twenty-four hours ahead of time; but there are
only ten minutes left!"
Passepartout had seized his master by the collar, and was dragging him
along with irresistible force.
Phileas Fogg, thus kidnapped, without having time to think, left his
house, jumped into a cab, promised a hundred pounds to the cabman, and,
having run over two dogs and overturned five carriages, reached the
Reform Club.
The clock indicated a quarter before nine when he appeared in the great
saloon.
Phileas Fogg had accomplished the journey round the world in eighty
days!
Phileas Fogg had won his wager of twenty thousand pounds!
How was it that a man so exact and fastidious could have made this
error of a day? How came he to think that he had arrived in London on
Saturday, the twenty-first day of December, when it was really Friday,
the twentieth, the seventy-ninth day only from his departure?
The cause of the error is very simple.
Phileas Fogg had, without suspecting it, gained one day on his journey,
and this merely because he had travelled constantly eastward; he would,
on the contrary, have lost a day had he gone in the opposite direction,
that is, westward.
In journeying eastward he had gone towards the sun, and the days
therefore diminished for him as many times four minutes as he crossed
degrees in this direction. There are three hundred and sixty degrees
on the circumference of the earth; and these three hundred and sixty
degrees, multiplied by four minutes, gives precisely twenty-four
hours--that is, the day unconsciously gained. In other words, while
Phileas Fogg, going eastward, saw the sun pass the meridian eighty
times, his friends in London only saw it pass the meridian seventy-nine
times. This is why they awaited him at the Reform Club on Saturday,
and not Sunday, as Mr. Fogg thought.
And Passepartout's famous family watch, which had always kept London
time, would have betrayed this fact, if it had marked the days as well
as the hours and the minutes!
Phileas Fogg, then, had won the twenty thousand pounds; but, as he had
spent nearly nineteen thousand on the way, the pecuniary gain was
small. His object was, however, to be victorious, and not to win
money. He divided the one thousand pounds that remained between
Passepartout and the unfortunate Fix, against whom he cherished no
grudge. He deducted, however, from Passepartout's share the cost of
the gas which had burned in his room for nineteen hundred
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