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Travel Scholarships
Travel Scholarships
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The other French protagonist in the story is Louis Clodion, who is “twenty years old, part of a family of ship merchants who settled in Nantes many years ago” (Part I, chap. 2). He visits an uncle in the Antilles who is “a rich and influential grower in Guadeloupe. He lived in Pointe-à-Pitre and owned vast properties surrounding the city” (Part II, chap. 2). This brief biography matches that of a friend of Verne’s—the merchant and art critic Paul Eudel (1837–1911), whom Verne had met in 1861 in Chantenay at his sister Marie’s marriage to the ship-owner Léon Guillon. According to a brief biographical sketch of him published in 1899, “Upon finishing college, he had to abandon regretfully the literary career he [Eudel] had dreamed of, for his family no longer had the resources to send him to Paris to make his start. He then went into business and left for the island of Réunion in 1857 to join one of his uncles, a rich planter and businessman in Saint-Pierre.”36 Returning to Nantes two years afterwards, Eudel later published his autobiographical Souvenirs de voyage (1864). Despite the different French colonies in question (Réunion or Guadeloupe), the facts and the ages of the persons are similar.
A few pages earlier in Travel Scholarships, as if by a surprising coincidence, Verne mentions the family name of the brother-in-law who had introduced him to Eudel: “It was one of the principal merchants of the city [of Marigot on the island of Saint Martin], Mr. Anselme Guillon, who organized this reception” (Part I, chap. 15). The character named is a secondary one, but this name—which never appears anywhere else in the Extraordinary Voyages—nevertheless recalls once more the leading character of the short story The Marriage of a Marquis, Anselme des Tilleuls. Finally, there is the ship Fire Fly that appears near the end of Part I of the novel: its name is the same as that of a ship in a novel published in 1861 by the novelist René de Pont-Jest (1829–1904). Pont-Jest claimed to have taken part in French naval campaigns with Paul Verne in the 1850s. Later, he would unsuccessfully bring a plagiarism suit against Jules Verne—a lawsuit that was first filed in 1877, the year in which the action of Travel Scholarships takes place. It certainly seems that, toward the end of his life, writing was one way for Verne to bring the past back to life and to give his literary oeuvre a personal dimension without going so far as to make it an overt autobiography.
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