From within his index-card lighthouse, the isolation began to tell on the aging Jules. He had now streamlined the production of novels to industrial assembly-work, so much so that lying gossip claimed he used a troop of ghostwriters. He could field-strip a Verne book blindfolded, with a greased slot for every part--the daffy scientist, the comic muscleman or acrobat, the ordinary Joe who asks all the wide-eyed questions, the woman who scarcely exists and is rescued from suttee or sharks or red Indians. Sometimes the machine is the hero--the steam-driven elephant, the flying war-machine, the gigantic raft--sometimes the geography: caverns, coal-mines, ice-floes, darkest Africa.
Bored, Jules entered politics, and joined the Amiens City Council, where he was quickly shuffled onto the cultural committee. It was a natural sinecure and he did a fair job, getting electric lights installed, widening a few streets, building a municipal theater that everyone admired and no one attended. His book sales slumped steadily. The woods were full of guys writing scientific romances by now--people who actually knew how to write novels, like Herbert Wells. The folk-myth quotes Verne on Wells' _First Men In The Moon_: "Where is this gravity-repelling metal? Let him show it to me." If not the earliest, it is certainly the most famous exemplar of the hard-SF writer's eternal plaint against the fantasist.
The last years were painful. A deranged nephew shot Verne in the foot, crippling him; it was at this time that he wrote one of his rare late poems, the "Sonnet to Morphine." He was to have a more than nodding acquaintance with this substance, though in those days of children's teething-laudanum no one