Mantel clock (pendule de cheminée) ca. 1783 Designed by François Joseph Belanger French Capturing daily life in the French capital on the eve of the Revolution, the playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) observed in Tableau de Paris: Every chimney-piece has its clock; a pity, I think; a dismal fashion. Nothing is more dreary to contemplate than a clock; you watch your life ebbing, the pendulum ticks off each second that is yours only as it passes, and then is yours no more. Clocks are everywhere, in every room you see them, and apparently nobody finds them disturbing, though they mark most mercilessly the flight of the hours; clocks like little temples, or with domes of gilded bronze, or perhaps globes of white marble, with figures running round like an equator... Luxury has run the whole gamut of imagination in devising these superfluous splendours, it can go no further; and since they are quite useless, and not even pleasing to the eye, the waste of money in such futile expe