JUST AS MUCH as I love stone, I also love sundials and I love that the author of this piece went in search of some with her husband in Paris. I’ve seen two that she mentions, and I intend to track down the others, but not mentioned here is one of my favorites, at 19 rue du Cherche-Midi. It is actually a stone bas-relief of a man with a beard holding a tablet of a sundial. On the other side of the tablet, helping to hold it up, is a cupid. The man’s right hand has come to rest at a spot where the line for noon and the figure XII are missing, and the inscription below this reads, “Je Cherche Midi” (I seek noon). One description I’ve read explains that this is a reference to the Italian hours, which were once counted from sunset to sunset, and an allusion to the phrase “chercher midi à quatorze heures.” The phrase implies that to waste time in a ridiculous venture is to seek the impossible: though the hour of noon might fall at sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen o’clock depending on the hour of sunset and the time of year, it could never be at fourteen in Paris due to its northern latitude. The rue du Cherche-Midi has had this name since 1595, likely due to the sundial.
SUSAN ALLPORT is the author of The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love (Crown, 2000), A Natural History of Parenting (Harmony, 1997), and Sermons in Stone: the Stone Walls of New England and New York (Norton, 1990), among others. She contributed this piece to the travel section of the New York Times.
I CAN’T IMAGINE that the Musée Carnavalet in Paris sells too many copies of the book Cadrans solaires de Paris—Sundials of Paris—an inventory of more than one hundred of the city’s sundials. But when it sold one to my husband, David, he was immediately hooked. And so David and I began tracking down these timekeepers of old when we celebrated our twentyfifth wedding anniversary in February 2002, continuing the mission in January the following year.
There are many ways to look at Paris—through its architecture, history, museums, cafés, or street life. Sundials are one of the most esoteric. But somehow it was fitting to be thinking about time on an anniversary that few would ever count on celebrating. Moreover, searching for sundials required skills of each of us: my husband’s excellent sense of direction and my high school French, which allowed us to make sense of the tome that was our guide.
As I discovered when I sallied out alone to revisit a nearby sundial and found myself walking in confused circles—or as David discovered when he arrived at the location of a sundial to learn that access required written authorization—we both were absolutely necessary for this hunt, a mutual dependence that is reflective (but that we often chafe at!) of the rest of our life.
And a hunt it was, a citywide scavenger hunt, taking us to places we would not otherwise have gone: a corner of the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden in the fifth arrondissement where the architect, Edme Verniquet, had placed a folly of a sundial within a maze on top of a hill; or the center of the Place de la Concorde, where we saw from the bronze lines radiating out into the busy roundabout and from the numerals embedded into the sidewalks that the obelisk, transported from Egypt in 1833, had been transformed by the French into the gnomon of a giant sundial, a project that was started in 1939, then abandoned during the war and never completed.
David loved this part of the business, finding our quarry, in which I felt like a small, obedient child, clueless as to where I was heading. But even I was taken by the Alice in Wonderland aspect of the sundial at the Hôtel de Sully in the Marais, examined on our second visit. We entered the building, the home of the Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings Commission, from the busy rue Saint-Antoine and walked through one courtyard into a quieter, interior courtyard with a lovely parterre garden. Then, after viewing the simple sundial on the handsome seventeenth-century rear façade, we popped into the Place des Vosges through a small door in the garden’s outside wall. Without this excuse of a sundial, we might never have discovered this delightful shortcut through the Marais.
Without question, however, the sundials themselves are fascinating, and many are inscribed with such apt reflections on the nature of time that they were worth seeking out for those snippets of truth alone. One might already be familiar with the inscription on top of the recently regilded sundial in the center court of the Sorbonne, Sicut Umbra Dies Nostri—Our Days Pass Like a Shadow—but standing below that dial as the shadow of its style moves slowly from one Roman numeral to the next really does give one that feeling.
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 by Salvador Dalí in 1968. At first, we walked right by this blue-eyed girl with her flaming eyebrows and simple gnomon, but then we remembered to lever le nez, as our book says—look up—and this charming face told us her time.