irst we need to do a little context wonking. It only hurts for a little while. Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum, a fairly short novel by Jules Verne's standards, was first published in 1879 as part of the 19th volume of his great series of Voyages Extraordinaires, of which he completed 56 volumes before his death in 1905. His son, Michel Verne, was substantially responsible for a further nine titles. These 50 or so novels fit together into an enormous kaleidoscope of Views of the World from Europe, a multifaceted glass upon the century that created the 20th century that created us; many of the later volumes of the series seem now, a century after his death, to give off a prophetic thanatopic glow. Peter Schulman's introduction to this volume of The Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series (overall editor Arthur B. Evans) has much to say on the assocation of guns and death, militarism and thanatopsis, in Jules Verne. Within the hearty tramp of the surface story of The Begum's Millions, dead bones do surely march. There is something prophetically exsanguinated about this first example of his late fiction, as though something up there from the next century had gorged on it, Doctor Death mounting Europa.
Certainly, as far as his contemporaries who accessed him in English were concerned, Verne's great years had already passed by 1879; he had already published what remain his most famous titles: Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870), Around the World in 80 Days (1873) and The Mysterious Island (1874-1875). By 1879, it was all beginning to fade: his life, increasingly straitened by illness; his career, which never regained the massive sales of his young pomp; and France, shaken and obsolete, a land that never (which has not even yet) recovered from the trashing it endured in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
In 1879 or so, anglophone readers would not have been likely to have understood The Begum's Millions as marking a new phase in Verne's career, partly because of the obliterating presumption that he was a children's writer; partly because his early dystopia, Paris in the 20th Century (written 1863; only published 1994), had been rejected by his long-term publisher Jules Hertzel; and partly because—like almost all of his novels—the book was very badly treated by its translators. But The 500 Millions of the Begum (1879), the first of several stiff-kneed incomplete and bowdlerized translations, no longer fogs the vision. Stanford L. Luce's new translation, which we are looking at now, is clean-cut, thorough and with an idiomatic roughness of diction that is much in favor these days among translators attempting to de-varnish 19th-century texts. Tina Nunnally's translation in Fairy Tales (2005) of 30 of Hans Christian Andersen's fables is another superb example. The glass is clean. We can try to see through it.
A tale of two cities
Which is not to say that The Begum's Millions is much of a novel. The original version was written, close to the beginning of his career, by Pascal Grousset (1845-1909), who as André Laurie later published some very effective SF on his own; Hertzel disliked the manuscript and asked Verne to revamp it, but the result seems to have been far more than a polish (though Verne would have, according to fairly common French practice in these years, have been listed as sole author regardless of his contribution). Verne was clearly unwilling to put his name to Grousset's melodramatic tale, which (Verne told Hertzel) strayed very widely from its true potential subject: which should have been to contrast the two European utopian cities that have been built according to opposing principles by two men, Dr. Sarrasin and Dr. Schultze, one French (benign) and one German (not). Verne's version of the story tells us how they gain equal shares in a vast fortune left by the French widow of the Indian Begum of the title and describes how each beneficiary decides to use his wealth to finance the building of his version of the Ideal City in virgin wilderness (purchased from the United States) along the Pacific Rim. Verne then skips half a decade in order to show us the cities complete and to describe them in action, which is what, clearly and correctly, he thought was the heart of the matter.
In his haste to get at the meat, he does also skip half a decade in the lives of the passel of young protagonists, whose adventures Grousset almost certainly concentrated on at some length; instead, they are put out to pasture till the cities are completed, at which point they are allowed to play a highly melodramatic role in the conniptions that climax the book. But it is truly pretty hard to pay much attention to any of them (though especially to the French idealist's feckless son) after Verne blows hot air into them and sticks them back into his works. I'm entirely happy to take Evans' and Schulman's word that what Grousset originally wrote (not available for perusal in this edition) and what Verne published are radically dissimilar, almost certainly on the lines suggested above, and rather suspect that the five-year caesura was a Vernian shortcut to the meat. But so what? The story Grousset told was probably pretty fatuous, and what replaces it is anything but.
The Begum's Millions reads like Verne: Verne beginning to sense that the future was already being written all around him. Dr. Sarrasin's city, France-Ville, is constructed and run on principles that allow an obsessive-compulsive hygiene to rule all lives in every detail, which any paraphrase is likely to make repellent (Dr. Schulman's synopsis seems almost deliberately designed to intensify our natural dislike of Sarrasin's cod eugenics). But in fact, as Verne himself depicts his French idealist's dream of purity, France-Ville is more like one of the full-spectrum garden cities built after World War II—Welwyn Garden City near London, rather than Levittown in Long Island—than a prelude to the Camps. Dr. Schultze's city, Stahlstadt (i.e., Steel City), only becomes more ominous the longer Verne goes on about the place. Much of the book is given over to a narrative tour of its perfectly circular black stone walls, which bar the country from the stench within; of the infernal bureaucratic ordeals imposed on anyone attempting to penetrate the inner circles where wage slaves craft killing devices; of the astonishing clamor that attends the manufacture—from raw ore to finished product—of the most advanced weapons of war; of the shadows pierced by flames; of the icy tower at the city's very heart, where Schultze—like Satan at the bottom of hell, bound in the ice of Dis: the image is explicit in the text—lays his plans to preside over the fallen world. Stahlstadt is more like the 1913 the Leipzig Monument to the Battle of the Nations than I really care to dwell on.
Aiming a barrel at the future
What fossil storyline remains, after Verne's decision to concentrate his gaze on Stahlstadt, gives some semblance of suspense to the tour: Marcel, one of the young protagonists, who has been in love with Sarrasin's daughter for the entire book, penetrates the city in disguise and works his way up the rigid hierarchy until his design skills are noticed by Dr. Schultze himself, who eventually takes him into his confidence in the innermost chamber. His plan is to demonstrate the inevitability of German dominance of the world by firing a super-cannon—packed with inflammable super-shrapnel—at France-Ville, as he tells Marcel:
"...on the 13th, at eleven forty-five in the evening, France-Ville will disappear from the American soil! The incineration of Sodom will have had its equal! Professor Schultze will have unleashed all the flames of heaven in his turn! .... We're doing the opposite of what the founders of France-Ville do! We're finding secret ways of shortening lives, while they seek to lengthen them. But their work is doomed, for it is from death—sown by us—that life is to be born. ... The law of living competitively is just as natural as the law of gravity. Resisting it is utter inanity; to accept it and act according to its precepts is both reasonable and wise—which is why I shall destroy Dr. Sarrasin's city."
Marcel, who now knows too much, is bundled off (by two retainers with immense beards who very much resemble, in Léon Benett's 1879 illustrations, two-thirds of ZZ Top) to the slaughter, but escapes.
Schultze's cannon fails to work properly, being fired at such a velocity that it goes into orbit, and silence falls on Stahlstadt. When brave young Marcel penetrates the thanatopic city again, he finds it totally deserted. Eventually (don't ask) he gains access to the inner sanctum again and finds a great glass viewing-window in the floor of the chamber. Peering down, as though he were Verne himself peering through his words at the world he saw, staring straight into hell, he sees
Herr Schultze! He was recognizable by the horrible smile on his face and by his gleaming teeth. But it was also a gigantic Herr Schultze who, due to the accidental explosion of one of his dreadful armaments, had been asphyxiated and instantly frozen by an arctic cold beyond description!
The King of Steel was seated at this desk, holding a gigantic pen, as big as a lance, and he appeared to be still writing!
But of course, we suspect—as the novel drifts to an inconclusive halt—the King of Thanatopsis only looks dead. He simply looks what it is his wont to look. It is his true appearance, stripped of metaphor. He is the Serpent's Egg of Ingmar Bergman's 1977 film, which is set in 1920s Berlin; he is the literal birth throes of the terrible nature of time to come, perfectly visible for those who have eyes to see.
"It's like a serpent's egg," says the Schultze figure of Bergman's great film, describing a vision of himself and the mechanisms with which he has driven all Berlin mad in order to create a shining future: "Through the thin membranes you can clearly discern the already perfect reptile." Dr. Schultze is the perfect reptile of our condition now. It may be the case that Verne thought something like this, and for that reason makes it clear, as far as we can see through the glass in the floor above hell, that Dr. Schultze is only sleeping.
