Around the World in One Attic

Verne is everywhere, even Breteuil

In the upstairs study of the Maison Jules Verne in Amiens, we find the author’s Google; his version of the Elizabethan “commonplace” book.

Verne’s library is over 12,000 books strong, and there are maps, atlases, the works. “Long before I was a novelist I have always taken notes as I read newspapers, magazines and scientific journals,” he tell us. “These notes were and still are filed away, arranged by subject. I need not tell you how priceless such documents is.”

This doesn’t explain the wild imagination though; nothing really can. Jules Verne did go to Scotland before his novels made him famous (he’d written comic stage plays earlier); and later as success hit he visited America. But this story is not about a physical explorer, like Tom. The incredible journeys, the “Voyage Extraordinaire” are the product of the mind.

Maison Jules Verne would have been on the outskirts of Amiens in the nineteenth century, it is only very recently opened for tourists. The dark rooms on four floors – there is a tower/turret on the roof – echo to a discrete soundtrack: laughter and voices in the parlour; a pen scratching across paper in the study, and in a replica of the office of his famous editor, Hertzel – the man who made Verne.

There are few of us not touched by Jules Verne, whatever our disposition to science fiction. I seem to remember even Alan Partridge, or was it Steve Coogan, essaying a poor Phineas Fogg recently. Verne isn’t a geat writer, not Suzanne’s favourite, nor mine, but his best books do have a vital visionary quality. I particularly like the nineteenth century obsessiveness of “Around the World in 80 days”. There is a man doing much the same as we speak, armed with Conde Nast expenses and a gold card. Verne lives on.

Upstairs again and there is a certificate for Verne from the Alliance Française, for his work in popularizing the French language overseas. He is the most translated Frenchman, publishing even more than De Sade or Voltaire abroad. Literature not just as Proustian prose, but Age of Empire geo-politics as well.

He worked hard, Verne, up at five each morning. In this house alone he wrote 44 books. There are over seventy in all; before the plays, films and PC games added to the pantheon. By the 1870s Verne was all the marketing rage: plates, snakes and ladders, lotto cards, even wallpaper attested to his appeal And Méliès made his ground-breaking “moon” film of 1902, based on Verne’s writings.

There is a framed letter from the Boy’s Empire League of Ludgate Hill in London, praising Verne for his “wonderful imagination for the delight of boys all over the world.” The League sent a gold-capped walking stick in thanks.

Verne takes us to the centre of the Earth, the Moon, 20,000 leagues under the sea; to the “Lighthouse at the End of the World.” Takes us to places that even now are denied to Google Earth.




But what I like most about Verne is his social commitment; it is not really visible in his fictions, but in the world about him in Amiens he gave something back. Benjamin Barber or Victor Hugo, friend of Verne’s publisher, Hertzel, would be proud. Verne was a local councillor for the last 17 years of his life. He concentrated on cultural matters in Amiens, including the building projects. His masterpiece? The Cirque: Verne loved the circus.

Ah well.

In the attic of the house the exhibition is full of movie posters from every country, and in numerous languages, James Mason and Kirk Douglas stand out. Verne was not Hugo, nor Proust, but his stories are transforming experiences, and almost always for the good. He is a writer of the surface, not a stylist or one for psychological depth. But his vision is the up side of technological progress; besides, he didn’t have to see much of the twentieth century, dying in 1905.

The French historian, Etienne Gibson writes that Renaissance humanism was the Middle Ages, “not plus humanity, but minus God.” If this is the case, then Verne’s amazing positive view of technology’s possibility is “the nineteenth century plus imagination and disengaged love.”

At the station in Breteuil I tell Peter about Verne. “He never went anywhere, Verne,” he says. “Except in his mind. What a journey that must have been.”

Fi-fishing in Breteuil

The Renaissance humanist writer, François Rabelais said that laughter is the mark of humanity. In that case I’m having an on, off, very-on crisis of humanity here in Breteuil.

Rabelais was one of those betwixt figures, an ex-monk, lawyer and doctor before he found his feet as author of Pantagruel and Gargantua, long held as one of the greatest of novels, early or not. His catch-phrase was fais ce que voudras – do whatever you like. He’d shoot ads for Nike these days.

Breteuil was an overnight stop for Tom, one of his “meane and ignoble places,” that he describes only in terms of ruins. I quite like the place; it is quiet and the people more guarded than Amiens, but once again, it understands itself. Apart from the relation of a railway station to the town centre: Breteuil station is seven kilometres away from the town.

“Politics,” Peter, an American-Norwegian, says as he waits. “Some official there who didn’t want to see trains.” He’s at the station to meet a French social worker who comes down from Paris once a week. He offers a lift without question. “Many people make this mistake,” he says, in a “Dutch” accent. He lives nearby. When we part he worries I’ll have nowhere to stay, hands me his numbers.

There is no problem with the hotel room, just lunch. It is two and – unlike anywhere else in town – the dinning room is humming with “Burghers” in lunchtime fineries, (one is the double of the deadly VP in “24”, his ancient friend has an endearing ash-blonde ponytail) and all are eating what looks very good food. I get the purse-lipped “closed” from Brett One, the man behind the bar, and when I sit down despite this and get out a map the entire room gives me a master-class in snow-blinded self-importance. It’s only a McQueen leather jacket.



Brett Two and Les Burgher-Roi


There is a half an hour of absolutely no eye contact in a room the size of a medium-sized kitchen before the accident. “You want something?” Brett Two says, tricked into looking at me.

Later I double-check the times for dinner. “7.30 to nine. Then closed. The television is good tonight,” Brett One says. And Rabelais’s dictum kicks: he laughs, I laugh. We are human again.

But not for long.

The ebb and flow of laughter moves through me as upstairs I fish for wi-fi in my room. It is utterly unexpected, but suddenly I have three potential signals: I stalk my room over and over, a hungry Ahab in search of his whale. Call me Email.

The networks drift by and occasionally take the bait, but never let themselves be reeled in. “Lipsky, Neuf987, and Orange all play the Communication Coquette, allowing a few pages of download (farewell: Cutty Sark; adieu French-American concert in Paris) but never the right ones.

In the recent century studies of Rabelais have increased greatly: his writings never seeming more modern. The Russian critic and Dostoevsky scholar, Michael Bakhtin, was fascinated by Rabelais: he said that “to be human was to laugh,” though he believed that we’ve lost the ability to laugh at important things, and so we stick to the trivial. If we don’t know what is sacred any longer, how can we laugh at it – and prove our humanity?

By dinner – at 7.30 prompt – I am laughter-lite once again, tired from all the fi-fishing. I sit alone and order. The pate arrives on a square glass plate with: jam, brown sauce, pecan ice cream, cooked chives, red peppercorns, sea-salt. Is this a Rabelaisian moment to laugh out loud?

A short man enters, ignores everyone except me: I get a nervous “bonsoir.” He sits at a table for one where a half-decanter of red wine is waiting. He has nothing to read, no cigarettes to amuse him. He pockets a roll from the basket in his jacket pocket so badly it is an insult to the word “furtive.” He downs some wine. A fish dish arrives at his table without prompting, and unacknowledged by Bretts One, Two, or the Mysterious Man Himself. He nods his head and shakes his shoulders in time with a French jazz version of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and then mutters through his fish. He talks himself into getting his countryman’s jacket back on, finishes the wine, and without a thank you or good evening he (and his bread roll) are vanished into the night.

Can I laugh now?
Non.

Brett Two is the Boss. He picks up the fat cat that has circled my table for hours: take it, pate with jam and chives – take it now, big pussy.
“This is my cat,” Brett Two says. He’s from Biarritz, Brett Two. No wonder he’s in Rabelasian Denial. “This is Pepper.”
“Pepper?”
“Non! Pepper.”
Bien.
It’s nine in the evening, television time for the Two Bretts. In a reflection at the window I can see myself. I’m not laughing.

In “Europe”, the historian Norman Davies wonders if Rabelais “was not the last European to be truly human.”