The Enchanted Clock Read online

  At about age fourteen, I nearly succumbed to one of those so-called orphan maladies that take possession of your blood and your wits and imprison you in an irremediable silence. Nothing could appease me, then, other than a strange desire for the hereafter. My mother, who had promised me to a solar future at the Bar, wisely sought to distract me with books of history or amusement. Only Bion’s work, The Use of Celestial and Terrestrial Globes, drew my interest. Ecstasy, beyond words. I abandoned my impotent body, tasted God’s exteriority, and embraced Him in the flights of my feverish mind. But since my only will was my mother’s wish, my pleasure felt pain within itself, bitterness showed on my face, and people thought I was melancholic, whereas I was saved, I was elsewhere. I experienced the bliss of saints.

  Let’s not exaggerate. I willingly see myself in the celibacy of ecclesiastics, and I have read almost all the literature on the matter, the Latin as well as the French. Even yesterday I impressed Dr. Sue the younger, husband of my younger daughter. I am more knowledgeable than he is in matters of celibacy. Doesn’t spiritual passion equal the passion of the senses, isn’t it even more ardent?

  For a long time I thought I was alone in living like this, in this century enlightened by frenetic ideas and sensual audacity. Now I possess the assurance that our king the Beloved is himself not a stranger to these designs of Providence that grace has granted me the benefit of. How could I have such a pretention, as a simple commoner who is not even a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences? “Whereas in England, you would already have been in it,” my son-in-law insists. “They have had their Revolution.”

  I won’t tell him that human affairs leave me cold, whether they take place under my window or on the other side of the Channel. Although I am intrigued by the ideas of Voltaire, who launched the stellar word “revolution” into our world here below, for my part I am interested only in celestial revolutions. They surpass us infinitely more and better than our own, with all due respect to Monsieur Arouet, who has become the king’s historiographer and whom I might have encountered on the stairs at the Château where he had his lodgings—it seems he found that His Majesty’s current favorite possessed a philosophical turn of mind—if he had not left it to become chamberlain to the king of Prussia. I would not have told him—it goes without saying—that cosmic bodies obtain for me, humble engineer of Louis XV, a way to transcend myself. Besides, any other way scares me.

  As for the good Dr. Sue the younger, who like so many people today has political ideas, he inevitably irritates me by wanting to converse, dragging speech out of me, seeking to make me agree to certain actions above my rank. In spite of my love of freedom and my indifference to wealth, I don’t like to argue, and I say nothing to him, obviously. I just turn my back, when I’m not slamming the door in his face—because my moods are violent but short-lived, thank God. On the other hand, I am often seized by impatience, resistance, and the spirit of contradiction when I observe that the life of the mind, such as it is deployed by the sciences, scarcely moves the powerful of this world to passion. Except for our Beloved king, who has charitably manifested his interest in me, perhaps even an attachment. So my son-in-law believes, always overly keen on honors. He’s wrong. God has simply given us a monarch with an affection for architecture, physics, astronomy, and mathematics. But those who know this fact number too few, and I fear it is not to the liking of his close relations.

  “He lives and breathes for plots and drawings on his table,” people murmur in Versailles. And Mme de Pompadour’s friends are worried because they think she isn’t able to keep this man of science as amused as he deserves to be. I know it. His Majesty prefers to reflect on his plots in the evening after dinner, and sometimes, before or instead of joining the marquise, he writes. On his campaign table, provided by Gaudreaux, I have actually seen a set square measuring six inches, with a plumb line; a large compass with six points, of which five are broken; a three-inch compass with a changeable point of pencil or ink; a small simple compass of four inches; a great six-inch proportional compass; a silver protractor and one made of horn; an ebony foot-measure decorated in silver; an ebony ruler; an ebony awl with a silver point; pencil holders; and paper clips. Are these not the tools of an architect? Drawings in his own hand covering the table, the annotations and modifications he has inscribed on the projects of his architects and engineers—I have seen these things. Also the mathematical instruments provided by Langlois. All the while Meissonnier, the Slodtz brothers, and then Challe compete and will compete in their zeal to design furniture, fireplaces, andirons, silver and gold vessels, festival decorations, and theater décor. His Majesty shows a great deal of kindness to his engineers, and the fact that he has deigned to manifest such beneficence on my behalf—for me, his modest clockmaker—is an immense privilege … Do I even deserve it?

  I cannot imagine a greater happiness than the hours the king and the younger Gabriel spend together, sketching and discussing. His Majesty drafted continually with Jacques Gabriel, himself the scion of a long line of architects, and then with his son, Ange Jacques Gabriel, since this architect, endowed with exquisite sensitivity, possessed a dwelling near the king’s. And when he doesn’t go hunting, the sovereign is often found working in his private cabinet on projects for buildings and gardens.

  Not exactly the kind of thing that interests Mme de Pompadour, and I choose my words carefully. I know the favor enjoyed by the marquise places her above events, sovereigns not being known for their continence. I also concede that the royally elect—whose beauty is very unique (for there are different kinds of unique) and whose intelligence is superior, for a woman—excels at running the household, at enlivening a supper or a soirée. As the queen’s position is relegated to the official apartments and the grand royal homes, it is in fact la Pompadour who reigns over the little dwellings and the pleasure palaces. My work rarely takes me there, Providence having so decided, and that’s a fabulous bit of good luck. The king’s anxious character finds refuge there. But does the favorite truly love him? I ask myself because the duration of human affections is certainly not measurable like the time of celestial rotations, even if it is no less attractive to me, contrary to what my son-in-law imagines.

  In this liaison I see a sincere attachment on the part of the marquise, but rather than a true love, I perceive a powerful appetite for domination. How could it be otherwise, since “la Poisson” (as she is called by her enemies, via a feminized allusion to her father François Poisson, though I never do so, except in this document in which I confide strictly personal thoughts that I wish to hold confidential throughout my lifetime and beyond) does not know that our well-educated sovereign can only truly take relaxation, other than in the hunt, through serious distractions. And I do mean scientific ones. Designing and discussing with architects, discoursing with scientists, performing mathematics, and even reflecting on the time of Apollo (the god he prefers as much, if not more, dare I say it, than our Lord) with a modest clockmaker like me. As for her, la Pompadour, she thinks only of stimulating him and enticing him to theatrical representations (which personally I avoid), in which, they say, the unfortunate woman excels. These frivolities bore His Majesty rather quickly, I presume. I sense it. And they are harmful in the end because they brand him with the bad reputation of a frivolous, spendthrift king. “He will end up angering his good subjects,” asserts my dogmatic son-in-law. Yes, he again, always paying heed to rumors running around the city—and a great reader of lampoons.

  Right away I understood that there is only one place where the king can be alone: his dressing room. Courtesans sneak in everywhere else. Connected to his bedchamber alcove, opening to it by a door hung with a tapestry and tiled with a colored marble mosaic, this place, which I have only glimpsed, marries the extreme elegance of tradition with the most intimate comfort. And His Majesty must feel this same harmony as he goes from his bedchamber into a vast room lit by three windows overlooking the marble courtyard. This room brings together the salon of his grand
father Louis XIV, by the little staircase, and a small room with niches designed by Louis XV himself, where there are astronomical dials built into a semicircular wall. Called the Oval Cabinet, with clocks set into the walls covered with magnificent white and gold woodwork sculpted by Verberckt, this room is pleasantly furnished with chairs and tables for quadrille, ombre, and piquet, prompting its designation as the Salon de Jeux. Oh, I have contemplated it, studied it, a great deal. I hold it in my memory, and you know why.

  My clock, accepted by the Academy of Sciences in 1749, constructed by Dauthiau and presented to His Majesty, thanks to the intervention of the Marquise de Pompadour, on September 7, 1750, at Choisy, then at the court on October 10, 1753, was installed in this room at Versailles, but only in 1754. That’s because the Caffieris took a long time to dress it in a case of cast and chiseled bronze from a design chosen by the king himself. But Louis XV is not one to stop at appearances, if I may be allowed an opinion, and it was for the pleasure of the mathematician king that I offered my automaton. I thought of his mathematics teacher, François Chevalier, an expert on fortifications from the school of Vauban, when I was working on it in my studio in the Louvre, generously provided by His Majesty, and then on the day when they did me the honor of exhibiting it officially. I have carefully preserved the draft I present here of the lines I wrote in support of my presentation to the Beloved king, explaining the clock clearly to the court and making myself understood up to the year 9999, a year toward which my thoughts never cease projecting themselves:

  “The sphere daily represents the different movements of the planets around the Sun, their location in the Zodiac, their configurations, stations, and retrogradations. Each circle carries the orb of a planet and is inscribed with the time it takes for it to circle the Sun. During its annual revolution, the Earth sees the Sun traversing the signs of the Zodiac and their degrees.

  “The clock beats the seconds. Marking true time and average time, it chimes the hour and the quarter hours of true time or Sun time, repeating, on its own, the hour and the quarter hour at each quarter hour. The movement of the chime works with spring, fusee, and chain, and the movement of the clock works with a double-weighted slotted pulley.

  “At the front of the clock, above the dial, a planisphere indicates the Moon’s age and phases. There one can see the day of the week, the date of the month, the name of the month, and the calendar year, in a singular new construction. The mechanism is made in such a way that it can continue to indicate the calendar year for ten thousand years, should the clock exist.

  “The mechanism of the entire piece is designed so that each movement can be separated if needed, though they are all linked. The number of gear wheels that compose the mechanism of the sphere is so simple that there are only sixty, as many as there are pinions, few of which are on the inside. This makes it more open to view and at the same time more solid. The sphere is one foot in diameter and is enclosed in glass. The case of the clock is entirely of bronze, gilded with ormolu. It has four faces decorated with glass, of a very pleasant shape and fine finish, and with openings so one can easily see all the mechanisms of the workings. Its height, including the sphere at the top, is seven feet.”

  Here end the pages that Mlle Aubane Dechartre, assistant curator at Versailles, found in the archives of the Château—upon my request, to satisfy Stan’s passion. No one had touched them since the clockmaker had written them. I was overwhelmed by this fragment of unfinished manuscript written with a lively pen, whose pages had yellowed. Of course, not as much as I was overwhelmed by Stan’s reawakening after several days of being unconscious, but still. The guardians of the patrimony had no clue about its existence. A pretty coup d’état in museographic science, and perhaps beyond, in my humble opinion …

  Way to go, Aubane!

  4

  NIVI CAN SEE HIM AS IF SHE WERE THERE …

  So here he is. Claude-Siméon is presenting his astronomical clock at Versailles.

  The man is vigorous, slim, rather tall. His face is diamond shaped, and his aquiline nose, long and hooked, betrays his obstinacy more than any nobility, to which he has no claim anyway. One also senses a certain penchant for pleasure. His sensitive mouth is drawn in the French manner but without the willful chin. His long fine hair, inherited from his German father, is the color of wheat. The look from his piercing Germanic eyes, of a beautiful steely blue, is furtive; his gaze fixes internally or on the stars. But if his eyes fall upon you, it’s to make you cringe, as Saint-Simon would have said.

  Because if the Duc de Saint-Simon had lived during Louis XV’s reign, which is out of the question in a time where nothing stays in place, he would certainly have noticed this man of the most precise distinction.1 No cruelty, quite a lot of rage, frequent bouts of anger revealing an inner-directed impatience, a severe judgment of his results—mechanical results, on the whole, in a mechanical world. But no feeling, no inclination with regard to others. To the point that one wonders if Claude-Siméon Passemant even has any notion of what we know as “others.” For him, only the stars count. But are the stars other? Or are they only his invisible secret, beyond his telescope or his own antennas?

  At a time as despotic and directionless as this reign, where the whole court and through it the rest of the world regulates its actions by the movements of the king, prime mover among all things, Passemant is convinced that not only is the originating mover to be found in star time but that an artisan like him is perfectly capable of reproducing it in the form of an astronomical clock whose time is infinite. And that this fabulous clock, a product of his hands, will be the true sovereign body by which everyone must henceforth be regulated. Louis XV has no difficulty being convinced, the court follows suit, and soon so will the entire world. See for yourself, everyone, see how the automaton has the bearing of His Majesty, perfect Louis XV style, at once light, precise, erotic, and celestial. Therefore, Mesdames et Messieurs, who is the sovereign? The automaton or the monarch? That is the question! I’m the one asking it, I, Claude-Siméon Passemant, engineer of His Majesty the king of France!

  You can find descriptions of the fabulous clock but no trace of the inventor himself. None whatsoever. Neither in the archives at Versailles nor in the National Archives, and not even waiting to be culled from some secret location by the continuing diligence (which I have solicited) of Mlle Aubane Dechartre, the Owl’s colleague. Nothing other than the clockmaker’s manuscript reproduced above, which I’m guarding like a treasure. Rereading it, and lacking any other personal testimony from Passemant, I imagine him through Saint-Simon’s eyes.

  Why the duke? Because there is nothing more precise, slanderous, and correct than his implacable impudence in denouncing our society’s ills, the cruelty of men, the devilry in the rituals of power. Well before the Red March of Parisians and the guillotine.2 His music caresses appearances and skewers vices. The “Little Duke,” as posthumous writer, would not have botched his portrait of my Claude-Siméon: a devil of a man, but of a discrete species, neither hellish nor romantic. Not even debauched—no wild license, no filthy dance of rumors, no scandals, and at the same time an understanding collaborator, a perfect witness, the duke would have said. Our astronomer clockmaker reinforces the scientific whims of His Majesty.

  A stranger to the court, of which he is however the reflection, split off from the reflection within the reflection, Claude-Siméon takes part in the becoming-mechanical of the world—from afar, from above, from beyond, from time’s astronomical infinity, which does not turn the king’s engineer into a rebel, just a simple dissident, as prone to migraines as he is pitiless. Echoing Stan’s passion and with Stan, I love him. I invent him as a distant double of my multiverse Astro. I combine them, I see two simultaneous faces of a reality that cannot be grasped entirely or in any other way. To achieve this, I have to avoid being an obstacle myself; I have to yield up all mastery, seek a network of silences, of furtive signs, of logical crossings.

  If Saint-Simon had not withdrawn f
rom court in 1723 after the demise of the regent, the very year in which his memoirs stop, he would certainly have mentioned this new species of technicians, artisans, and great scholars, whether there would be an Encyclopédie or not. Hadn’t he wanted to connect them to the power of the throne in the form of councils he called “polysynodia,” which were intended to replace the ministers? With the vehemence of his arrow-sharp wit, in a defensive gesture like a cautious fencer, the excellent, terrifying memorialist would have understood this personage of the emergent “fourth” estate, a class not yet belonging to the “vile mushrooms controlling the highest places” whose “interest is in decomposing everything, destroying everything in the end.” Not a poisonous mushroom, nor in the highest places, decomposing nothing but making himself a master in composition, Claude-Siméon the subtly uncouth, the celestially depressed, the sensitively robotic would not perhaps have served in the ranks of the polysynodia. But he might have been one of their experts, nervous, annoying, and innovating, and he might have made himself indispensable without self-praise or applause. A new personage endowed with the grace to live in this time outside time that unfolds, with his clock, between the Parc-aux-Cerfs and the guillotine.3

  1. The Duc de Saint-Simon was the author of famous memoirs about the court of Louis XIV.

  2. In May 1750, rumor had it that children were being rounded up and kidnapped by disguised policemen and taken to the hôpital—not a hospital but an institution where undesirables were interned against their will. Parisians staged a revolt, the “Marche rouge” or Red March, and a repression followed.