 2015)
Benjamin Guyet has a passion for commercial art and creates his own posters announcing imaginary events.
One of his series is devoted to Jules Verne and his novels, providing them with offbeat interpretations. This poster announces the stopover made by the Saint Michel II (the author’s boat from 1876 to 1877) at La Roche-Maurice, a village on the banks of the Loire downstream from Nantes.
The discovery of Scandinavia
In the summer of 1861, Jules Verne was yet to be the famous author of Extraordinary Voyages. He worked at the Paris Stock Exchange in order to provide for his family but dreamt of escape.
Accompanied by two friends, Aristide Hignard and Émile Lorois, he seized the opportunity to set sail aboard a ship bound for Scandinavia. Their adventure lasted about six weeks and followed a carefully mapped route: Denmark and arrival in Copenhagen, Norway and across Telemark county to Bergen and on to Christiania (present-day Oslo). The travellers explored the fjords, waterfalls and rugged mountains. Jules Verne took a great many notes on the region’s geology and local customs in his travel diary. However, he had to cut the journey short and hurry back to Paris upon learning of the imminent birth of his son Michel.
His discovery of the Nordic lands inspired the author to write the novels Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Lottery Ticket.
Jules Verne
Joyous Miseries of Three Travellers in Scandinavia
Circa 1861
Ms 2756-2 – Exhibition print (Louis Aragon Library, Amiens Métropole)
This handwritten text is the first chapter of an autobiographical novel certainly written by Jules Verne following his return from Scandinavia. In it, he is clearly very enthusiastic about the idea of undertaking such a journey and gets ready to tell his future readers all about his Nordic adventures in great detail.
The Lottery Ticket – 1886
Éditions Hetzel, Paris, 1886
MJV A376
The novel is set in Telemark county in Norway, which Jules Verne visited in the summer of 1861. In it, he provides accurate descriptions of the inns, roads and landscapes he explored 25 years earlier.
Jules Verne
Travel diary, circa 1861
Ms 2874B – Exhibition print (Louis Aragon Library, Amiens Métropole)
The author’s work and life sometimes seem to merge, with the one drawing inspiration from the other. As in this travel diary manufactured by the Henry Penny’s Patent company, containing 80 pages of notes and sketches relating to his travels in Scandinavia and specifically quoted from in his autobiographical text Joyous Miseries of Three Travellers in Scandinavia.
Jules Verne
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Éditions Hetzel, Paris, 1868-1872
Jules Verne Museum collection
An air trip
Jules Verne only made one balloon flight in his life. It took place on 28 September 1873 aboard Le Météore piloted by Eugène Godard. The flight lasted 24 minutes and covered only a few kilometres. The balloon rose but the ballast provided was not enough to enable it to make a real ascent and cover any great distance. The balloon soon started on a rapid descent. Perhaps these impressions inspired the first pages of Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island, which he was writing at the time of this short air trip.
Eugène Godard was one of France’s most famous aeronauts. Between 1845 and 1890, he built 18 hot-air balloons and 50 gas balloons and made over 1,500 ascents.
The Mysterious Island
Directed by Cy Enfield, United States, 1961
MJV D720
This fantasy film is a free adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel.
In 1865, during the American Civil War, a group of unionists escape aboard an observation balloon. A violent storm carries them to an unknown island in the Pacific. These castaways from the air soon discover that the place harbours gigantic creatures and a mysterious protector, who is none other than Captain Nemo.
Jules Verne
The Mysterious Island, 1873
MS 83-13 – Exhibition print (on long-term loan from the State)
In 1873, Jules Verne made his one and only balloon flight. The same year, he started writing his great robinsonade The Mysterious Island. The manuscript’s first page describes the disastrous descent of the balloon in which its passengers have escaped. The beginning of the story may well have been inspired by Jules Verne’s own experience aboard the balloon Le Météore?
Jules Verne
The Mysterious Island
Éditions Hachette, Paris, 1917
MJV A214
This novel by Jules Verne, published in 1875, narrates the adventures of five protagonists who have fled the siege of Richmond during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Their balloon is caught in a hurricane and crashes on an unknown island they name Lincoln Island in honour of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
Jules Verne
Twenty-Four Minutes in a Balloon
Jeunet, Amiens, 1873
MJV H241
Story of the only balloon ascent made by Jules Verne aboard Le Météore on 28 September 1873. This text, published in the Journal d’Amiens of 29-30 September 1873, is in the form of a letter to Théodore Jeunet, the newspaper’s founder. Shortly afterwards, Jeunet published the story under the title Twenty-Four Minutes in a Balloon, in booklet form as presented here.
Scotland, between legends and industry
In 1859, Jules Verne made his first major trip abroad. Accompanied by a friend of his, the musician Aristide Hignard, he set off to Scotland, a country that fascinated him. In 1895, he told the journalist Marie Belloc, “All my life I have delighted in the works of Sir Walter Scott, and during a never-to-be-forgotten tour in the British Isles, my happiest days were spent in Scotland. I still see, as in a vision, beautiful, picturesque Edinburgh […], and many entrancing memories…”.
Adopting a method he would go on to follow systematically, Jules Vernenoted times, destinations, unusual details and all his travel impressions. The atmosphere of the industrial cities and mining landscapes left its mark on the author, who used his notes on his return to France to write Backwards to Britain, then, in 1876, to write The Child of the Cavern and The Green Ray in 1881.
Jules Verne
Backwards to Britain, 1859
MJV B81 – Exhibition print (acquired in 1981 with the support of the Pays de la Loire region, the département of Loire-Atlantique and the Fondation de France)
In the guise of Jacques Lavaret and Jonathan Savournon, the novel tells the story of Jules Verne’s and Aristide Hignard’s travels in 1859. The manuscript was the first text Jules Verne offered to his future publisher Hetzel, even before his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon. It was rejected and was not published until 1989.
Jules Verne
The Green Ray
Éditions Hetzel, Paris, 1882-1890
MJV A372
Fingal’s Cave
MJV CP424
Fingal’s Cave is a basalt cave on the island of Staffa in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. In the story, Miss Campbell fascinated by the cave’s beauty, is taken by surprise by a violent storm.
Jules Verne
The Child of the Cavern
Éditions Hetzel, Paris, 1890
MJV A1114
The Child of the Cavern,is one of Jules Verne’s most poetic novels. In it, he contrasts the new industrial Scotland with the old Scotland of legends, drawing on the notes he made during the visit he paid in 1859. He describes the beautiful, picturesque city of Edinburgh, which “deserved the name Athens of the North”.
Walter Scott
Description of Scotland
Firmin Didot Frères, Paris, 1843
MJV A2064
Marie-Adélaïde Belloc
Jules Verne at home, in The Strand Magazine
Volume 9, United Kingdom, February 1895
MJV H886
In 1894, Jules Verne played host to the writer and journalist Marie-Adélaïde Belloc. During the interview, he spoke of his taste for such British authors as Walter Scott, whose works he said he had taken delight in reading.
The Mediterranean
In 1884, aboard his steam yacht the Saint-Michel III, Jules Verne explored the Mediterranean with his family and a few friends. Setting sail from Nantes, the crew skirted the Spanish and Portuguese coasts before making their way through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Stopping over in Oran, Algiers and Carthage, the writer was welcomed as a real celebrity, after which the vessel sailed on to Malta, Sicily and Italy, where the travellers visited Naples, Rome and Venice.
This triumphal cruise was the last that Jules Verne made as he was forced to sell his boat in 1886.
Thanks to this final voyage, which was a major source of inspiration, the author provided Mathias Sandorf’s readers with a picture postcard of the Mediterranean Sea. The novel takes its heroes from Trieste to Pisino (Pazin), to the Bay of Cattaro (Kotor), Malta, Syracuse, Gibraltar, Suez, Carthage and Monaco, not forgetting the fictional island of Antékirtta at the head of the Gulf of Tripoli.
Jules and Honorine Verne seated in the stern of the Saint Michel III
Photograph, circa 1880
MJV E670 – Exhibition print (acquired in 2017 with the support of the Regional Fund for Library Acquisitions (FRAB), Pays de la Loire)
In 1877, Jules Verne splurged 55,000 francs on purchasing the Saint Michel III built by Chantiers Jollet Babin (the future Chantiers de la Loire in Nantes), a 35-metre steam yacht rigged as a schooner and equipped with a whole range of amenities. “What voyages in perspective, what field of impressions and what ideas to harvest”, Jules Verne wrote to Hetzel.
Jules Verne
Mathias Sandorf, 1884
MJV B147 – Exhibition print (acquired in 1981 with the support of the Pays de la Loire region, the département of Loire-Atlantique and the Fondation de France)
Mathias Sandorf is the most Mediterranean of the Extraordinary Voyages; all the action takes places along the shores of the Mediterranean, which supplies the plot with a superb geographical setting. As the manuscript shows, the novel was originally titled Mediterranean.
Jules Verne
The Saint Michel III’s ship’s log
MS 2753B – Exhibition print (Louis Aragon Library, Amiens Métropole)
For Mathias Sandorf, Jules Verne drew inspiration from his two-month cruise in the Mediterranean, during which one event in particular had left its mark on the author. On the night of 18 June, the yacht was caught in a violent storm and pushed towards the cliffs on the island of Gozo’s coast (Malta archipelago). Thanks to the help provided by a pilot boat, the Saint-Michel III just managed to take shelter in a channel. In the novel, Dr Antékirtt’s vessel Ferrato escapes the same danger under very similar conditions.
Photograph of the Great Eastern
Milford Haven, circa 1870
Exhibition print (Archives, Wales)
This liner, a veritable « Leviathan of the seas », built by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and commissioned in 1860, was at the time the largest ship ever built. Measuring 211 metres long and 25 metres wide, with 4,000-passenger capacity, it featured water wheels and two powerful steam machines., This motor was indeed the main attraction of the voyage.
The Great Eastern was designed to be a commercial ship, but since it was too large, not suited to the loading or unloading of freight in most ports, difficult to steer and vulnerable to storms, its commercial use was a failure. In 1864, the engineer Cyrus West Field was charged with making alterations to convert the ship into a cable ship. It was then chartered to install transatlantic cables between Ireland and the US coast, a mission that it completed successfully, before being condemned for demolition 31 years after its launch.
Jean-Marc Deschamps
The Great Eastern
Model inspired by the novel The Floating Island, 2004
MJV G179 (Purchased from the artist, 2008)
Jules Verne
The Floating City
Hetzel publishing house, Paris, 1872
MJV A350
In 1867, Jules and Paul Verne crossed the Atlantic between Liverpool and New York. on board the Great Eastern The author recounts this adventure in his log book used as inspiration for the novel The Floating City published in 1871.
Arthur Mangin
Science with the family
The Great Eastern and the transatlantic cable
Musée des Familles magazine, Paris, 1865-1866
MJV A623
Transformed by engineer Cyrus West Field, the liner was used to install a telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland from 1865 to 1866. Its gigantic proportions enabled 4,000 metric tons of cables, over 5,790 kilometres, to be loaded.
Mapping Jules Verne’s cruises
From 1866 onwards, Jules Verne put to sea on a regular basis, setting sail on one of his boats whenever he could.All his voyages, coastal runs and cruises aboard his successive Saint-Michel yachts have been studied by Master Mariner Philippe Valetoux and described in his book Jules Verne, en mer et contre tous [Jules Verne, at Sea and at Odds] (2005).
The map opposite was created on the basis of his research and presents a simplified version of Jules Verne’s sea voyages.
Travel trunk belonging to Jules Verne.
Leather and interior made from coated canvas
MJV G235(Purchase in public sale)
The trunk is from the brand Au départ, a Parisian trunk-maker founded in 1834 and installed at 29 avenue de l’Opéra in Paris.
The letter « V » for Verne is painted in white on both sides.
