Upon a pretext of making some further arrangement of the works before the execution of his sentence, the old man was allowed once more to mount the tower. Instead of adjusting the clock, he deranged it in some way so that its chimes never rang out as intended, and thus the magistrates and the citizens of Strasburg were, in a way, avenged for[{108}] the injustice done the inventor. This famous clock of Strasburg's tower is now only a memory.
The more recent works of a similar nature have a history less sordid and unpleasant. The first clock of the cathedral, placed inside the church at the crossing, dated from 1352, and of course was a remarkable work for its time.
Two hundred years later it was intended to replace it with another, but the work was never achieved, so a third was begun with an effort to outdo the ingenuity which had made possible the fourteenth-century astronomical wonder.
It was planned in 1571, under the direction of Conrad Dasypodius, of Strasburg, and his friend Daniel Volkenstein, an astronomer of Augsburg. It was completed in 1574, restored in 1669 and 1732, and ceased its labours through the stress of time in 1790.
The present great clock, certainly an unseemly and incongruous adjunct of a great church, was commenced on the 24th of June, 1838, and installed on the 31st of December, 1842. Its construction is supposed to have reflected great credit upon its designer, one Schwilgu, a clock-maker of Strasburg. Nothing[{109}] was preserved of the more ancient timepiece, except its elaborate case, which was restored and further embellished.
At the base of the tower, on the summit of which is placed the crowing cock, is a portrait of the designer. "This great man," say the local patriots, died an octogenarian in 1856.
In 1723 a subterranean tremor sent the tower of Strasburg's cathedral a foot out of plumb. It speaks well for the solidity of the construction that no ill effects resulted, and to-day there are no evidences, to the casual observer, of this deflection.
The beauty of Strasburg's cathedral was in so great repute in the middle ages that Jean Galeaz Marie, Visconti Sforza, in 1481, demanded of the magistrates of the city the name of an architect capable of completing his cathedral at Milan.
In a vaulted chamber attached to the cathedral proper are two strangely curious memorials. They are nothing more or less than two mummies which, for their better preservation, have been varnished, and the costumes which they anciently wore have from time to time been renewed.
One is the mummy of the Count of [{110}]Nassau-Saarbruck, who died in the sixteenth century, and the other is that of a young girl of perhaps twenty years, supposed to have been his daughter.