Paris & Jules Verne

The French author Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was one of the leading writers of his time and a founder of the literary genre of science fiction. He caught the enterprising spirit of the 19th century with its uncritical fascination about scientific progress and inventions describing the possibility of space flight, the use of submarines for travel beneath the ocean and a variety of other visionary technologies that were realised in the 20th century. Despite writing about exotic places and travelling
relatively little, he nonetheless managed to produce over 60 novels often written in the form of travel, voyaging from the centre of the earth, to the moon and around the world in 80 days. Jules Verne would perhaps have disapproved of this sortie to Paris as being just too easy, with travel by train between the two capitals completed in just over two hours with the new ‘High Speed 1‘ service.