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(18) Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (The Begum's Millions, 1879) (1 volume) 54K words


The eighteenth Extraordinary Voyage is considered by some Verne scholars as the start of the second part of his career, marked by a more cautionary, pessimistic outlook about progress and occasionally featuring evil scientists and politics. It's not a clean change of style, in any case. The next books will be traditional adventures, and there are a good number of Verne novels to come that fit well with the optimistic, exploratory adventures of his early works.


First read or reread?: This is a first read for me.


What is it about?: Two men inherited a vast fortune as descendants of a French soldier who settled in India and married the immensely rich widow of a native prince – the begum of the title. One of the inheritors is a French physician, Dr. Sarrasin, who has long been concerned with the unsanitary conditions of European cities. He uses the money to establish a utopian model city constructed and maintained with public health as its government's primary concern. The other is a German scientist Prof. Schultze, a militarist and racist. Though having a French grandmother, he is convinced of the superiority of the "Saxon" (i.e., German) over the "Latin" (primarily, the French), which he believes will lead to the eventual destruction of the latter by the former. Schultze had published many articles "proving" the superiority of the German race. Schultze decides to make his own utopia—a city devoted to the production of ever more powerful and destructive weapons—and vows to destroy Sarrasin's city.


This is both an utopic and dystopic novel, contrasting the two cities, the well-ordered, health-focused France-Ville, and the industrial, totalitarian nightmare of Stahlstadt ("Steel City"). I read it as a political fable, since one cannot take seriously the idea that the US would have allowed the two millionaires the temporary right to establish sovereign cities within their territory, no matter how much they were willing to pay. Also, France-Ville is very idealized (there's no crime in it). But these details are not the focus of the novel, and we accept the unlikely premise in order to set the conflict and the contrast between the two mindsets.

Verne was clearly bitter about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which had resulted in the defeat of France, the unification of Germany and the establishment of the Second Reich. Germany's industrialization was more advanced than France's, which is reflected in the industrial nature of Stahlstadt. It can't be a coincidence that the novel's hero, Marcel Bruckmann, a protégé of Dr. Sarrasin who infiltrates Stahlstadt as a spy, is from Alsace, a region of France with a blend of French and German culture which had been taken by Germany after the war.

This bitterness, which had not been present in Verne's earlier work (see for example the German heroes in Journey to the Center of the Earth) results in the depiction of Prof. Schultze as an unflattering caricature of German people, complete with his racist belief in the supremacy of the German race and his exaggerated fondness for Frankfurter sausages and sauerkraut. (The anti-racist message of the novel is perhaps undermined by how the Chinese migrant workers who help build France-Ville are sent away when the city is completed but, as I have mentioned in other reviews, Verne, while enlightened and forward-thinking in some ways, was not free from the European prejudices of his time). One could say that the caricature of the German is heavy-handed, but I have to admit that in hindsight the novel can be a bit uncanny as an anticipation of World War II, with the supremacist ideology, the chemical weapons of mass destruction, the totalitarian state where people are identified with numbers...

Other elements of anticipation are the use of teleconferences for meetings, the creation of an artificial satellite that is (accidentally) put into orbit, or the long range siege gun that brings to mind the Paris Gun that Germany would use to bombard Paris during World War I.

In the first chapters Verne displays some of his sense of humor in his depiction of the rapacious lawyers who handle the inheritance or the way the attendants to a scientific meeting change their attitude towards Dr. Sarrasin when they learn about his newfound wealth.

I enjoyed that instead of boring the reader by insisting too much on the depiction of the political contrast between the two cities, Verne keeps things moving with the story of the spy who infiltrates Stahlstadt. However, the resolution of the story, while satisfactory, was kind of anticlimactic, in the sense that it is achieved without the heroes actually having to do anything. This is a very short novel, and maybe Verne could have extended it to set up a better ending.

It is worth mentioning that the original English translation of this novel (the one you can find for free or cheap in different places) is reputed to be particularly awful. The official translator, W. H. G. Kingston, was dying and his wife, who understandably had other things on her mind, did the translation. If you want to read the novel in English, the advice is to seek the 2005 translation by Stanford Luce.


Enjoyment factor: I have to confess that my love for Verne comes from his more optimistic adventure and exploration stories. I prefer to travel with my imagination in a balloon with Dr. Fergusson, Kennedy and Joe, discovering the source of the Nile, instead of getting into the awful, polluted Stahlstadt. Nevertheless this was an enjoyable read, with more elements to analyse than the average exploration adventure and with a reasonable pace, the fortunate result of Verne not forgetting to have a plot. The ending was lackluster, though.


Next up: Tribulations of a Chinaman in China