Riassunto
Riassunto di Di fronte alla bandiera
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love sea adventure, secret hideouts and early submarines, and for anyone who enjoys a mystery solved one clue at a time. Fans of Verne's inventive gadgets and moral questions will find both here.
Che cos’è questo libro
Facing the Flag is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, who died in 1905. It joins a sea story with a question that still matters: what should an inventor do when his work can destroy whole fleets? The story begins in North Carolina, in a private sanitarium called Healthful House, and ends far out in the Atlantic.
The patient at the center is Thomas Roch, a French chemist whose new weapon, the fulgurator, is said to give mastery of land and sea. Governments refused his price, and his mind gave way. Now a rich foreign visitor with a fine schooner arrives with a curious interest in him. Much of the book is told through the notes of the engineer who guards Roch, and the reader learns each clue as he does.
You get a kidnapping, a ship that moves with no sails and no screw, a hidden lair, and a hard moral test. Let us begin where the book begins, at the gates of Healthful House.
In questo riassunto
- 1A mad genius in Healthful HouseFree
- 2The guardian who is not what he seems
- 3The Count visits and a plan takes shape
- 4Searched by the navy and still unseen
- 5Hart's notes from the dark
- 6Inside the hollow mountain
- 7The Count is the pirate Ker Karraje
- 8A prisoner's schemes and a message in a keg
- 9The rescue that fails
- 10What the story is about and how it is told
Punto chiave 1 di 10
A mad genius in Healthful House
The story opens on June 15 at Healthful House, a private sanitarium near New Bern in North Carolina. A visiting card arrives from Count d'Artigas, who asks to tour the place with Captain Spade, commander of his schooner Ebba. The director is flattered, because the house is famous and the Count seems very rich.
The real attraction is one patient, the Frenchman Thomas Roch, forty-five years old. He has lived in Pavilion No. 17 for eighteen months. In daily life he is lost, with no memory and no judgment. Yet when his inventions come up, his mind turns sharp and sure.
Roch is the maker of the fulgurator, a self-propelled shell with a special explosive and a special detonator. He claims it can destroy everything within a huge area. He offered it to France, Germany and Britain, but his price was so high that all three turned away. Each refusal made him more bitter, and his love of country faded.
The American government finally took him in and judged it wiser to keep him under care. Roch still guards the secret of his explosive and his detonator, even in his worst fits. Everything he says in his delirium is written down.
The book builds its stakes before any action starts. Everyone who reads these pages sees that this broken man carries something the world will fight over.
That’s 1 of 10 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Di fronte alla bandiera
What is Facing the Flag about?
It tells of a mad French inventor, Thomas Roch, whose terrible weapon draws a rich Count and his schooner to a sanitarium in North Carolina. Roch and his guardian are carried off to a hidden pirate lair.
Who is Count d'Artigas in Facing the Flag?
He is a rich, silent owner of the schooner Ebba, whose origin no one knows. Hart learns that the name is false and that he is really the pirate Ker Karraje, who once terrorized the Pacific.
What is Back Cup?
Back Cup is a small islet at the edge of the Bermuda group, shaped like an upside-down cup. It looks like a smoking volcano, but inside it is hollow and holds the pirates' hidden base.
What is Roch's fulgurator?
It is a self-propelled shell filled with a new explosive, set off by a special liquid detonator. Roch claims it destroys everything within a wide zone, so that its owner would rule the seas.
Is Facing the Flag easy to follow?
Yes, in the sense that the plot is clear and moves by mystery. Much of it is told through the diary of Simon Hart, so you learn each clue as he does, in short dated entries.