In 1861 Verne visited Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,
missing the birth of his only son Michel, despite an instruction to his
wife to delay the event, at least according to Marguerite. Traveling
with Hignard and Lorois, he spent five weeks away. The sole
surviving chapter of the description, the humorous "Joyous Miseries
of Three Travelers in Scandinavia," appeared in 2003.
Verne conceived of the northern countries as remote and
compelling, as fulfilling a long-suppressed thirst for escape from
urban France, as compensation for the exoticism he had missed:
"These were my savages of Oceania, my Greenland Eskimos,
Switzerland on a grander scale." All these "adventures, discoveries
... explorations," such magical words, "made me ill; a nostalgia for
foreign countries took over my life. To leave France ... where I no
longer lived, no longer slept, hardly breathed, was an absolute
must."
Fascinating in the light of his soon-to-be transformed career is
the indication of sources, the most complete account of his "ten
years of constant reading." Verne scanned the 66 volumes of the
Univers pittoresque and took out a subscription to Tour du monde,
"falling head over heals for Doré's and ... Riou's engravings." He
quotes Frenchmen Dumont D'Urville and Dumas and Britons Cook,
Ross, and John Richardson. He loves Louis Enault's Norway (1857)
and Ossian, legendary third-century Gaelic warrior, whose poetry,
modernized - perhaps largely invented - by James Macpherson,
helped make Scotland the major focus of the Romantic movement
("Joyous Miseries").
The trio bought rum, tobacco, pistols, walking sticks, matching
25-franc mackintoshes, and 210-fr. tickets to Stockholm.i Leaving
from Gare du Nord on Tuesday, 2 July,ii they crossed southern
Belgium and, passed through Cologne and Hanover (see Figure 8).
Figure 1: Scandinavia
They spent about two days in Hamburg, staying in the Zum
Cronprinzen Hotel on Jungfernstieg - Verne enjoyed the evening
panorama from the tower of St. Michael's Church but hated the
architecture of the theater.iii
At Lubeck the three embarked on the steamship Svea for
Verne's third open-sea voyage, again delighting him. In Stockholm,
with the "most educated and courteous population" in Europe
(Cynthia iv), Verne realized he had lost his 2,000-fr. Rothschild
Bank money-draft and spent days visiting every bank in Stockholm
to cancel it. Only in the very last one, just as he finished yet again
explaining his plight, did the draft drop out of his guidebook… (Marx
Intr). "We travelled from Stockholm to Christiania by canal,
mounting 97 locks, an extraordinary voyage of three days and three
nights in a steamer" (Sherard).
After Christiania's "white-stone and redbrick houses," set in a
superb amphitheater of mountains and fjord,iv civilization came to
an abrupt halt as the three headed for the wild Telemark region.
Having sailed to Drammen and traveled overland to Hougsund, they
took a horse-drawn sleigh along a narrow track through firs for nine
hours. From the dirty and expensive inn in the tiny hamlet of
Tinoset, they jolted on an unsprung two-wheeled post-horse cart,
their trunks and bags hanging perilously off a shelf at the back.
Then by tiny steamboat Rjukan over stormy Lake Tinn to Mael, and
by cart along a narrow track skirting precipices to Dal.v At some
stage they also rode horseback.
"Fresh and smiling" Dal enchanted them, with its babbling
brook and handful of houses painted "budding green, pale pink,
and... blood-red," their roofs growing wild flowers and grass, cut
each autumn, the whole scene picturesquely softened by "damp
green mists."vi Telemark, Verne decided, was "the most charming
place in the world."vii The friends stayed at the Inn in Dal, where
the menu was just black bread and fish tails, Verne shocked at the
grammar mistake Hignard made in the register.
Ten miles up the spectacular valley of the River Maan rose
Rjukan Falls, with a 900-foot drop, five times as high as Niagara
and the most celebrated in Europe. Verne edged fearfully over a
projecting ledge, soaked by the dense spray and deafened by the
thundering roar.
Only too soon it was time to return. From Tinoset, the trio took
a longer and easier route via Bamble, south of Lake Fol, rejoining
their outward route at Kongsberg.viii They crossed the Baltic from
Helsingborg in Sweden, admiring Kronoberg Castle and Helsingborg
Tower. At Elsinore in Denmark they were longing to see Hamlet's
castle, but felt disappointed it had been rebuilt long before.ix To
Verne's surprise, no letter from Honorine awaited him; but one
eventually came, and he rushed home alone, paying an extra 300
fr. (PV 46). Hignard stayed, still seeking the ghost of the prince so
as to write an opera of the same name.x
In Copenhagen, Verne must have climbed a church-spire on
the Island of Amager in southwest Copenhagen, with a spiral
staircase winding round the outside, "protected only by a thin rail,
with the steps getting ever narrower, apparently climbing up to
infinity." He was rewarded, however, by a spectacular, vertiginous
vista: "The Sound unwinding to the Point of Elsinore, speckled with
a few white sails exactly like seagulls' wings, as to the east the
coast of Sweden rolled through the mist."xi
The normal onwards route was by train to Korsør and boat to
Kiel, "like a nest amidst a trellis of branches,"xii in the part of
Denmark Germany would seize three years later. After the train to
Altona, on the outskirts of Hamburg and where the delicate lovescenes of Journey to the Center of the Earth will take place, to a
backdrop of thistles and lonely storks, Verne got back on 8
August.xiii
Having spent the princely sum of 3,500 fr., Verne was
impressed by the Scandinavian equality of citizens, lack of privilege,
civism, and participation. While Hignard was responsible for noting
the local melodies and Lorois the accounts, Verne kept a leather
notebook, with a brass clasp and pencil holder. In it he produced
remarkable sketches of the castles, boats, and strange windowless
dwellings that struck his imagination.xiv But until Amiens changes
its current black-box policy, with no information about documents
acquired with taxpayers' money, we can only guess the details of
Verne's longest every journey.
The trip again transformed the youngish man. From the blend
of Scotch mist and Norwegian spray, Verne had found his voice: a
mix of geographical research, visual imagination, and humorously
self-mocking exaggeration, shaken together but not stirred. "Joyous
Miseries" proposes a manifesto for the next 60 books: "to see on
one's travels things that don't exist." Henceforth an irresistible urge
would draw him:
to the hyperboreal regions, like the magnetic needle to the north ... I
love cold lands by temperament. [As] Enault says: "As you head
north, you continually get higher; but so uniformly and imperceptibly
that you only realize the height you've got to by looking at the rise in
the barometer and the drop in the thermometer."
Verne equates altitude with both latitude and the deliciously cold
temperature, three scales measuring out his Nordic obsession.
More generally, because he traveled by public transport, lacked
money, and was stimulated by Hignard - to whom the Extraordinary
Voyages therefore owe an enormous debt - he participated fully in
Scottish and Norwegian life. Both these proud nations, not yet
states, suffered under a more comfortable half-brother fated by
geography to regulate their commerce with the rest of the world.
Verne's superficially unmetaphysical worldview, his fascination for
what people ate, drank, traded, sang, traveled on, wore, or spent,
was more than satisfied as he blended into the social landscape of
the two countries whose character so closely resembled his own,
prickly, independent, and hard-working. The man who embarked on
the two epics was not the same as the one who returned.
9. Destiny Draws up her Skirts: 1860-3 (pp. 000-000)
i
ADF 87 and RD 58 say he traveled for free on a cargo-boat again
arranged by Alfred Hignard, setting off luxuriously installed with a cargo of
coal, and accompanying pine planks on the return journey. According to
these accounts, the three put in at various points on the Norwegian coast,
visiting the fjords and "sad northern seas and islands," with Verne
imagining he caught a glimpse of Iceland and the vision leaving a deep
impression on him.
ADF 87 and JJV 54 say 15 June, but may have adjusted the date to
fit with the return date of about 3 August, apparently an embellishment to
enable Verne get back for the birth of his son.
iii
Volker Dehs, "Impressions d'Hambourg," BSJV 149:55;
Scandinavian notebook kept in Amiens Municipal Library.
iv
Lottery Ticket xvii.
v
Henri Pons, "Jules Verne en Norvège," BSJV 28:75.
vi
Lottery Ticket ii.
vii
Lottery Ticket ii.
viii
Claude Pétel, Le Tour du monde en quarante ans (Villecresnes:
Villecresnes reprographie, 1998), Vol. I, 58.
ix
Journey to the Center of the Earth ix.
x
ADF 91; JJV 54; CNM 121.
xi
Journey to the Center of the Earth vii.
xii
Journey to the Center of the Earth viii.
xiii
"Joyous Miseries."
xiv
Dehs, "Impressions," 56, Scandinavian notebook.
ii