The Begum's Fortune (Les voyages extraordinaires)

[Les voyages extraordinaires /1879] '(...) Two heirs to an Indian Bégum's estate -- Dr. Francois Sarrasin, a Frenchman, and Professor Schultz, a German -- split 525 million francs. With his half of the money, Sarrasin builds an ideal community called Frankville in the northwestern United States. Schultz uses his half to construct a city called Steeltown, which produces weapons of destruction. Of course, their ideologies clash . . . literally and figuratively!'

Jules Verne's conceptions are as brilliant as ever. Dr. Sarrasin, a French savant, simple in taste and absorbed in science, delivers an address at the Brighton Scientific Association. The publication of it with his name in ' The Daily Telegraph' discovers him to a London lawyer as the lost heir of the Bégum, whom his uncle had married in India. He inherits a moderate property of twenty-one millions sterling, all ready for him in the Bank of England. Dr. Schultz, a German professor, also a connection by marriage, threatens to dispute it. They settle the dispute by dividing it. Dr. Sarrasin founds in the Rocky Mountains a city of health, modelled on Dr. Richardson's lines. Dr. Schultz founds at thirty miles distance a stupendous cannon manufactory. One piece fires a shot with a velocity and force that give it perpetual motion. He resolves to destroy Dr. Sarrasin's city. How he fails and perishes by his own science the story must tell ; but it is prodigious. The magnificence and the verisimilitude are perfect.

[About the Author]: Jules Verne was a French writer and pioneer of the science fiction genre through novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and The Mysterious Island. A visionary, Verne wrote about air, space, and underwater travel long before the ability to travel in these realms was invented, and his works remain amongst the most translated, most continually reprinted, and most widely read books of all time. Jules Verne died in 1905 having paved the way for future science fiction writers and enthusiasts.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Begum's_Fortune
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_cinq_cents_millions_de_la_Bégum

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