A couple years ago, I published in French a novel about a watch collector, Une course contre la montre. A few of of you asked for it in English. With some help from AI, here it is, starting today, in a 24-part series.
You can start with the introduction below, or jump further down straight to Chapter 1:
Herbert is a man of precise habits. On the surface, his life is as steady as a Swiss escapement: a stable marriage to Élisa, a teenage son, and a “tame” passion for horology. Over the years, he has carefully orchestrated a collection of twelve timepieces—a consolidated assembly that represents his life’s work and his hard-won domestic peace.
But the gears of his life are about to be thrown into a frantic spin.
The one watch Herbert has hunted for decades—a piece so rare he had long ago abandoned hope of ever seeing it—has suddenly surfaced for sale. It is the ultimate “Grail,” and for Herbert, acquiring it is not an option—it is a necessity.
The price of admission, however, is staggering. To claim it, Herbert must liquidate his entire beloved collection in just over three weeks. As the clock ticks down, he must outmaneuver a powerful rival collector and navigate the secretive, high-stakes Swiss collector world.
With every sale, Herbert risks more than just his watches. He is betting his marriage, his finances, and his sanity on a single prize. In this race against time, Herbert will discover that even the most perfect mechanism has its breaking point.
Chapter 1
Saturday, October 15
Herbert was three or four years old. Perched on his father’s lap, the chronograph within his reach served as his first toy. Pressing the top pusher, he would let the seconds hand sweep for a few moments before bringing it to a dead stop. With the bottom pusher, he sent it flying back to its starting position, which it reclaimed with magical speed. At first, his father’s help was necessary. But after a few months—a year, perhaps—once he had gained sufficient strength and dexterity, Herbert operated the mechanism on his own. He would entertain himself for long stretches before this playful, comforting spectacle of eternal recurrence, around his father’s thick wrist.
Over the years, the childhood game morphed into an adult obsession. Herbert pursued his horological quest like a hand chasing the hours in an endless ritual. Succumbing to the “innumerable faces of time,” as he called them, he devoted the bulk of his energy—and his savings—to quenching his thirst as a collector. Every moment spent thinking about watches, touching them, or talking about them became a sacred interval during which time itself seemed to stand still. Imbued with the belief that these objects on his wrist were alive because the movements within beat like hearts, he pushed his anthropomorphism to the point of kissing them just below the crown whenever the fragile quiver of a sweeping seconds hand or the sweet nostalgia of a patinated dial cast its spell. In these moments of horological intimacy, he simply made sure to remain hidden from the gaze of Elisa, his wife.
Elisa had nothing against watches. But the subject’s grip on her husband gnawed at her. It was as if his very mind were controlled by the gears of the movements he relentlessly wound, scrutinized through a loupe, or listened to with his ear pressed against the case; Herbert was no longer quite himself when it came to his passion. More than any potential rival, it was horology that Elisa perceived as the threat to their marriage. How many times had she been forced to intervene just as Herbert was about to jeopardize the family finances? Beyond the secondary issue of money, it was the time and attention of the family man that this horological whim had gradually confiscated.
Elisa had shown great patience over their two decades together. She had listened to Herbert for hours on end as he detailed the minute differences between two generations of the same model and their profound significance. She had accompanied him to try-ons, purchases, visits to museums and manufactures. She had sacrificed hobbies, trips, and her own desire for jewellery so her husband could afford his latest find—simply because its case, movement, dial, history, provenance, or some other characteristic imperceptible to mere mortals had made it a vital necessity. It never seemed to be enough. Eventually, Elisa began to distance herself from Herbert whenever he was with his watches—which was to say, a good portion of the time. Their union remained sincere, but it was indisputably diluted.
Why did Herbert—a loving husband and father, a man otherwise respectful, simple, and composed—lose all sense of judgment when it came to watches? Didn’t they all tell the same time? Wasn’t that time the same for everyone, an arbitrary invention, a unit of measurement like any other? Did the hours he devoted to watches grant him any real grip on the passage of time? Or was it, on the contrary, a certain way to lose even more of it—“a double indemnity, a slavery where you feed the master,” as Elisa tried, in vain, to make him understand?
Despite the pain Elisa’s own suffering caused him, and his desire to soothe her, Herbert remained deaf to such considerations. His few attempts to tame the obsession all ended in stinging failure. After a day or two of forcing himself not to swap the piece on his wrist, fleeing his collector friends, or avoiding trade magazines, Herbert would relapse harder than ever the moment he approached the box carefully hidden in his desk. Snared by the “soul” he perceived in each piece it sheltered, he felt himself merge with their heartbeat the second he pinched a crown between his thumb and forefinger to wind them, one by one.
Herbert saw his collection as a small family, an extension of his own. Refined over the years, it consisted of a few immovable pillars and transient members—ones adopted for a time and then replaced, sometimes after heartbreaking goodbyes. He knew his twelve “chosen ones” down to the smallest detail: production year, case diameter, lug width, the movement’s frequency, the hairspring material, and the power reserve. He could identify them by the mere sound of their ticking. Some bore witness to ancestral horological art and the eras in which they had been worn; heavy with history, their imperfections made them unique. Others, at the cutting edge of contemporary savoir-faire, represented new heights of aesthetics or function. Various complications—the alarm, the moonphase, the flyback chronograph—served as reminders of the variety of uses and the feats of engineering required to make them possible in such a small tool. What a pity, he thought, that Elisa couldn’t perceive the magic of these objects that gave life to time.
On this brisk autumn morning, sitting before his screen with his lips dipped into a now-tepid coffee, Herbert stopped moving—stopped breathing, almost. His eyebrows, their brown contrasting with the ruddy complexion of his deceptively boyish face, remained arched, frozen by an unexpected revelation: the watch he had coveted for decades was finally within reach. This piece, which would indisputably dethrone the highest in his collection, would be its culmination. It truly earned that word so overused in the collector’s world: the “Grail.”
Setting down his cup, oblivious to the drops clumsily spilled onto his keyboard, Herbert gripped the thin hair that less and less concealed his receding hairline, squinted, and performed a laborious calculation. Deep down, he already knew the result. He could, feasibly, afford this watch. But only at the cost of a sacrifice he had never before envisioned.
Parting with a centerpiece to replace it with another was the norm. At the summit of this pyramid, there was room for only one queen. To demote her to a subordinate role would be unnatural, unbearable; once dethroned, exile was the only way out. But the difficulty lay elsewhere: the departure of the fallen queen was a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Acquiring the ultimate piece would be cruelly demanding. The numbers held a truth Herbert didn’t want to admit: to obtain the watch he desired so much, he would have to part with his entire collection.
Part 2 coming in a few days…
