While Baudelaire lauded Edgar Allan Poe for “his concern with all the subjects that really matter”—listing among them probabilities, conjectural sciences, calculations about life in the future, the study of eccentrics and pariahs, clowning and drollery—the words could be applied just as aptly to Jules Verne (1828–1905). Indeed, the author of Around the World in Eighty Days derived something of his own substance from the tales of the tortured American writer, including the idea for the surprising twist of “the phantom day” in that suspenseful novel. In 1864 Verne himself was to publish an essay on Poe, whom he qualified elsewhere as “a weird and meditative genius.” However, Verne would largely cultivate only one area of Poe’s gift, the sphere of extraordinary travels, of reasoned mathematical deductions from current scientific advance, rather than venturing far into the realms of Gothic horror, the morbid, and the metaphysical. Both writers shared a black sense of humor, and a love of puzzles, hoaxes, cryptograms, and puns.

Verne’s name may not be found in traditional histories of French literature; he does not figure in any canon. Still, over the years some of his stories have been filmed more than once; they also continue to be read and appreciated by novelists and critics of repute, and not just by the young who were once thought to form their sole public. Consequently, the appearance of Paris au XXe siècle, a hitherto unpublished short novel by Verne, could not fail to be