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January 31, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich
Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
On 14 January, Richard Fallon, an expert on 19th/20th-century literature and science, posted on Bluesky: “More people ought to read George Sand’s 1864 romance Laura, Voyage dans le cristal: a delirious, phantasmagoric, mineralogical story that includes a trip to a prehistoric lost world at the North Pole”.
I had read some stories by George Sand as a student of French literature decades ago, but not Laura, Voyage dans le cristal (Laura, or Voyage into the Crystal) (henceforth VDC). The title immediately conjured up in my mind an illustration from the famous 1864 novel by Jules Verne: Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) (henceforth VCT) (see featured image).
I was intrigued and got myself a copy of VDC. While starting to read this novel, I also explored possible links between Sand and Verne. In this post, I’ll first introduce readers briefly to Sand and Verne, then to their novels, and end with some reflections on science and literature.
George Sand
George Sand is the pseudonym of Amantine Lucille Aurore Dupin (1804-1876). She was a renowned author and feminist. In 1848, she was a member of the provisional revolutionary government and in 1871 she got involved in the Paris Commune. Her first novel, Indiana (1832), was a story of a woman abused by her husband. She also worked as a village doctor, having studied anatomy and herbal medicine and she was passionate about botany, mineralogy, palaeontology, in short, natural history.
Sand published VDC in the Revue des Deux Mondes in January in 1864. The year before, in 1863, Verne’s first novel Cinq semaines en ballon (Five weeks in a balloon) had received a favourable review in that widely read literary, cultural and scientific journal.
Jules Verne
Jules Verne (1828-1904) was about twenty years younger than Sand and politically a bit all over the place. He became the well-known and prolific writer of the Voyages Extraordinaires published between 1863 and 1905.
In the 54 Voyages Verne drew on emerging geological, mineralogical, paleontological, geographical, botanical etc. knowledge and imparted it in didactic and digestible form to his young readers, but he also extrapolated from it and anticipated a wide range of technological innovations, including, for example the sodium ion battery. He was an amateur geologist and became “one of only three writers (Verne, Goethe and Theophrastus) to have a mineral named after them”, in this case ‘verneite’ (see Skrabec). One quote from VCT illustrates his view of science overall: “Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
VCT was published in November 1864 by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a publisher who worked with both Verne and Sand.
Voyage dans le Cristal
In Sand’s VDC, budding geologist Alexis (guided by friend and future wife Laura) undertakes an imaginary and fantastic voyage into the crystal core of a geode* (below you see an agate geode, a fluorite tower, and some amethyst crystals on my windowsill) and its phantasmagorical landscapes. A second hallucinatory voyage leads him and his uncle Nasias, who wants to get rich, to the North Pole guided by a magical diamond that lights up the polar night. They meet strange beasts (probably not dinosaurs) and explore caverns sparkling with crystals, some giving the impression of travelling within a diamond.
In a way, the geode and the magic diamond act as portals to other dimensions only accessible through the imagination, including an arctic sea and an arctic Eden.** Enchantment, awe and wonder ensue. At the end of the story, Alexis wakes up from his crystal-induced dream/delirium and returns to love, Laura, and normal life.
Along the way, readers learn a lot about minerals and crystals, but they also encounter various views about science. Sand distinguishes between three types (personified by various protagonists): hypothesis-driven science trying to find reasons for why things are what they are, for example what’s at the centre of the earth; practical or applied science, focused on making extracting and making stuff; and wonder-driven science focused on beauty and the sublime. (See Kafanova)
Voyage au Centre de la Terre
Among Verne’s many works, VCT is the most geological. Its hero is Professor Otto Lidenbrock, author of a Treatise on Transcendental Crystallography, “a true scientist” who “combined the genius of the geologist with the eye of the mineralogist.” Professor Lidenbrock leads his nephew Axel on a journey into the depths of Earth in the footsteps of a medieval alchemist. After entering the bowels of the Earth through the crater of the extinct volcano Sneffels on Iceland, they emerge in Italy with a lava flow from Stromboli (see Bollinger). (Volcanoes also feature in VDC).
On the way, readers encounter a fantastical subterranean world filled with all sorts of prehistoric creatures (not dinosaurs either, it seems), a vast underground ocean, luminous rocks (one more photo from my windowsill) and ancient forests. Like Nasias and Alexis, Axel and Lidenbrock end up in a diamond cave. Axel describes the reflection of the light on the rocks: “the light [. . .], echoed by the small facets of the rock mass, crossed its jets of fire from all angles, and I imagined myself traveling through a hollow diamond” (see Harkness; my transl.; on light see Nerlich)
What’s going on here? And what’s with the diamonds?
Sand and Verne
Verne and Sand knew each other. Whether they met is unknown, but they exchanged letters. In one letter of 1865 Sand wishes Verne well with writing his novel Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas) (1870) and that “you will soon lead us into the depths of the sea and you will make your characters travel in these diving devices that your science and your imagination can afford to perfect” (see Vaclavik; transl. mine)
However, an entry in her diary, in July 1865, says that “I am now reading Voyage au Centre de la Terre by Vernes [sic]; so far it resembles a bit too much my Voyage dans le Cristal” (see Harkness; transl. mine) She is clearly miffed, but they can’t have fallen out too seriously, as Verne names her in glowing terms as one of the authors in Captain Nemo’s library onboard the Nautilus. It’s all a bit mysterious.***
Interestingly, later, VCT inspired a shortstory by Sand. It’s called La Fée Poussière (The dust fairy), published in 1875 when Sand was a grandmother telling grandmotherly tales, in this case about a trip through the bowls of the earth, which is also a tale about evolution. This novel has an all-female cast, contrasting with the all-male cast of Verne’s VCT (see Vaclavic). So perhaps that’s a bit of a punch-back.
Both VDC and VCT were published in 1864 and that’s not all, in 1864, Verne, Hetzel and Jean Macé founded the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, journal de toute la famille, in which all of Verne’s subsequent Voyages Extraordinaires would appear. What a year for education and entertainment.
Both authors had the educational mission to inspire scientific curiosity in young readers. Both used imaginative storytelling to make scientific concepts accessible and engaging, and sparkling crystals, especially diamonds, it seems, serve as conduits to both science and fantasy.
19th-century science and literature
These are the beginnings of a new type of educational science/fiction writing. However, both Sand and Verne stand on the shoulders of giants. Both were massive readers of popular science and exploration books and magazines that nourished their knowledge and imagination.****
Both Verne and Sand were developing new strategies to ‘translate’ science into fiction (see Mathias) in a context when science and literature were not yet separate aesthetic and conceptual enterprises. They both wanted their young readers to look at nature, really look at it, in wonder and awe but also to engage in serious science.
As Sand wrote in a dedication to her daughter-in-law [Madame Maurice Sand] in the 1865 edition of VDC (my translation): “My dear daughter, I dedicate this blue tale to you, which will remind you of the sermons your husband gives us when we let ourselves be amazed by the beauty of mineralogical samples, instead of following him exclusively in the study of geological formations. In a few years’ time, your son, who today has more beautiful dreams in his cradle than I do in front of my inkwell, will read this tale, and he may acquire a taste for research or serious hypotheses. This is all that is needed for those who are prepared to know and understand. That’s how useful this kind of fiction can be to children and many adults. (Nohant, 1 December 1863).”
Notes
*George Sand was inspired to write the story after seeing an amethyst geode at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in 1862.
**Some of Alexis’ imaginings of the North Pole seem to be directly reflected in the illustrations by Henri de Montaut and Édouard Riou for the 1866 edition of Verne’s Voyages et Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (the story, which described adventures of a British expedition led by Captain John Hatteras to the North Pole, first appeared in the first number of the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation in March 1864 (!) and December 1865). Riou also illustrated the 1867 version of VCT and Figuier’s 1863 La Terre avent le Déluge) (For a comparison between Sand’s VDC and Verne’s Hatteras, see Freeburg)
***In this description of an old edition of VDC we gain some more insight into the mystery: “Verne may well have read Laura in La Revue des deux mondes in early 1864, & this could have influenced him decisively despite his own novel having already been well advanced. Verne later mentions George Sand’s eloquence in a letter to Hetzel in 1868, while he was finishing the writing of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea & reused her distinctive mineralogical vocabulary metaphorically to describe the effects of light in icebergs”
****Both read for example Luis Figuier’s, La Terre avant le Déluge (1872) and the French edition of Ludvig Holberg’s Le Voyage souterrain de Niels Klim (1745) and many more (see wiki and Mustière), including possibly, but I haven’t been able to verify that, Félix Archimède Pouchet’s L’univers: Les infiniment grands et les infiniment petits (1865). Sand knew both Félix Pouchet and his biologist son George Pouchet. And it is highly likely that they both read Charles Lyell’s 1863 Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man and Camille Flammarion’s 1864 (that year again!) Les Mondes Imaginaires et Les Mondes Réels. They certainly both read Elisha Kent Kane’s 1856 Arctic Explorations: The second Grinnell expedition in search of Sir John Franklin. ETC.
Image: Wood engraving after a drawing by Edouard Riou from a 19th century edition of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth
Further reading
Secondary sources
Bollinger, J. C. (2024). When Jules Verne Became a Geologist. Elements, 20(4), 280-281.
Freeburg, S. A. (2020). Dreaming Through Snow: The Arctic Imaginary in Nineteenth Century European Literature. University of California, Santa Barbara.
Harkness, N. (2012). ‘Textes fossiles’: The Metatextual Geology of Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre. Modern Language Review, 107(4), 1047-1063.
Kafanova, O. (2016). Colloque “George Sand et les sciences de la vie et de la Terre” 20-22 octobre 2016.
Le Loeuff. J. (2016). T. rex superstar. L’irrésistible ascension du roi des dinosaures, Belin, collection ” Science à plumes” (1e édition : T.rex. Tyrannosaurus et les mondes perdus, Les éditions du Sauropode, 2012).
Mathias, M. (2011). ‘Apprendre à voir’: The quest for insight in George Sand’s novels (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, UK).
Mathias, M. (2016). Vision in the Novels of George Sand. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mustière, P. (2014). Etude psychocritique croisée de “Laura” de George Sand et de deux romans de Jules Verne. The Rocky Mountain Review, 195-206.
Nerlich, B. (1989). La lumière, une métaphore millénaire face à la modernité. J.V. No 9 [Newsletter of the ‘Centre de Documentation Jules Verne’, Amiens], 1er Trimestre, 10-22.
Riondet, G. (n.d.). George Sand, la passion des gemmes et des bijoux. Blog post. BnF – Les Essentiels.
Skrabec Jr, Q. R. (2024). The minerals of Jules Verne. Geology Today, 40(2), 58-62.
Vaclavik, K. (2004). George Sand & Jules Verne: A Missing Link. French Studies Bulletin, 25(90), 8-10.
Other blog posts on Jules Verne and 19th-century scicomm
Jules Verne: Making science public
Gnomes, ichthyosaurs and 19th-century science communication
The mystery of the missing Martians
Camille Flammarion: Making science popular
Making science popular: Science communication in 19th-century France
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