Here is the very rare first version of the famous "Ulysses" clock, made around 1810 under the Empire. This model will be slightly modified during the Restoration, the enamelled dial giving way to its descendant in bronze representing a shield.
 This charismatic and imposing pendulum designed entirely in patinated bronze and yellow marble from Siena presents the mythological hero Ulysses in contemplation or meditative reflection, on the island of Calypso.
 The bronze sculpture captures with perfection the moment determining the most important choice in the life of the hero Ulysses (which I will tell you a little below).
 Ulysses seated, leaning on his lance, his sword resting on the terminal on which is inscribed an enamelled dial signed by Lepinte, successor of Mugnier, watchmaker to King Louis XVI. Master watchmaker active from the end of the 18th century until the beginning of the Restoration.
 The base decorated with bas-relief in patinated bronze representing helmets decorated with owls, spears and laurels, attributes of the goddess Athena (Minerva), great protector of Odysseus.
 The feet in the shape of owls and snakes.
 All the bronzes demonstrate a very high quality work.
 Revised watchmaking, in perfect working order.
 NB: The enamelled dial is being restored and will be delivered in mid January so that this magnificent clock is in the perfect condition it deserves.

 History of this very beautiful sculpture:

 Let us recall the plot of the story described by Homer in the Odyssey: Ulysses, after many adventures, is retained for ten years by the nymph Calypso, daughter of Okeanos and Tethys, on the island of Ogygia (which the authors place in the western Mediterranean and that some have identified as the peninsula of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar). The nymph who fell in love with him longs to marry him and keeps him captive with her spells in an enchanting garden. Unable to return home to Ithaca to find his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, Ulysses despairs of seeing his home one day and languishes, indifferent to Calypso's requests.
 The latter offering him, if he agrees to remain near her, to make him immortal and to remove old age and death from him forever.
 And this is where this magnificent sculpture takes on its full meaning:
 Like a god, he will live in his immortal company, in the permanent radiance of young age: never to die, not to know the decrepitude of aging, such is the stake of the love shared with the goddess. But, in the bed of Calypso, there is a price to pay for this escape beyond the borders which limit the common human condition.
 To share divine immortality in the arms of the nymph would be, for Ulysses, forfeiting his career as an epic hero. By no longer appearing as a model of endurance.
 In the text of an Odyssey which sings its trials, he should accept to be erased from the memory of men to come, to be dispossessed of his posthumous fame, to sink, even eternally alive, into the night of oblivion. : fundamentally, an obscure and anonymous immortality, like the anonymous death of those humans who have not been able to assume a heroic destiny and who form in Hades the indistinct mass of "nameless".
 The Calypso episode sets up, for the first time in our literature, what can be called the heroic refusal of immortality.

 Empire period.

 -A copy of this clock is kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
 -Model, later represented in "la pendule française" by Tardy on page 372.

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