Quartier de l’Horloge: Clockwatching in the Paris Third

Did you know it’s impossible to kill time in Paris? In the literal sense, that is. The whimsical proof can be found on the pedestrian rue Bernard-de-Clairvaux in the 3rd arrondissement. There, at every hour between 9 am and 10 pm, a life-size brass fellow, known only as the Defender of Time, raises his double-edged sword and battles fierce brass beasts who would destroy the clock he guards. Aided by electronic programming, the Defender and his shield consistently ward off a crab, a dragon and a bird, symbols of sea, land and air. Respective sound effects, designed to enhance each one-on-one confrontation, are of rough seas, an earthquake, and hurricane-force winds.

This brass-and-steel spectacle looms just around the corner from the Centre Pompidou in the Quartier de l’Horloge. The best times to see the Defender in action are at noon, 6 pm and 10 pm, when all three opponents attack him at once. In daylight, you’ll probably be standing among a crowd of children ready to cheer as the brawny hero makes short work of his adversaries. But be on time. The conflict takes place just seconds before a gong announces the hour.

It took creator Jacques Monastier four years to complete the tableau in the late 1970s. Overall, it stands 13 feet tall and weighs a ton. At each hour other than noon, 6 and 10, the Defender engages in those less demanding one-on-one struggles. The animal he will fight is chosen at random electronically. Mechanism on the Defender activates all combat. Hidden within the quartz clock itself are several timers and tape recorders. The fanciful project was inaugurated on October 8, 1979 by French President Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris.

Granted, Time may be indestructible, but it did freeze temporarily in January of 1910, when floods washed over the banks of the Seine and filled the compressed-air plant that controlled the public clocks. It caused all 500 of them to read 10:50 for several days until the electricity was restored. To the dismay of Paris historians, only a small fraction of the clocks that served the public then exist or operate today. This is not to suggest they were like the clock English poet John Dryden described as “worn out with eating time.” The fact is many venerable timepieces were eliminated when old city buildings were torn down in the name of progress; others came to a standstill because the city tired of repairing them. Nonetheless, some interesting clocks remain—not only to tell the hour, but also to fire the imagination of tourists with a sense of history. On the Ile de la Cite two clocks within steps of each other are time-honored examples.

The Tour de l’Horloge, one of four towers in the Palais de Justice complex overlooking the Seine, holds Paris’s first public clock, installed in 1334. Original carvings by artist Germain Pilon still grace the dial, but the sculptured tapestry that surrounds the timepiece has been renovated over the centuries to include fleurs-de-lis, rams, angels and royal shields. Mercifully, the clock’s silver bell was silenced in 1789 and melted down a few years later during the Reign of Terror. Until the French Revolution, the bell had announced each royal birth and death by pealing continuously for 72 hours. Two centuries before that, it was one of a handful of city bells used to sound the alarm for the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. From morning to nightfall on August 24, 1572, an estimated 31,000 Huguenots were savagely murdered by rampant Catholic mobs, pawns in a power play of the queen mother, Catherine de Medici.

Half a block away on the Boulevard de Palais, behind a gilded portal gate guarded by gendarmes, a blue-faced clock with an equally elaborate sculpted backdrop towers almost unnoticed over the Palais de Justice courtyard. It was to this cobbled quadrangle, known as the Cour de Mai, that Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton and other Reign of Terror unfortunates were dragged from their fetid cells in the Palais prison and herded onto tumbrils. The wooden carts carried them past taunting tricoteuses (women knitters) to their final earthly destination: the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine awaited.

Across the Seine in the 5th arrondissement, another ticking witness to historic revolt adorns the lateral façade of the 17th-century Eglise de la Sorbonne. This chapel, closed to the public except on rare occasions, is a virtual monument to Cardinal Richelieu, the champion of French absolutism. The building’s Romanesque dome clock, which rests directly beneath the cartouche bearing Richelieu’s coat of arms, overlooks the University’s main courtyard. In May of 1968, the clock ticked like a time bomb as students protesting everything from the Vietnam War to inflexible Bourgeois values to overcrowded conditions at the University rallied below it. About 400 people were injured in the insurgency that followed. The students clashed with police, then went on to loot and vandalize Left Bank neighborhoods.

During the first 39 years of the 20th century, railway travelers going to and from the southwest of France could not use “I didn’t realize what time it was” as an excuse for missing a train. All they had to do was look up at the resplendent gold-framed clock dominating the Gare d’Orsay’s glass-roofed atrium. Unfortunately, in 1939 the belle époque station became an anachronism. It wasn’t geared for electrification and its platforms could not accommodate the new, longer trains, so it ceased operations as a central terminus. In the two decades that followed, Orsay housed post-Liberation prisoners of war, served as the stage for live theater, and became the setting for Orson Welles’ 1962 film production of Kafka’s “The Trial.”  In 1971, it was proclaimed a national historic monument. But not until eight more years had passed was a trio of architects chosen to convert the vast station to the Musee d’Orsay. Its grand atrium clock retained, the interior became the unrivaled showplace for mid-to-late 19th-century and early 20th-century art, consisting mainly of sculptures, the classic canvases of the French Impressionists, and a variety of decorative arts. In 1986, the then French head of state, Francois Mitterand, presided over the museum’s inauguration. Today, among Paris museums, it is second only to the Louvre as a tourist draw. Of course, the first thing visitors see as they enter the sculpture-studded ground floor is that magnificent old clock. 

The atrium ticker is not without its outdoor rivals, however. Imposing twin clocks on set 150 feet apart from each other on Orsay’s Seine-side façade may be the most highly visible clocks in the city. From a tourist-laden riverboat or from the Louvre or the Tuileries across the river, it’s easy to read these original timepieces. What’s more, because both are unfailingly accurate, you can set your watch by them.

If clock history has your brain on overload, fall back on your sense of humor. Head for the 8th arrondissement, where, in 1985, the noted assemblage artist Arman installed a kooky sculpture just outside the front entrance of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Be prepared to smile at a haphazard arrangement of about 50 odd-sized black clocks with white faces piled 12 feet high on top of one another, each set for a different time of day. Smile again when you read the egalitarian inscription on the base: “L’heure de tous (Time of day for everyone).

* Quartier de l’Horloge: rue Bernard de Clairvaux, 3rd; Tour de l’Horloge: Quai de l”Horloge, 1st; Cour de Mai: 4 Boulevard de Palais, 1st; Eglise de la Sorbonne; rue de la Sorbonne, 5th; Musee d’Orsay: 1 rue de Bellechasses (at Quai Anatole-France), 6th; and Gare Saint-Lazare: rue Interieure, 8th.