Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters One to Three

In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other--the one as master, the other as servant; Passepartout in convinced that he has found his ideal; and a conversation takes place which may cost Phileas Fogg dearly; and in which our narrator for some reason insists on reading more books with necessary accents, and feels oddly put out by Mr Verne supplying his own "In which" chapter headings.



Whee, new book! We're going around the world, and as such will get to hear be butcher all SORTS of accents! Phileas Fogg and Passepartout are at least passable, perhaps, but Phileas's Reform Club buddies... meh. Anyway, much like Treasure Island and Anne of Green Gables, this requires a surprising number of notes, which I'll intersperse with the illustrations from the original 1873 French edition of the book, by Alphonse-Marie de Neuville and Léon Benett. First up, we have the map chronicling the route our heroes take, in what appears to be the endpapers of the book:

And then of course is the title page, in the original French: Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours. Early on, this was translated into English sometimes as The Tour of the World in Eighty Days or Round the World in Eighty Days before the more familiar English title finally won out.

Following that into the actual chapters, we first meet our hero, the extremely punctilious and apparently impressively bewhiskered Phileas Fogg:

And right off the bat, in the very first sentence, we need to note that the "Sheridan" referred to as having died in what is now Fogg's house is noted Irish playwright and poet Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and that the sentence further gets two things wrong. First, the correction I made from "1 Savile Row" to "7 Savile Row," apparently unique to this specific publisher, doesn't matter much as he actually died in number 14. Also, he died in 1816, not 1814. Some English translations have corrected that one, though since the mistake is in both the original and in mine, I'll keep it in.

Whist, which will come up quite a bit in this book if memory serves, is a card game that evolved to a form more commonly known in the US as Bridge, though younger generations may be more familiar with the related games Hearts or Spades. Basically, you have two teams of two, with partners sitting opposite each other. All cards in the deck are dealt out, so everyone has 13 cards. One suit is designated the "trump" suit. Players take turns being the first to lay down one card. After that first card is laid down, everyone else has to go around and lay down a card in the same suit as that first card. If they don't have a card of that suit, they can lay down any other suit. Whoever lays down the highest card of that lead suit wins the four cards, called the "trick." If, however, one of those "can lay down any other suit" cards is of the trump suit (remember that?) it wins the trick. So, say Diamonds are the trump suit. The first player lays down the Ten of Clubs. The next players lay down the Jack of Clubs, the Three of Clubs, and the Four of Diamonds. Whoever laid down that Four of Diamonds wins the trick. If it had been a Four of Clubs, then the person who laid down the Jack would have won. Whichever team has the most tricks after all cards have been played wins that round. If you play to best out of three, that's called a "rubber," which we'll try not to giggle too much about because it will be mentioned more than once.

Got all that? Good. Following that, we've got:

8:17 - "Ionic columns of red porphyry." Or, scroll-topped columns made of a red igneous rock containing large-grained crystals embedded in a finer-grained crystal material.

And then we meet Passepartout:

His name means "master key" in French, explaining his remark about a "natural aptitude for withdrawing from a business."

Then at 13:07 we have "whose somewhat academic posture Angelica Kauffmann has marvelously reproduced under her pencil." Ms. Kaufman (her preferred spelling of her name in English, not used in my translation) was a noted Austrian painter who was successful as a portraitist in Britain in the eighteenth century.

Following on the heels of that, at 13:12 we have reference to two noted watch and clockmakers of the eighteenth century, Pierre Le Roy (written in my translation and thus mispronounced by me as "Leroy) and Thomas Earnshaw, both noted for their marine chronometers, the clocks ships needed to help them determine their longitude and thus needed to remain very precise under difficult weather and motion conditions.

At 13:25, the phrase "the expression of his feet and his hands" is in quotes in the text, making me believe it was a reference to some specific quote of phrase, but I can't find any reference to it that isn't this translation of this book. So, probably quotes for no reason?

14:21 - The "Frontin" and "Mascarille" Passeportout is favorably compared to are servant characters in French farces.

At 20:15, Phileas cuts his uncut copy of The Times. It seems that at the time, newspapers were printed on very large sheets which were folded down but could be cut apart to make it easier to read. Or something.

When Phileas has his dinner at 20:32 he adds "Royal British Sauce," which apparently no one is certain about but could be a reference to the French term "English Sauce," which means "custard."

And our last illustration for these chapters, we see the moment of the bet, with Phileas and his Club friends sitting and blustering around the card table in what I can only imagine is a terribly, terribly British manner:

28:50 - "Well, Mr. Fogg, yes, and
I bet four thousand pounds!"

Last, we've got some monetary amounts to put into modern perspective: the £55,000 stolen from the bank would equal roughly £4,500,000, or around $7,300,000, today. So, yeah, a pretty good haul. Meanwhile, the £2,000 reward would be about £162,000, or about $265,000 (plus 5% of what's recovered, which would be an additional max of around $365,000). This would similarly make Phileas's £20,000 wager equal about £1,620,000, or about $2,650,000. So, for the rest of the book, remember that some seven million dollars were stolen, for which there is a reward of about six hundred thousand dollars, and Phileas made a bet for nearly 2.7 million dollars. Pretty high stakes all around.

Oh, and I'd like to thank Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection for helping me identify what translation I have, since the publishers themselves did not see fit to mention it, and to Ibiblio.org for specific information about translation quality.


If you would like to read along, I unfortunately can't find my translation by Stephen W. White online, but the George Towele translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!