The artworks, and especially those of literature, are often a social testimony of a historical epoch. This is particularly flagrant in this novel The Begum’s fortune, published as several episodes in the year 1879. There are two characters, both recipients of a large legacy. Both of them decides to found “ideal” cities, according to their personal visions. If one develops a city with a steel face, turned towards industry and military production, the other prefers to lead its project towards a social development, echoing a certain environmental balance – visionnary for its time! Jules Verne develops particular, through the design of this ideal city, ideas of clean thermal insulation:
“The houses would be made of bricks. Not, of course, these bricks roughly molded with a cake more or less well cooked, but light bricks, perfectly regular shape, weight and density, pierced in the direction of their length of a series of cylindrical and parallel holes. These holes, assembled end to end, were to form in the thickness of all the walls of the open ducts at their two ends, and thus allow the air to circulate freely in the outer envelope of the houses, as in the internal partitions ”
The character of Verne even proposes to purify the carbon vapor in each of the chimneys of its inhabitants, from “special stoves”:
“Each room has its fireplace heated, according to taste, fire wood or coal, but any chimney is a mouth of external air call. As for the smoke, instead of being expelled by the roofs, it engages through underground conduits to special stoves, established, at the expense of the city, behind the houses, as there is a furnace for two hundred inhabitants. There it is stripped of the carbon particles that it carries away, and unloaded in a colorless state, at a height of thirty-five meters, into the atmosphere. “
