|
1873 |
| AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS |
| by Jules Verne |
| CHAPTER I |
| In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other: the one as |
| master, the other as man |
| Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington |
| Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1816. He was one of the |
| most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to |
| avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom |
| little was known, except that he was as a polished man the world. |
| People said that he resembled Byron, -at least that his head was |
| Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a |
| thousand years without growing old. |
| Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg |
| was a Londoner. He was never seen on 'Change, nor at the Bank, nor |
| in the counting-rooms of the "City;" no ships ever came into London |
| docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had |
| never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the |
| Temple, or Lincoln's Inn, or Gray's Inn; nor had his voice ever |
| resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the |
| Queen's Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a |
| manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name |
| was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never |
| was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal |
| Institution or the London Institution, the Artisans 'Association or |
| the Institution of Arts and Sciences. He belonged, in fact, to none of |
| the numerous societies which swarm in the English capital, from the |
| Harmonic to that of the Entomologists, founded mainly for the |
|