In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was
born the same year. Three sisters, Anna (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.[8]
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Mme Sambin, was the
widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before.[9] Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a
shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return likeR obinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise[.10] The theme of the
Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island (1874),
Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).
In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly
distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing.[11] In the same year, 1836, Pierre
Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire River.[12] In his
brief memoir "Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse" ("Memories of Childhood and Youth", 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination
with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it.[13] He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle
Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took
joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be
memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).[13][14]
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie, with the
intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The ship was due to set out for the
Indies that evening but stopped first at Paimboeuf, where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to
travel "only in his imagination".[15] It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his
niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident[.16]
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie,
was born in 1842.[12] In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student.
His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive,[17]
describes the seminary in disparaging terms[.11] From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the
Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and
received the grade "Fairly good" on 29 July 1846[1. 8]
By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839
and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion.[17] However,
his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but
would instead inherit the family law practice[.19]
Life
Early life
Nantes from Île Feydeau, around the
time of Verne's birth
In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primariyl to begin his studies in law school,
and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from
Nantes.[20][21] His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27
April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five
children.[22]
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to
Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year (provincial law students
were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams).[23] While in Nantes, he met
Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell
intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some 30 poems to her, including
"La Fille de l'air" ("The Daughter of Air"), which describes her as "blonde and
enchanting / winged and transparent".[24] His passion seems to have been
reciprocated, at least for a short time,[21] but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student
of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner 10 years her senior, on 19 July
1848.[25]
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of
half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery.[26] This requited but aborted love affair seems to have
permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will
(Gérande in "Master Zacharius" (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that
the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex".[27] The incident also led Verne to bear a
grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem "La sixième ville de France" ("The Sixth City of
France").[28][29]
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