He will find there a watch of the house of Valois placed in the centre of a Latin cross, and moving with it symbolical figures, Time, Apollo, Diana, etc.; or, again, the Virgin, the apostles and saints.
Time has not always been lost through the instruments that indicate its flight. Ages have changed even palaces; and the Palais Royal, whose cannon gives us still the exact hour of mid-day, once knew no hours for its habitués, and vice and immorality consumed the time that virtue now gives to better purposes. The poet of 1830 said:
"The palace lives in better days,
And virtue holds its court supreme;
The sun that lent to vice its rays
Now gives to time its potent beam."
But now that I have rendered every tribute to M. Claudius Saurrier that his special science can demand, may I not be equally frank with him?
I don't like to know what time it is; I am seized with profound melancholy when the clock strikes and as the hands of my watch indicate the rapidity with which my life is passing.
If there had never been an hourglass, a clepsydra, a clock, a regulator, a Swiss cuckoo, or a French chronometer, what with the variations of the seasons which are no longer regular—the trees leafing in January, and the house-tops iced in April—we might never be sure of anything, and lead the existence of those who frequented the balls of the tenor Roger. With shutters closed and curtains drawn, the sun excluded for four days, his guests could have doubted whether time had anything to do with their existence.
Then we could so long believe ourselves young! The dreaded question How old are you? could be answered in all sincerity, I do not know.
One word more, however, for our pretty watch. How often has it been the symbol of gallantry.
A lady asked a poet why he used two watches. He replied immediately: