Around the World in Eighty Days (Signet Classics) - Softcover

Verne, Jules

 
9780451474285: Around the World in Eighty Days (Signet Classics)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451474287 ISBN 13: 9780451474285
Verlag: Signet, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Jules Verne's masterpiece of adventure fiction that has captured the imaginations of generations of readers and continues to enthrall us today.

On October 2, 1872, an English gentleman makes a remarkable wager: He can travel around the entire world in a mere eighty days. Thus begins Jules Verne’s classic novel, which remains unsurpassed in sheer storytelling entertainment. Phileas Fogg and his faithful manservant, Passepartout, embark on a fantastic journey into a world filled with surprises, danger, and beauty—from the shores of India, where the travelers rescue the beautiful wife of a rajah from ritual sacrifice, to the rugged American frontier, where their train is ambushed by an angry band of Sioux. With twenty thousand pounds at stake, Fogg’s mission is complicated by an incredible case of mistaken identity that sends a Scotland Yard detective in hot pursuit in what becomes a riveting race against time and an action-packed odyssey into the unknown.

With an Introduction by Herbert Lottman 
and an Afterword by Karen J. Renner

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jules Verne (1828–1905), born in Nantes, France, was the author of innumerable adventure stories that combined a vivid imagination with a gift for popularizing science. Although he had studied law in Paris, he devoted his life entirely to writing. His most popular stories in addition to Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) include A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and The Mysterious Island (1874–75), all available in Signet Classics editions. In addition, he was the author of a number of successful plays, as well as a popular history of exploration from Phoenician times to the mid-nineteenth century, The Discovery of the Earth (1878–80). After a long and active career in literature, Jules Verne died at Amiens, France.

Herbert Lottman, a longtime resident of France, was the correspondent for a number of American and British periodicals and literary magazines. Among his twenty-seven books are biographies of Jules Verne, Albert Camus, Colette, and Gustave Flaubert, as well as of The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War, The Purge (on postwar punishment of Nazi collaborators), and The Fall of Paris: June 1940, all published in both the United States and France.

Karen J. Renner teaches American literature and popular culture at Northern Arizona University. She has published essays on the apocalypse, the Antichrist, horror films, and reality ghost-hunting television shows. She is the editor of The “Evil” Child in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, a collection of essays.

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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...

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Verlag
Signet
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451474287
ISBN 13 
9780451474285
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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