La Maison de Jules Verne (Jules Verne's House), Amiens, Picardie, France - August 2024

Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 - 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet and playwright.
His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.
Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.
Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death.
This house was built from 1845 to 1854 for the Amiens notary Jean-Baptiste-Gustave Riquier. It is similar to the other houses in the district with a tower" built of red brick, plastered in pink on the street and with light joints on the courtyard. The lintels, cornices and window sills are made of limestone.
The first floor of the house was reserved for the bedrooms, which were accessed by the spiral staircase of the tower. The writer's study was located on the second floor at the corner of the building2.
In 1882, Jules Verne and his wife, Honorine, moved into this house. They were tenants until 1900. Jules Verne was 54 years old, he was at the height of his glory.
In 1980, the city of Amiens bought and opened the house to the public, which was then managed by the Jules Verne Documentation Centre and housed this Association's collection. In the year 2000, the city acquired the collection of 30,000 original pieces assembled by the Italian collector Piero Gondolo della.
The music which accompanies this August visit is a topical song about this great man sung by the French Group 'Les Compagnons de la Chanson'.