Abstract: One should not confuse Le Beau Danube jaune, written by Jules Verne in early 1901, and Le Pilote du Danube, published by Michel Verne under his father’s name in 1908. The son’s apocryphal work brings to mind a revenge novel that aims to incorporate features of the detective genre, while the father’s original develops as an ironic take on the indexical paradigm; a novel of fishing rather than hunting, a novel of idle suspicion, it distances itself from the nascent codes of the detective genre.
