The Special Correspondent

Set in the early 1890s, The Special Correspondent tells the story of Claudius Bombarnac, special correspondent from the Parisian newspaper Twentieth Century, assigned to travel the newly completed Grand Transasiatic Railway running from Uzun Ada (on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea) to Peking (Beijing), China. Over his thirteen-day journey he meets an eclectic cast of characters, including an impatient American businessman, a detached English lady, a Russian major, a French actor and actress, a young Chinese noble accompanied by an eccentric Doctor, and a German baron racing to circle the globe in thirty-nine days, perhaps a nod to Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, published twenty years earlier. As he meets them, Bombarnac assigns each a number in his notebook, and seeks to get to know them as they travel together.

As a dedicated special correspondent, Bombarnac's greatest fear is that his nearly two-week journey will pass without anything interesting happening to fill his columns. But his fears turn out to be unfounded, and he sees as much, and perhaps even more, danger and adventure than he had hoped. Between these episodes, we're also given an interesting look at Central Asia at the cusp of the twentieth century, influenced by the expanding political scope of Russia and China, and by the forces of modernity, as Bombarnac mourns the sight of electric streetlamps in ancient towns, and expresses horror when passed by two locals in Samarkand riding bicycles.

The Special Correspondent was originally published in France in 1892 under the title Claudius Bombarnac. Written later in Verne's life, it shows off his knowledge of languages, people, and customs, as well as his wry sense of humor. This English translation, originally appearing in The Boy's Own Paper of October 1893, feels surprisingly fresh and modern, and takes the reader on an entertaining ride along with Verne's indefatigable news correspondent.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)The Special Correspondent is a travel adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, part of his Voyages Extraordinaires series, reproduced here from its Standard Ebooks edition.