Verne had lived his final years in declining health, made worse by a nephew's gunshot wound years earlier that left him with a permanent limp. He died at his home on Boulevard Longueville, leaving behind a final manuscript, 'The Invasion of the Sea,' which his son Michel later revised and published posthumously.
By the time Jules Verne died, he had already imagined submarines, moon rockets, and round-the-world air travel decades before any of them existed. Engineers and explorers openly credited his novels with inspiring their careers; the real submarine pioneer Simon Lake kept a copy of Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' on his desk his whole life.
Verne's death in Amiens drew mourners from across Europe, but he had grown quietly bitter in his last decade—troubled by failing eyesight, diabetes, and the 1886 shooting by his mentally ill nephew Gaston, who put a bullet in his leg that never fully healed. His novels had sold in the millions, translated into dozens of languages, yet French literary critics of his era often dismissed him as a mere children's writer.
History judged otherwise. Verne is now the second most-translated author in the world, behind only Agatha Christie, and his 'Nautilus' submarine and 'Columbiad' moon cannon proved eerily prophetic once real submarines and rockets arrived in the 20th century.
Key people: Jules Verne