“Sir,” I told the captain, “thank you for placing this library at my disposal. There are scientific treasures here, and I’ll take advantage of them.”
“This room isn’t only a library,” Captain Nemo said, “it’s also a smoking room.”
“A smoking room?” I exclaimed. “Then one may smoke on board?”
“Surely.”
“In that case, sir, I’m forced to believe that you’ve kept up relations with Havana.”
“None whatever,” the captain replied. “Try this cigar, Professor Aronnax, and even though it doesn’t come from Havana, it will satisfy you if you’re a connoisseur.”
I took the cigar offered me, whose shape recalled those from Cuba; but it seemed to be made of gold leaf. I lit it at a small brazier supported by an elegant bronze stand, and I inhaled my first whiffs with the relish of a smoker who hasn’t had a puff in days.
“It’s excellent,” I said, “but it’s not from the tobacco plant.”
“Right,” the captain replied, “this tobacco comes from neither Havana nor the Orient. It’s a kind of nicotine-rich seaweed that the ocean supplies me, albeit sparingly. Do you still miss your Cubans, sir?”
“Captain, I scorn them from this day forward.”
“Then smoke these cigars whenever you like, without debating their origin. They bear no government seal of approval, but I imagine they’re none the worse for it.”
“On the contrary.”
Just then Captain Nemo opened a door facing the one by which I had entered the library, and I passed into an immense, splendidly lit lounge.
It was a huge quadrilateral with canted corners, ten meters long, six wide, five high. A luminous ceiling, decorated with delicate arabesques, distributed a soft, clear daylight over all the wonders gathered in this museum. For a museum it truly was, in which clever hands had spared no expense to amass every natural and artistic treasure, displaying them with the helter-skelter picturesqueness that distinguishes a painter’s studio.
Some thirty pictures by the masters, uniformly framed and separated by gleaming panoplies of arms, adorned walls on which were stretched tapestries of austere design. There I saw canvases of the highest value, the likes of which I had marveled at in private European collections and art exhibitions. The various schools of the old masters were represented by a Raphael Madonna, a Virgin by Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph by Correggio, a woman by Titian, an adoration of the Magi by Veronese, an assumption of the Virgin by Murillo, a Holbein portrait, a monk by Velazquez, a martyr by Ribera, a village fair by Rubens, two Flemish landscapes by Teniers, three little genre paintings by Gerard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two canvases by Gericault and Prud’hon, plus seascapes by Backhuysen and Vernet. Among the works of modern art were pictures signed by Delacroix, Ingres, Decamps, Troyon, Meissonier, Daubigny, etc., and some wonderful miniature statues in marble or bronze, modeled after antiquity’s finest originals, stood on their pedestals in the corners of this magnificent museum. As the Nautilus’s commander had predicted, my mind was already starting to fall into that promised state of stunned amazement.
“Professor,” this strange man then said, “you must excuse the informality with which I receive you, and the disorder reigning in this lounge.”
“Sir,” I replied, “without prying into who you are, might I venture to identify you as an artist?”
“A collector, sir, nothing more. Formerly I loved acquiring these beautiful works created by the hand of man. I sought them greedily, ferreted them out tirelessly, and I’ve been able to gather some objects of great value. They’re my last mementos of those shores that are now dead for me. In my eyes, your modern artists are already as old as the ancients. They’ve existed for 2,000 or 3,000 years, and I mix them up in my mind. The masters are ageless.”
“What about these composers?” I said, pointing to sheet music by Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod, Victor Massé, and a number of others scattered over a full size piano-organ, which occupied one of the wall panels in this lounge.
“These composers,” Captain Nemo answered me, “are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade; and I’m dead, professor, quite as dead as those friends of yours sleeping six feet under!”
Captain Nemo fell silent and seemed lost in reverie. I regarded him with intense excitement, silently analyzing his strange facial expression. Leaning his elbow on the corner of a valuable mosaic table, he no longer saw me, he had forgotten my very presence.
I didn’t disturb his meditations but continued to pass in review the curiosities that enriched this lounge.
After the works of art, natural rarities predominated. They consisted chiefly of plants, shells, and other exhibits from the ocean that must have been Captain Nemo’s own personal finds. In the middle of the lounge, a jet of water, electrically lit, fell back into a basin made from a single giant clam. The delicately festooned rim of this shell, supplied by the biggest mollusk in the class Acephala, measured about six meters in circumference; so it was even bigger than those fine giant clams given to King François I by the Republic of Venice, and which the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris has made into two gigantic holy-water fonts.
Around this basin, inside elegant glass cases fastened with copper bands, there were classified and labeled the most valuable marine exhibits ever put before the eyes of a naturalist. My professorial glee may easily be imagined.
The zoophyte branch offered some very unusual specimens from its two groups, the polyps and the echinoderms. In the first group: organ-pipe coral, gorgonian coral arranged into fan shapes, soft sponges from Syria, isis coral from the Molucca Islands, sea-pen coral, wonderful coral of the genus Virgularia from the waters of Norway, various coral of the genus Umbellularia, alcyonarian coral, then a whole series of those madrepores that my mentor Professor Milne-Edwards has so shrewdly classified into divisions and among which I noted the wonderful genus Flabellina as well as the genus Oculina from Réunion Island, plus a “Neptune’s chariot” from the Caribbean Sea—every superb variety of coral, and in short, every species of these unusual polyparies that congregate to form entire islands that will one day turn into continents. Among the echinoderms, notable for being covered with spines: starfish, feather stars, sea lilies, free-swimming crinoids, brittle stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, etc., represented a complete collection of the individuals in this group.
An excitable conchologist would surely have fainted dead away before