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| The Three Musketeers: 'All for one and one for all' |
This morning, The Jones have returned to their activity after celebrating MJ's birthday sailing across the Seine River.
They have revised the Object Pronouns and Whose. They have also written some composition using connectors about the next visits in Paris.
After the grammar session, they have read a new chapter of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and they have practised different verb tenses.
The Grandma has explained her impressions about two great French writers: Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas and their influence in the universal literature. They have been talking about different topics like the importance of sleeping to have a health life and about the scientific experiments about sleeplessness.
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| The Jones in The Bibliothèque nationale de France |
They have also discussed about Narcís Monturiol and his famous invent, the Ictineo, a submarine which was tested on the shores of the Delta de Llobregat, a beautiful special place if you want to see a great variety of birds and wild animals or you want to help to return them to the sea.
This afternoon, the family has visited The Bibliothèque nationale de France which is the national library of France. It is the national repository of all that is published in France and also holds extensive historical collections. The family has searching more information about some authors.
More information: Object Pronouns
On the one hand, The Jones have talked about Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), who was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors.
Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.
Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first.
He also wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris.
More information: The Count of Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas' father's aristocratic rank helped young Alexandre acquire work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans. He later began working as a writer, finding early success. Decades later, in the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years.
Upon leaving Belgium, Dumas moved to Russia for a few years before going to Italy. In 1861, he founded and published the newspaper L'Indipendente, which supported the Italian unification effort. In 1864, he returned to Paris.
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
Alexandre Dumas
On the other hand, the family has remembered Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) a French novelist, poet, and playwright who was born in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage.
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| Jules Verne |
His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the Father of Science Fiction, a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.
In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them.
Jules Verne
Moreover, the family has remembered Narcís Monturiol (1819-1885), who was a Catalan artist and engineer and the inventor of the first air-independent and combustion-engine-driven submarine. Monturiol was born in Figueres, Girona.
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| Narcís Monturiol i Estarriol |
He was the son of a cooper. Monturiol went to high school in Cervera and got a law degree in Modtoles in 1845. He solved the fundamental problems of underwater navigation. In effect, Monturiol invented the first fully functional engine-driven submarine.
Monturiol never practiced law, instead turning his talents to writing and publishing, setting up a publishing company in 1846, the same year he married his wife Emilia.
He produced a series of journals and pamphlets espousing his radical beliefs in feminism, pacifism, and utopian communism. He also founded the newspaper La Madre de Familia, in which he promised to defend women from the tyranny of men and La Fraternidad, Spain's first communist newspaper.
Monturiol's friendship with Abdó Terrades led him to join the Republican Party and his circle of friends included such names as musician Josep Anselm Clavé, and engineer and reformist Ildefons Cerdà.
More information: Semantic Scholar
Monturiol also became an enthusiastic follower of the utopian thinker and socialist Étienne Cabet; he popularised Cabet's ideas through La Fraternidad and produced a Spanish translation of his novel Voyage en Icarie. A circle formed round La Fraternidad raised enough money for one of them to travel to Cabet's utopian community, Icaria.
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| Marta Jones's memories of the Ictineos I and II |
Following the revolutions of 1848, one of his publications was suppressed by the government and he was forced into a brief exile in France. When he returned to Barcelona in 1849, the government curtailed his publishing activities, and he turned his attention to science and engineering instead.
A stay in Cadaqués allowed him to observe the dangerous job of coral harvesters where he even witnessed the death of a man who drowned while performing this job.
This prompted him to think of submarine navigation and in September 1857 he went back to Barcelona and organized the first commercial society in Catalonia and Spain dedicated to the exploration of submarine navigation with the name of Monturiol, Font, Altadill y Cia. and a capital of 10,000 pesetas.
In 1858, Monturiol presented his project in a scientific thesis, titled The Ictineo or fish-ship. The first dive of his first submarine, Ictineo I, took place in September 1859 in the coast of the Llobregat River, in Barcelona.
A book is kind of like a river; I simply jump in and start swimming.
Melody Carlson
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