Free The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace Page B

reverses which might have caused despondency.” When Flagler finished his statement a St. Louis reporter asked what he thought of Harden-Hickey’s reference to him as a “blackguard” in the farewell note. Flagler did his best, “with dignity,” the press reported. “I have no personal knowledge that the Baron left any such communication,” said Flagler. “I was a good friend to the Baron, and was ready to go to his assistance. If he left a letter tending to show that he was depressed, that in itself would be no sign that he took his life. Among other eccentricities of his genius he had a tendency to melancholy, which sometimes made him say strange things.”
    On February 12 the El Paso police physician reaffirmed that Harden-Hickey’s death came “from drugs taken with suicidal intent.” The same day his personal effects, including the royal crown, were forwarded to his wife in Riverside, California. His remains were shipped at his wife’s request to his mother, Mrs. E. C. Hickey, in San Francisco.
    The New York press, in the three days following his death, gave considerable space to his Parisian and Trinidad adventures. But in all the columns of copy, no New York paper was enterprising or sentimental enough to refer to the foreword of Harden-Hickey’s last book, Euthanasia ; the Aesthetics of Suicide :
    “Away with darkness where ignorance creeps in slimy filth, let Truth show herself in her splendid nudity, in her ideal beauty. I now see thy face, it illumines my way. I sought for thee during many weary years and under many bitter difficulties; and when thou knewest that I would never renounce the hope of finding thee and that I would pursue thee, not only in this life, but through a thousand incarnations, thou earnest to me saying:
    “‘Here am I, what wilt thou?’
    “‘Disclose to me the enigma, the remedy to the evils of life?’ was my prayer; and thine answer was:
    “‘Death.’”

III
    The Man Who Was Phileas Fogg

    “Remember Jules Verne’s ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’? He stole my thunder. I’m Phileas Fogg.”
    GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN

    The inspiration for the most popular novel Jules Verne was to write came to him one day late in 1871 while he sat in his favorite café in Amiens absently leafing through a French periodical.
    For months the press had been filled with the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. Verne had followed the short, bitter conflict closely. He had read about Worth and Metz, about the capture of Napoleon III at Sedan, about the besieged citizens of Paris forced to partake of their beloved elephants in the Zoological Gardens for sustenance, about the Prussians encamped two days on the shuttered Champs-Elysées. Verne sighed with relief when Adolphe Thiers put his pen to the peace, even though it meant conceding much of Alsace-Lorraine and a one-billion-dollar indemnity to Bismarck.
    But though the war was over, the press promised no relief from violence. A savage civil strife was under way. Leon Gambetta, the one-eyed French-Italian deputy from Marseilles who had fled Paris in a balloon, rallied the new republic to suppress the Communards, a fanatical uprising of ordinary laborers, National Guardsmen, and communists who had the blessings of Karl Marx from his headquarters in the British Museum.
    For Jules Verne, whose growing reputation at forty-three was based on novels of the future inspired by events of the moment, the periodical he held in his hands, with its painful political reportage, held little hope of either inspiration or escape.
    And then, suddenly, as he remembered years later, his gaze fell upon a curious account from abroad.
    An eccentric American millionaire had circled the globe in eighty days, an incredible accomplishment in that era of carriages, sailing vessels, and erratic iron horses. It was this new record for speed against countless obstacles that struck Verne at once, this “new possibility of making the circuit in eighty days.”
    Hastily