JULIUS
VERNE
The charming novella Mr. Re-Sharp and Miss Mi-Flat was written as a Christmas story for children and published in a magazine in 1893. It retains all the freshness of Verne’s early works, even though the author was already of retirement age (65) when he wrote it. It recounts a Christmas episode narrated by a young boy, a primary school student in a mountain village in Switzerland.
The story presents parallels with Master Zacharius: here too we encounter a similar human type, embodied in the figure of a musical instrument tuner and church organist, who acquires metaphysical dimensions when he attempts to assemble a choir in order to replace certain notes of the keyboard with children’s voices—in other words, when he tries to create a human rather than a mechanical musical instrument. Here, music takes on metaphysical dimensions.
