CHAPTER III
A STRANGE VISIT
POOR Gerande would have lost her life with that of her father, had it not been for the thought of Aubert, who still attached her to the world. The old watchmaker was, little by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and human existence seemed to have departed from him. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the hostile rumors which had spread concerning his labors.
The news of the strange derangements which his watches betrayed had a prodigious effect upon the master clockmakers of Geneva. What signified this sudden inertia of their wheels, and why these strange relations which they seemed to have with the old man's life? These were the kind of mysteries which people never contemplate without a secret terror. In the various classes of the town, from the apprentices to the great lords who used his watches, there was no one who could not himself judge of the singularity of the fact. The citizens wished, but in vain, to penetrate to Master Zacharius. He fell very ill; and this enabled his daughter to withdraw him from incessant visits, which thereupon degenerated into reproaches and recriminations.
Medicines and physicians were powerless in presence of this organic wasting away, the cause of which could not be discovered. It sometimes seemed as if the old man's heart had ceased to beat; then the pulsations were resumed with an alarming irregularity.
A custom existed, in those days, of submitting the works of the masters to the judgment of the people. The heads of the various corporations sought to distinguish themselves by the novelty or the perfection of their productions, and it was among these that the condition of Master Zacharius excited the most lively, because most interested, commiseration. His rivals pitied him the more willingly, the less he was to be feared. They never forgot the old man's success, when he exhibited his magnificent clocks with moving figures, his striking watches, which provoked the general admiration, and commanded such high prices in the cities of France, Switzerland, and Germany.
Meanwhile, thanks to the constant and tender care of
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