Jules Verne Museum

The Jules Verne Museum occupies the house on Boulevard Jules Verne where the author lived and worked from 1882 until his death in 1905. Verne wrote many of his most celebrated works here — most of the Voyages Extraordinaires, including Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth had all been published before he moved in, but Michel Strogoff, Hector Servadac, and many later works were written at this desk. The museum preserves his study, his library of several thousand volumes, and the wooden model theatre he had built for staging plays.

The collection also includes scientific instruments, maps, illustrations from his books, and personal memorabilia. For anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction's founding figure, or in the bourgeois intellectual life of the Belle Époque, it is a genuinely affecting place. Verne's tomb in the Cimetière de la Madeleine, about a kilometre away, is worth the short detour: the marble figure of the author rising from his grave is one of the most unusual funerary monuments in France.

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A story
Verne moved to Amiens in 1872 because his wife Honorine came from a Picard family, and he stayed for the rest of his life. He wrote most of his famous novels here, rising at 5am to work before breakfast. He was also a local politician — elected three times to the Amiens municipal council — and a passionate advocate for the city's infrastructure improvements. The house on Boulevard Jules Verne was purpose-built for him in the fashionable Neogothic style; the turret at the top is where he liked to retreat to work.