Jules Verne — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

At half-past four on the ninth of October, in the Depository of Suspended Instruments beneath the Rue Vaugirard, I first heard the mechanism running the wrong way.

I had come, as I came every Tuesday, to catalogue the abandoned patents of the Second Empire — pneumatic umbrellas, hydraulic corset-stays, a telegraph key operable by the tongue alone — when the sound reached me from the third gallery: a ticking, unmistakably metallic, unmistakably regular, and unmistakably retrograde. A clock does not tick backwards. I had studied horology at Besançon under men who would have called such a sentence an obscenity. Yet there it was: tick, tock, reversed, as though time itself had been made to walk home drunk along the path it had gone out sober.

I am not, I confess at once, a man given to alarm. Thirty-one years of cataloguing the discarded machinery of my century had furnished me with a temperament that measures before it marvels — a habit my colleagues at the Conservatoire found tedious and my late wife found unbearable. So I did what any scholar would do: I took out my watch, noted the hour, and went to find the thing.

It stood on a shelf between a barometer that had once belonged to a bishop and a stuffed loris with glass eyes, a brass casket some sixty centimetres in length, forty in height, its face a single dial marked not in hours but in names — hundreds of them, engraved in a hand so fine I required my glass to read a single line: Héloïse D., milliner, aged 24, disposition sanguine. Beneath the dial, a second ring of smaller apertures showed numerals climbing and falling as the gears beneath turned; and as I watched, the hand crossed Héloïse D. and the numeral beneath her fell from 88 to 61 to 40, dropping three full points in the space of a held breath, though no force that I could discover had touched the case.

"She has broken off the correspondence, monsieur," said a voice behind me. "The engine feels it before she has finished writing the letter."

I turned to find a small, quick-eyed man in a coat too fine for the dust of that gallery, one Étienne Roque, self-styled restorer of curiosities, who had — as I learned within the half-hour and regretted within the week — installed himself in the Depository some months prior under an arrangement with the porter that no committee had sanctioned.

"The engine," I said, "cannot feel anything. It is brass and spring steel."

"Then explain to me, monsieur le savant, why the numbers move."

I could not, not then. I set myself instead to the mechanism's anatomy, as I had been trained: first the case, of Lyonnais manufacture judging by the hallmark; then the movement, a going-barrel train of unusual reduction, some forty-one wheels where four would serve an ordinary clock; then the escapement, which I confess held me an hour by itself, for it was cut to release not forward against a spring's unwinding but backward against a spring's winding-up, so that the whole engine ran, as it were, downhill toward a beginning rather than uphill toward an end. Its motive force, I later determined by weighing the mainspring's unwound length against its wound, was sufficient for one hundred and forty years of continuous retrograde motion, provided it was rewound — forward, absurdly — every ninth day.

"It was built," Roque offered, with the particular warmth of a man about to ask for money, "by a clockmaker of the Faubourg who kept a ledger of every woman who answered his advertisement in the Petites Affiches — her age, her means, her temper, the colour of her ribbon. He rated each on a scale to one hundred and built the engine to keep the sum, so he need not trust his own poor heart in the matter."

"An advertisement," I repeated.

"A printed circular, monsieur, offering himself in marriage to whichever lady of quality cared to reply, with particulars of his income and his habits set down for comparison, precisely as a shipping-agent lists his tonnage and his ports of call."

I own that I set down my glass at this. I had catalogued flying-machines that would not fly and submarine boats that would not submerge; I had never catalogued a heart reduced to a manifest. Yet here the thing lay, ticking its arithmetic backward through a hundred and forty years of banked affection, each courtship entered as a numeral and each numeral now unwinding, degree by degree, toward the innocence of its first, unwritten hour.

"And why," I asked, "does it run backward at all?"

Roque smiled the smile of a man who has been waiting three months for exactly that question, and named, without a blush, a sum in francs that would have shamed the bishop's barometer.

"Because, monsieur," said he, "the clockmaker discovered, on the morning of his own wedding, that he had rated the wrong woman highest — and built the engine to run in reverse, so that he might watch, at his leisure, precisely where his arithmetic had failed him."

The dial ticked once more. Héloïse D. fell to thirty-eight.

"""
I resolved, then and there, to stay until it reached zero.
"""

The numeral, however, seemed in no hurry to oblige me: it held at thirty-eight for the better part of an hour, which I confess unsettled me more than any swifter fall; a mechanism, like a fever, is honest only when it moves. I employed the interval usefully. I measured the case's width against the shelf, established that it had not been fixed there but merely set, weighed the whole at eleven kilograms by lifting one corner against my luggage-scale, and noted in my pocket-book that the hallmark I had taken for Lyonnais manufacture bore, under the glass, a second and fresher stamp — that of a locksmith in the Passage des Panoramas, no more than four years established.

"Monsieur Roque," I said, "this casket was not built under the Empire. It was built, or at the least refitted, within the decade."

He had, by then, procured from somewhere a paper of roasted chestnuts and was eating them with the frank appetite of a man who considers scholarship a spectator sport. "The movement is old," he said, around a mouthful, "the case is new. A clock, like a coat, may be relined."

"And the ledger of names? Sixty women, entered in a single hand, the ink unfaded?"

"The clockmaker's daughter continued his labour. A pious undertaking."

"Monsieur, the ink is not faded because the ink is recent."

I own that I took some satisfaction in his silence, brief as it was; a pedant's small triumphs are the only wages his trade affords. I opened the back plate — a matter of four screws, none of them older than my own boots — and found, beneath the going-train I had so lately admired, a second and lesser mechanism unknown to horology: a balance-scale no larger than a spectacle-case, its pans connected by silk thread to the numeral-wheel, so contrived that whatever was laid upon the left pan turned the number down, and whatever was laid upon the right turned it up. Beside the scale, in a drawer scarcely two centimetres deep, lay a sheaf of letters, the topmost signed Héloïse D., dated not to any Imperial October but to the Tuesday preceding my own, the ink of the postmark still faintly violet with the chemist's aniline.

"You have been weighing them," I said. "Her letters. Literally weighing them, and calling the grains her disposition."

"I weigh nothing that is not on the pan, monsieur. If a woman writes generously of herself, the pan falls; the arithmetic is hers, not mine."

"And when a suitor pays you to place his rival's letter upon the wrong pan?"

Here Roque did at last colour, a fact I record with the same coolness I should give to a thermometer, for I had by then ceased to feel astonishment and begun to feel only the mild, procedural disgust of a man auditing a ledger and finding the columns doctored. He had, I established over the following twenty minutes — through the simple expedient of turning out every drawer in the case while he protested, then fell silent, then finally sat upon the bishop's barometer's crate and ate the last of his chestnuts in the manner of a man conceding a hand of cards — placed an advertisement of his own composing in three respectable gazettes, promising a gentleman of means and antique family who would rank his correspondents by an infallible mechanical philosophy inherited from a vanished age; charged each lady two francs for the privilege of a reading; and charged, additionally, any gentleman jealous of his standing a further sum to have his own name entered on the favourable pan. The backward ticking that had so moved my scholar's heart was nothing more than the ordinary forward motion of an ordinary scale, read, by an ordinary trick of the dial's engraving, in reverse — so that a rising fortune showed as a falling numeral, and a falling numeral, to the credulous eye of a horologist half in love with his own wonder, resembled nothing so much as time walking home the way it had come.

I will not pretend the deflation was without its ache. I had wanted, for one afternoon, an engine that felt; I got instead an engine that counted, and a rogue who had counted upon my wanting it. There is an economy in that exchange which I set down here without further comment.

What remained was procedure, and procedure I performed. I removed the letters, sealed them for return to their authors under the Depository's own frank; I entered the casket in the general catalogue under its true date and true trade — matrimonial calculator, illicit, Paris, current manufacture — striking out the fanciful attribution to the Faubourg clockmaker, whom I have since satisfied myself never existed outside Roque's chestnut-scented eloquence; and I informed the porter, in writing, that Monsieur Étienne Roque's arrangement with the Depository was, from that Tuesday forward, at an end.

The dial, relieved at last of its silk-threaded burden, came to rest, as any honest scale will when both pans are emptied, at the numeral fifty — the exact and undramatic mean of all possible fortunes. I closed the case at eleven minutes past six, noted the hour in my book beside the hour of my arrival, and went home along the Rue Vaugirard under a sky giving nothing but its ordinary, unengraved dark.