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Updated: May 19, 2025
The door yielded under the blows, and a dishevelled, haggard, ill-clothed man appeared. "My father!" cried Gerande. It was Master Zacharius. "Where am I?" said he. "In eternity! Time is ended the hours no longer strike the hands have stopped!" "Father!" returned Gerande, with so piteous an emotion that the old man seemed to return to the world of the living.
It was in the midst of this stagnation that Master Zacharius invented the escapement, which enabled him to obtain a mathematical regularity by submitting the movement of the pendulum to a sustained force. This invention had turned the old man's head. Pride, swelling in his heart, like mercury in the thermometer, had attained the height of transcendent folly.
The old servant, literally delighted with the word, though she did not understand it, swore by her holy patron saint that the whole town should hear it within a quarter of an hour. Master Zacharius found it difficult to calm her; but made her promise to keep on this subject a silence which she never was known to observe.
His eyes glittered with a supernatural fire, and his pride illumined every feature. And truly, if ever vanity was excusable, it was that of Master Zacharius! The watchmaking art, indeed, down to his time, had remained almost in its infancy.
The best workers in Geneva readily recognized his superiority, and showed that he was an honour to the town, by saying, "To him belongs the glory of having invented the escapement." In fact, the birth of true clock-work dates from the invention which the talents of Zacharius had discovered not many years before.
"Master," said he, "this can only come from the wear of the pivots and gearing." "Do you want, then, to kill me, little by little?" replied Master Zacharius passionately. "Are these watches child's work? Was it lest I should hurt my fingers that I worked the surface of these copper pieces in the lathe? Have I not forged these pieces of copper myself, so as to obtain a greater strength?
So saying, he stretched out his hands towards his two children, who were thus united at his death-bed. But soon Master Zacharius lifted himself up in a paroxysm of rage. The words of the little old man recurred to his mind. "I do not wish to die!" he cried; "I cannot die! I, Master Zacharius, ought not to die! My books my accounts!
The snow raged around them, and mingled its white flakes with the froth of the swollen torrents. As they passed the chapel erected in memory of the massacre of the Theban legion, they hurriedly crossed themselves. Master Zacharius was not to be seen. At last the village of Evionnaz appeared in the midst of this sterile region.
"Master, may I not speak with you a few moments?" "Who are you?" asked the watchmaker abruptly. "A colleague. It is my business to regulate the sun." "Ah, you regulate the sun?" replied Master Zacharius eagerly, without wincing. "I can scarcely compliment you upon it.
She thought that it might give some vitality to his dying soul; but the dogmas of faith and humility had to combat, in the soul of Master Zacharius, an insurmountable pride, and came into collision with that vanity of science which connects everything with itself, without rising to the infinite source whence first principles flow.
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