MISTER RAY SHARP AND MISS ME FLAT (MONSIEUR RÉ-DIÈZE ET MADEMOISELLE MI-BÉMOL)

The charming novella Mister Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat was written as a children’s Christmas story in a magazine in 1893, and retains all the freshness of Verne’s early works, while at the time of its writing our author had reached the age of retirement (65). It tells of a Christmas incident as told by a young boy, a primary school pupil in a mountain village in Switzerland. The story has analogies with that of Master Zacharius: here we have a similar character in the form of a musician-tuner of church organs and organist, who takes on metaphysical dimensions when he tries to create a choir to replace certain notes of the clavier with children’s voices, in other words, when he tries to create a human instrument instead of a mechanical one. The music here takes on metaphysical dimensions.