At his death on 24 March 1905, Jules Verne had been a successful author for more than four decades. While the print-runs of his novels naturally waxed and waned – peaking with the sale of 108,000 copies of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours in the 1870s, though suffering something of a decline in the final decade of his life – his commercial value was assured. But his obvious marketability was to increase exponentially in the course of the twentieth century. The Voyages extraordinaires would be exploited and adapted (notably in the early stages by Verne's own son Michel, who passed off his rewritten versions of the posthumous texts as ‘genuine’ Jules Verne novels), then transposed with huge success to other forms and media. With Georges Méliès's two short films Voyage dans la lune (1902) and Voyage à travers l'impossible (1904), and with Michel Verne's own later ventures into film-making, the enduring tradition of cinematic adaptations of Verne's works was established. Today, Jules Verne is not only a household name, but is recognised as an essential icon of travel, exploration and scientific progress. His place in Western culture is attested among other things by the massive number of events and exhibitions that were organised in France and across the world in 2005 to celebrate the centenary of this enduringly popular author.

However, such obvious appeal comes at a price. A hundred years down the line, Jules Verne is more than ever misrepresented, misread and misunderstood, especially in the popular imagination. Among the socalled ‘chattering classes’ today, the common image of Verne is of a futuristic author – a cliché which, as we saw earlier in this study, was damagingly reinforced in 1994 with the publication of Paris au XXe siècle. Much of what is stated about Verne is based on second-hand information, on recycled and adapted versions of his stories, on inaccurate translations, or on extravagant myths that have become common currency. Even brilliant and respected critics can regularly be found to slip up in their knowledge, and the sheer quantity of works in the corpus means that only the most specialised scholars are likely to have read the entire series of the Voyages extraordinaires.