For on 20 September 1793 Gilbert Romme, a mathematician and a man little known among the revolutionaries, who at the time the Bastille was stormed had been escorting a Russian count through Europe as his tutor, addressed the National Convention on the era of the republic. Time, he said, was opening a new chapter of history; and he added that among all peoples the calendar had been a powerful talisman, by which priests bound to themselves the great crowd of feeble minds. And so, as the same writer tells it, years from 1792 were to be counted as "years of the republic", and the year was ordered to begin on 22 September, the day in 1792 when the republic was proclaimed and the equinox fell together; the seven-day week was abolished, and ten-day decades put in its place.

But that calendar never fully took hold. The country people, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reports, clung to the old Christian calendar, since it promised more feast days. Napoleon, once he had seized power, restored the old calendar. Romme himself did not see it: he had died two years after his speech.

I once undertook to sing the seasons of Latium arranged through the year with their causes, and I asked two-faced Janus why the year begins in the cold and not in spring. The German writer gives a simple cause, and a Roman one: on the Kalends of January the consuls entered office, and from that day the nations still celebrate the new year. He recalls too that Caesar introduced the leap days, Augustus corrected them, and Pope Gregory perfected them in 1582, so that two summer months still bear their names. But mark the difference. Caesar forced the calendar to obey the sky, because it had wandered away from it; Romme ordered the calendar to serve a faction; those who move the hours twice a year want the sun itself to obey the clock.

I think of Phaethon, whom I sang in my poem of changing forms: he begged his father the Sun for the chariot, could not hold the horses, set the earth on fire, and was struck down by Jupiter's thunderbolt. He was a boy who believed the light would shift its rising and setting at his command. Our regulators of the hours are more modest, I grant: they ask not for the whole chariot but for a single hour, and they burn no lands; they only upset the sleep of infants and the milking of cows. Yet what they ask is the same: that the day should rise not from the sun but from a decree.

And this is what the learned men of Paris never grasped. A calendar is a reckoning not of numbers but of gifts: it gives the people feast days, rites and leisure. The countryman counts holidays, not decades; take his day of rest from him, and you may promise him the equinox, reason and a new age in vain. Numa, when he wished to tame the fierce Romans, did not change the hours; he added rites and feast days, and so his calendar outlasted the centuries, while Romme's barely lasted a decade. Romme accused the priests of binding minds with the calendar; yet the common people stayed bound to it because that calendar fed them with holidays. Let whoever would rule the year first learn to give a holiday.

What, then, is to be done? First we must ask who gains from shifting the hour twice a year, which the paper does not say; then, if no one answers well, let the clocks be given back to the sun and left in peace for good. A magistrate who longs to be remembered in the calendar should add a holiday, not steal an hour. For the rest, I console myself with the words of Pythagoras: all things change, nothing perishes. The hour snatched in spring returns in autumn, like Proserpina from the shades; it never dies, though it is often harried. If only those who harry it would at last understand that the sun has never read a decree.