Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [170]
The afternoon dial on the Convent of Mercy on the rue des Archives in the third arrondissement advises Utere Dum Lyceat, to make the most of your time. And at the Palais de Justice, on the side of the building on the Quai des Orfèvres, a bas-relief of Time with his scythe and Justice with her sword and scales proclaims Hora Fugit Stat Jus—The Hour Flees; Justice Stays—a reminder of both the strength and the fragility of the law, given the sham trials that occurred inside this same building during the French Revolution.
Not all the inscriptions are somber. A whimsical blue chicken on a sundial at 4 rue de l’Abreuvoir in Montmartre clucks, “Quand tu sonneras, je chanteray”—“When you ring, I sing,” a humorous reference to the time when chickens were alarm clocks. Sundials ask us to contemplate not only time and its passage, but also when and why humans began to divide time into hours, a development that was not, at first, universally embraced, as the Roman comic playwright Plautus (circa 200 BC) made clear, condemning the man who set up a sundial in the marketplace “to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces.”
Yet surely it was inevitable that humans would associate the movement of shadows with the passing of time, then use those shadows both to understand the earth’s place in the universe (some sundials show the signs of the zodiac and the months of the year) and mark the hours. And inevitable, too, that those who knew the time (the word “gnomon” is derived from a Greek word meaning “one who knows”) would use that knowledge to control the actions of others.
In Paris, the earliest sundials are on churches, where they have long enabled passersby to know the time of prayers. One of the simplest but most dramatic is the noon mark on the fifteenth-century Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont on the rue Clovis in the Latin Quarter. On one of the church’s flying buttresses, it falls like a plumb line from the gargoyle above.
What I found most interesting about sundials, though, came to me only gradually as David and I crisscrossed the city this January. First, there is the fact that it is mighty hard to tell time this way. (And not just because sundials are useless at night.) Three out of four of our days in Paris were cloudy, so no shadows were cast. And many sundials are, by necessity of their locations, either morning or afternoon dials. So even when we had successfully found a dial—and were blessed with the sun—it was often the wrong dial for that time of day.
I don’t know what the Parisians of old did when they happened upon a sundial that was actually “ringing” the hour, but when my husband and I had our first sighting, at the Sorbonne, where an obliging guard had allowed us into the courtyard, we celebrated with a long lunch of céleri rémoulade and steak frites nearby at Le Balzar. We missed out on more sightings that afternoon, but Paris is, after all, much more than the sum of its dials.
Clouds are one reason clocks quickly replaced sundials once clocks became reliable (for hundreds of years the two coexisted because sundials were necessary to check and reset mechanical timepieces). But there’s another, far subtler reason that has to do with accuracy. Sundials, as it turns out, are too accurate for human affairs. They tell the true time, the exact time, as the sun passes overhead. This sounds like a virtue, and it was until people began to travel greater and greater distances in shorter and shorter amounts of time. Then they needed a less exact time, a mean or moyen time, where noon is noon for an entire city or country. Later, they needed a daylight saving time to get the most out of summer’s long days. Clocks and watches can tell these fictional times, inventions of humans for humans, but sundials can’t.
The last sundial we saw on these esoteric visits, perfect for two individuals who hadn’t quite settled yet on a moyen time, was one of our favorites. It was a bas-relief of a girl’s face placed on the side of a building near the Sorbonne at 27 rue Saint-Jacques