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Around the world in eighty days / Jules Verne ; illustrations by Jame's Prunier.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Verne, Jules, Voyages extraordinaires ; 11.Puffin classics | Whole storyPublication details: New York : Viking, 1996.Description: 296 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0670867934 (pbk.)
  • 014036711X
Subject(s):
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Childrens Fiction Davis (Central) Library Children's Fiction Children's Fiction VER 2 Available T00609863
Total holds: 0

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  • I In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other, the one as master, the other as man Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7 Savile Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron,-at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.
  • Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on 'Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the "City"; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln's Inn, or Gray's Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen's Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan's Association or the Institution of Arts and Sciences. He belonged, in fact, to none of the numerous societies which swarm in the English capital, from the Harmonic to that of the entomologists, founded mainly for the purpose of abolishing pernicious insects.
  • Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform; and that was all.
  • The way in which he got admission to this exclusive club was simple enough.
  • He was recommended by the Barings, with whom he had an open credit. His checks were regularly paid at sight from his account current, which was always flush.
  • Was Phileas Fogg rich? Undoubtedly. But those who knew him best could not imagine how he had made his fortune, and Mr. Fogg was the last person to whom to apply for the information. He was not lavish, nor, on the contrary, avaricious; for whenever he knew that money was needed for a noble, useful, or benevolent purpose, he supplied it quietly, and sometimes anonymously. He was, in short, the least communicative of men. He talked very little, and seemed all the more mysterious for his taciturn manner. His daily habits were quite open to observation; but whatever he did was so exactly the same thing that he had always done before, that the wits of the curious were fairly puzzled.
  • Had he travelled? It was likely, for no one seemed to know the world more familiarly; there was no spot so secluded that he did not appear to have an intimate acquaintance with it. He often corrected, with a few clear words, the thousand conjectures advanced by members of the club as to lost and unheard-of travellers, pointing out the true probabilities, and seeming as if gifted with a sort of second sight, so often did events justify his predictions. He must have travelled everywhere, at least in the spirit.
  • It was at least certain that Phileas Fogg had not absented himself from London for many years. Those who were honored by a better acquaintance with him than the rest, declared that nobody could pretend to have ever seen him anywhere else. His sole pastimes were reading the papers and playing whist. He often won at this game, which, as a silent one, harmonized with his nature; but his winnings never went into his purse, being reserved as a fund for his charities. Mr. Fogg played, not to win, but for the sake of playing. The game was in his eyes a contest, a struggle with a difficulty, yet a motionless, unwearying struggle, congenial to his tastes.
  • Phileas Fogg was not known to have either wife or children, which honest folk may surely have; either relatives or near friends, which is yet more rare. He lived alone in his house on Savile Row, whither none penetrated. A single domestic sufficed to serve him. He breakfasted and dined at the club, at hours mathematically fixed, in the same room, at the same table, never taking his meals with other members, much less bringing a guest with him; and went home at exactly midnight, only to retire at once to bed. He never used the cosy chambers which the Reform provides for its favored members. He passed ten hours out of the twenty-four in Savile Row, either in sleeping or making his toilet. When he chose to take a walk, it was with a regular step in the entrance hall with its mosaic flooring, or in the circular gallery with its dome supported by twenty red porphyry Ionic columns, and illumined by blue painted windows. When he breakfasted or dined, all the resources of the club-its kitchens and pantries, its buttery and dairy-aided to crowd his table with their most succulent stores; he was served by the gravest waiters, in dress-coats, and shoes with swan-skin soles, who proffered the viands in special porcelain, and on the finest linen; club decanters, of a lost mould, contained his sherry, his port, and his cinnamon-spiced claret; while his beverages were refreshingly cooled with ice, brought at great cost from the American lakes.
  • If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity! The mansion on Savile Row, though not sumptuous, was exceedingly comfortable. The habits of its occupant were such as to demand but little from the sole domestic; but Phileas Fogg required him to be almost superhumanly prompt and regular. On this very 2d of October, he had dismissed James Forster, because that luckless youth had brought him shaving-water at eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit instead of eighty-six; and he was awaiting his successor, who was due at the house between eleven and half past.
  • Phileas Fogg was seated squarely in his armchair, his feet close together like those of a grenadier on parade, his hands resting on his knees, his body straight, his head erect; he was steadily watching a complicated clock which indicated the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the days, the months, and the years. At exactly half-past eleven Mr. Fogg would, according to his daily habit, quit Savile Row, and repair to the Reform.
  • A rap at this moment sounded on the door of the cosy apartment where Phileas Fogg was seated, and James Forster, the dismissed servant, appeared.
  • "The new servant," said he.
  • A young man of thirty advanced and bowed.
  • "You are a Frenchman, I believe," asked Phileas Fogg, "and your name is John?" "Jean, if monsieur pleases," replied the newcomer, "Jean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me because I have a natural aptness for going out of one business into another. I believe I'm honest, monsieur, but, to be outspoken, I've had several trades. I've been an itinerant singer, a circus-rider, when I used to vault like Leotard, and dance on a rope like Blondin. Then I got to be a professor of gymnastics, so as to make better use of my talents; and then I was a sergeant fireman at Paris, and assisted at many a big fire. But I quitted France five years ago, and, wishing to taste the sweets of domestic life, took service as a valet here in England. Finding myself out of place, and hearing that Monsieur Phileas Fogg was the most exact and settled gentleman in the United Kingdom, I have come to monsieur in the hope of living with him a tranquil life, and forgetting even the name of Passepartout." "Passepartout suits me," responded Mr. Fogg. "You are well recommended to me; I hear a good report of you. You know my conditions?" "Yes, monsieur." "Good. What time is it?" "Twenty-two minutes after eleven," returned Passepartout, drawing an enormous silver watch from the depths of his pocket.
  • "You are too slow," said Mr. Fogg. "Pardon me, monsieur, it is impossible-" "You are four minutes too slow. No matter; it's enough to men- tion the error. Now from this moment, twenty-nine minutes after eleven, a.m., this Wednesday, October 2d, you are in my service." Phileas Fogg got up, took his hat in his left hand, put it on his head with an automatic motion, and went off without a word.
  • Passepartout heard the street door shut once; it was his new master going out. He heard it shut again; it was his predecessor, James Forster, departing in his turn. Passepartout remained alone in the house on Savile Row.
  • II In which Passepartout is convinced that he has at last found his ideal "Faith," muttered Passepartout, somewhat flurried, "I've seen people at Madame Tussaud's as lively as my new master!" Madame Tussaud's "people," let it be said, are of wax, and are much visited in London; speech is all that is wanting to make them human.
  • During his brief interview with Mr. Fogg, Passepartout had been carefully observing him. He appeared to be a man about forty years of age, with fine, handsome features, and a tall, well-shaped figure; his hair and whiskers were light, his forehead compact and unwrinkled, his face rather pale, his teeth magnificent. His countenance possessed in the highest degree what physiognomists call "repose in action," a quality of those who act rather than talk. Calm and phlegmatic, with a clear eye, Mr. Fogg seemed a perfect type of that English composure which Angelica Kauffmann has so skilfully represented on canvas. Seen in the various phases of his daily life, he gave the idea of being perfectly well-balanced, as exactly regulated as a Leroy chronometer. Phileas Fogg was, indeed, exactitude personified, and this was betrayed even in the expression of his very hands and feet; for in men, as well as in animals, the limbs themselves are expressive of the passions.
  • He was so exact that he was never in a hurry, was always ready, and was economical alike of his steps and his motions. He never took one step too many, and always went to his destination by the shortest cut; he made no superfluous gestures, and was never seen to be moved or agitated. He was the most deliberate person in the world, yet always reached his destination at the exact moment.
  • He lived alone, and so to speak, outside of every social relation; and as he knew that in this world account must be taken of friction, and that friction retards, he never rubbed against anybody.
  • As for Passepartout, he was a true Parisian of Paris. Since he had abandoned his own country for England, taking service as a valet, he had in vain searched for a master after his own heart. Passepartout was by no means one of those pert dunces depicted by Molière, with a bold gaze and a nose held high in the air; he was an honest fellow, with a pleasant face, lips a trifle protruding, soft-mannered and serviceable, with a good round head, such as one likes to see on the shoulders of a friend. His eyes were blue, his complexion rubicund, his figure almost portly and well built, his body muscular, and his physical powers fully developed by the exercises of his younger days. His brown hair was somewhat tumbled; for while the ancient sculptors are said to have known eighteen methods of arranging Minerva's tresses, Passepartout was familiar with but one of dressing his own: three strokes of a large-tooth comb completed his toilet.
  • It would be rash to predict how Passepartout's lively nature would agree with Mr. Fogg. It was impossible to tell whether the new servant would turn out as absolutely methodical as his master required; experience alone could solve the question. Passepartout had been a sort of vagrant in his early years, and now yearned for repose; but so far he had failed to find it, though he had already served in ten English houses. But he could not take root in any of these; with chagrin he found his masters invariably whimsical and irregular, constantly running about the country, or on the lookout for adventure. His last master, young Lord Longferry, Member of Parliament, after passing his nights in the Haymarket taverns, was too often brought home in the morning on policemen's shoulders. Passepartout, desirous of respecting the gentleman whom he served, ventured a mild remonstrance on such conduct; which being ill received, he took his leave. Hearing that Mr. Phileas Fogg was looking for a servant, and that his life was one of unbroken regularity, that he neither travelled nor stayed from home overnight, he felt sure that this would be the place he was after. He presented himself, and was accepted, as has been seen.

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Jules Verne never took a trip to the moon, never journeyed to the center of the earth, never traveled twenty thousand leagues under the sea--and he never went around the world at all, let alone in eighty days. And yet, in his imagination, he made all these journeys and many more. Although he is widely considered to be the father of science fiction, Verne did not write sci-fi as we know it today--he didn't write about aliens or galactic empires or time travel or even (with a few exceptions) the future--but rather like Michael Crichton in our own time, he wrote adventure stories about epic journeys set in the present day that were right at the edge of what was technologically possible during his lifetime. The most lighthearted of these epic journeys, Around the World in Eighty Days is the story of a single-minded, freakishly decisive Londoner named Phileas Fogg who, on a moment's notice one day in 1872, takes off round the world as fast as he can with his newly hired French manservant and a valise full of cash, for no better reason than to win a bet. Verne's own life was adventurous only in his imagination. Born the son of an attorney in the French port city of Nantes in 1828, he wrote in later life that he grew up fascinated by the clipper ships and schooners he saw along the docks, but apart from some amateur boating with his brother Paul along the Loire River, he was never so fascinated that he ever attempted to run away to sea. Instead, to please his father, he dutifully followed the career track of an ordinary bourgeois Frenchman, studying law in Paris and working as a stockbroker. The young Verne's aspiration to be something more than a businessman expressed itself as literary ambition rather than wanderlust, and from the age of twenty he began to publish plays and short stories, at first to little acclaim. It was not until he teamed up with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862 that he found success with his first novel-length adventure story, Five Weeks in a Balloon , which was an instant best seller. Hetzel declined to publish Verne's next novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century --one of his few truly futuristic tales and one that was not published until after his death--but nonetheless the two men entered into one of the most fruitful relationships in literary history between an author and a publisher. Shrewdly packaged by Hetzel as a series under the title "Extraordinary Voyages in the Known and Unknown Worlds," the books for which Verne remains best known were written between 1864 and 1874, including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), and The Mysterious Island (1874). Verne's mutually successful relationship with his publisher continued even after Hetzel's death in 1886, when Pierre-Jules' son, Louis-Jules, took over the company. Apart from one trip to America (where he never got further west than Niagara Falls), a visit to London, and some travels around the Mediterranean and other places in Europe, Verne never did see much of the world he wrote about so vividly,  He was content instead to live the comfortable life of a successful author in the provincial French city of Amiens. Maybe this was because he simply could not spare the time away from his desk--by the end of his life in 1905, he had published more than sixty books--but for a man who had been to the moon, at the earth's core, and around the world in his imagination, perhaps the real world did not hold that much interest. Published originally as a newspaper serial in 1872 and released as a book the following year, Around the World in Eighty Days was an immediate success. It was the best selling of Verne's books during his lifetime--108,000 copies, according to his publisher, compared to only 50,000 for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea --and it remains one of his most popular books today. Some of that continued interest comes from the fact that this is one of Verne's deliberately comic books, written as much to amuse as to awe the reader. The set-up itself is inherently comic. The protagonist, Phileas Fogg, is a leisured but taciturn Londoner of such mathematically precise habits that he has fired his servant for bringing him shaving water two degrees too cold. Early in the novel he enters into the sort of argument between idle men which nowadays would likely be started in a bar after two or three beers, but in Verne's mildly parodic version of moneyed Englishmen at play, starts over a game of whist at a gentleman's club. It ends as most such arguments do, with bravado and a foolish bet: Fogg wagers the other card players twenty thousand pounds (a huge sum in 1872) that he can travel around the world in eighty days or less. Then, after coolly playing whist for another twenty-five minutes, he returns home, collects the servant he hired that very morning--the excitable Frenchman Passepartout--and leaves for the train station with Passepartout and a carpetbag full of twenty thousand pounds in cash. Verne was writing during a great age of European literature, when writers like the Russian Leo Tolstoy, the Englishwoman George Eliot, and Verne's fellow Frenchman Gustave Flaubert were creating the modern novel. In the works of these authors the intimate lives of characters are evoked with great psychological complexity. Jules Verne, however, was an entertainer, and as in the work of popular novelists of our own day, his characters are merely complex enough for his purposes, which is to say they are simply but vividly drawn, sturdy enough to support the plot. Despite their epic scope, Verne's novels often depend on the interactions of a limited number of main characters, and in Around the World in Eighty Days , Verne limits himself to Fogg, Passepartout, and the British detective Fix, as well as, to a limited extent, the Indian princess Aouda. The three male characters conform easily to stereotypes of nationality and class: Fogg is a distilled version of the practical, decisive Englishman, interested only in winning his bet. Except as it makes his journey easier or more difficult, he takes no note of the cultures he is passing through. Passepartout is likewise a stock character, the plucky, devoted, resourceful servant who is also an excitable, voluble Frenchman. The English detective Fix--who trails Fogg because he suspects Fogg has robbed the Bank of England--can be boiled down to the adjectives wily and dogged. The Indian princess Aouda barely registers as a character at all, scarcely speaking throughout the book and serving first as a plot point, when she is rescued from the Indian ritual of suttee by Fogg and Passepartout, and then as a generic love interest for Fogg. Although these characters scarcely transcend their rudimentary nature, the two main travelers, Fogg and Passepartout, are surprisingly memorable, almost because of their sketchiness. Passepartout is very much the reader's surrogate, the only person in the book who shows any curiosity or wonder about the places they are passing through. His adventure on his own in the streets of Yokohama, Japan, in chapters 22 and 23 is one of the few moments in the book where Verne slows down enough to take in some local color--which he gleaned entirely from other accounts, not from personal experience. And the excitable Frenchmen is also the closest thing in the book to an action hero. Although Fogg gets the credit when Aouda is rescued from her husband's funeral pyre in India in chapter 13, it is Passepartout who actually, physically saves her, at considerable risk to himself. The same is true during an attack by the Sioux on their train as they cross the Nebraska prairie; it is Passepartout who stops the train by crawling under the cars to unhook them from the engine. As for Fogg, he is memorable chiefly because he is such a blank. If Passepartout is a comic stereotype of an emotional Frenchman, Phileas Fogg is a distilled version of a French author's stereotype of the cool, unflappable English eccentric. He seems to have sprung from nowhere, having no family or friends, and he seems to have a lot of money, though no one knows where it comes from. His behavior and his manner seem to a modern reader to be borderline autistic: as he waits to interview Passepartout in chapter 1, all Fogg does is watch the clock, and indeed, in the next chapter, he is described by Verne as being as exactly regulated as a chronometer. He has no apparent interest in the social, cultural, or political worlds of London, or even in other people, for, as Verne writes, "as he knew that in this world account must be taken of friction, and that friction retards, he never rubbed against anybody." His only pastime, as far as we can see, is playing cards at his gentleman's club, but even that does not seem to give him any pleasure: "Mr. Fogg played not to win, but for the sake of playing. The game was in his eyes a contest, a struggle with a difficulty, yet a motionless, unwearying struggle, congenial to his tastes." His sudden decision to travel around the world in eighty days is undertaken in the same spirit. He is clearly not interested in the money, since over the course of the book he spends as much as he is likely to win, and, as already noted, he shows no more interest in the countries he passes through than he does in his own. Depicted as watching the clock in his own home in chapter 1, he spends the rest of the book racing the clock, taking little note of anything along the way except for train and steamship schedules. Only occasionally does Verne hint that there might be more to Fogg, as when he risks the success of his trip (and his fortune as well) to rescue Aouda from the ceremony of suttee, or when he takes time to rescue Passepartout from the Sioux. Only at the end of the book does he expresses strong emotion, and then only twice--once with a punch and once with a declaration of love. Fogg's lack of interest in the world as he circles it is almost mirrored by the book's own, at least to begin with. Once the journey is started, it proceeds at a breakneck pace. Verne skips Europe entirely; at the end of chapter 4, Fogg and Passepartout are riding the train out of London, and when we see them next, in chapter 6, they are already in the Egyptian port of Suez. Apart from a couple of adventures in India--a ride on an elephant and the rescue of Aouda from her dead husband's funeral pyre--and from Passepartout's extended interlude in Japan, Asia goes by in a blur, with the descriptions of the geography and history of the countries they pass through reading as if they came out of guidebooks (which they almost certainly did). Even the action sequences, which most novelists would milk for every drop of suspense, are often rushed through, as if Verne were watching the time as carefully as Fogg is. On the other hand, Verne had a lifelong fascination with America, and he slows down in the American section of Fogg's journey to give us several striking scenes in this (to a Frenchman) exotic country: a political riot in San Francisco, a challenge to a duel from a boorish American officer, a potted history of the Mormons, an Indian attack on a train, culminating in a wild ride across the improbably flat Nebraska prairie on a wind-driven sledge. The fact that most of this is secondhand and unrealistic--the Sioux attacking a moving train from horseback in the dead of a Nebraska winter, for example--does not diminish the sequence's sheer narrative drive.  In the end, in fact, the reader's interest in following the story is essentially the same as Fogg's reason for undertaking the trip, and the same as Verne's apparent motive for writing the book, namely a fascination with the sheer physical challenge of circling the globe in an age before air travel. This is perhaps the main reason for the novel's continuing appeal: Around the World in Eighty Days does not depend as much on scientific extrapolation as some of his other novels do. Unlike his novels about journeys that were improbable, as least in his day--going to the moon, riding in a submarine--or even flat out impossible--in reality no one can travel to the center of the earth-- Around the World in Eight Days is about a trip that relies chiefly on technology that was already forty years old (the railroad and the steamship) or even older (sailing ships and elephants), and the narrative interest in the book comes not from his depiction of cutting-edge technology or natural spectacle, but from the more ordinary obstacles Verne throws in Phileas Fogg's path. "The unforeseen does not exist," says Fogg, before he has ever left London, and the fun of the novel results from just how wrong he turns out to be. Verne may have shared the average man's fascination with the technology of his day, but he was a clever enough dramatist to understand that the story works best when the technology breaks down. The promised railway across India peters out in the jungle, forcing Fogg to buy an elephant; having missed his steamship connection in Hong Kong, he bribes a captain to take his sailing ship through a storm; and in the final leg of his trip, he buys a steamship outright and burns the wooden superstructure piece by piece in order to keep the steam up. Because of the striking simplicity of the story and the uncomplicated vividness of Fogg and Passepartout, Verne's story of a feisty Englishman charging unflappably around the world lives on remarkably well, especially considering that today a man of Fogg's means could simply buy a plane ticket and do the trip in a day or two. Verne himself capitalized on the book's success by turning it into a successful stage spectacular that earned him ten million francs, which is more than most of his books did. In 1889 and 1890, much to Verne's delight, an American woman, the pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly, traveled around the world in seventy-two days, beating Fogg's record. The novel has been filmed several times, most notably in 1956 as a Cinemascope epic starring David Niven as a dapper Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout. More recently it has been made into a television miniseries starring Pierce Brosnan as Fogg and former Monty Python member Eric Idle as Passepartout, and even more recently as a comedy with Steve Coogan as Fogg and the martial arts star Jackie Chan as his servant. Perhaps the most memorable modern adaptation, however, was the work of another former member of Monty Python, the writer and comedian Michael Palin, who in 1989 reenacted Fogg's trip for a nonfiction BBC television series and book, trying to see if he could make it round the world in eighty days without flying. It is ironic that the author of one of the most archetypical fictional narratives of travel was a mild, middle-class Frenchman who not only hardly ever left France, but who, judging from his astonishing output, scarcely even left his study. Later writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene would write with more depth and power about Europeans abroad, and in our own time narratives that cross borders and travel the world are written by writers who would have been considered mere colorful "natives" from the perspective of a European in Verne's day, such as the Indian novelists V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. But the fact that the best of Verne's books are still read and enjoyed is a testament to the power of his imagination and his skill as an entertainer. Like the best popular writers in any era, he knew how to take a simple, striking idea and dramatize the hell out of it, with a headlong plot full of trains, ships, elephants, and wind sledges, not to mention human sacrifice, duels, and Indian attacks. As stripped down as any contemporary techno-thriller, it has aged about as well as any nineteenth-century novel could, especially one that depends so heavily on technologies, like rail and steamship travel, that now seem quaint. In fact, the key to the continued success of Around the World in Eighty Days may very well be its improbable but successful combination of modern speed and period quaintness, making it a delightful, timeless, steam-driven fairy tale.   James Hynes is the author of three novels, The Lecturer's Tale , Kings of Infinite Space , and The Wild Colonial Boy , and a book of novellas, Publish and Perish . Excerpted from Around the World in Eighty Days (Barnes and Noble Library of Essential Reading) by Jules Verne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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