The sun would some day regulate itself by my watch

Passepartout’s declaration that the sun would one day regulate itself by his watch is both a comic victory cry and an inadvertent clue to the novel’s final reversal. He treats his inherited watch, stubbornly kept at London time, as more trustworthy than local clocks; yet the very instrument he celebrates cannot show the lost-and-gained day that determines whether Phileas Fogg wins his wager. The saying condenses the story’s contrast between personal conviction and the impersonal arithmetic of global time.

The boast and its occasion

On November 23, aboard the General Grant, Passepartout discovers that his watch agrees with the ship’s chronometers. He has not adjusted its hands. Because he has continued to regard the times of the countries they have crossed as false or unreliable, he takes this coincidence as proof that his watch has been right all along. The discovery delights him, and he imagines how he would have answered Fix, who had previously tried to explain the relation between meridians and time. Passepartout’s boast is the climax of that private argument: “I was sure that the sun would some day regulate itself by my watch!”

The declaration is funny because it reverses the ordinary relation between a clock and the world. Rather than use the sun to correct his timepiece, Passepartout imagines the sun submitting to it. But the joke also belongs to his character’s practical experience of travel: a familiar object seems to offer stability amid unfamiliar places and changing local hours. The watch’s authority, however, rests on his refusal to distinguish the time it preserves from the time observed wherever he happens to be.

The watch against the journey’s schedules

That refusal has already produced a concrete disagreement. Before the party is due to catch a steamer, Passepartout looks at his watch and insists that it is only eight minutes before ten, while another character tells him it is noon. He protests that the watch is a family possession. The exchange gives the later boast a history: his confidence is not born aboard the General Grant but has been tested repeatedly against the practical demands of the itinerary.

The journey itself makes exact time a condition of success. When the feasibility of the eighty-day circuit is challenged on the ground that passengers would have to transfer mathematically from trains to steamers and back again, Fogg accepts the requirement literally. His cool answer turns the timetable into a principle of action. Against this disciplined coordination, Passepartout’s attachment to one fixed time is comic but consequential: a watch can be consistent without telling its owner how local time relates to the schedule he must meet.

The contrast reaches back to Fogg’s domestic routine in London. On October 2, he dismisses James Forster because the shaving water is eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit rather than the required eighty-six. Seated before a complicated clock that displays seconds, days, months, and years, Fogg waits for the precise moment when he customarily leaves Saville Row for the Reform Club. His precision is not a general faith that one clock rules the world; it is a practiced alignment of measurement, habit, and action. The novel sets this exacting routine beside Passepartout’s simpler faith in his inherited watch.

The hidden limit of London time

The supposed vindication aboard the General Grant is deliberately incomplete. The ship has passed the 180th meridian and reached the antipodes of London. Passepartout’s watch shows nine in the morning, but a twenty-four-hour dial would indicate nine in the evening: the twelve-hour face conceals the difference between London time and the time at that meridian. The chronometers’ apparent agreement with his watch therefore does not prove that the sun has yielded to it. It exposes how the watch’s limited display and Passepartout’s interpretation can make a coincidence look like confirmation.

The narrator makes the irony sharper by explaining what Passepartout does not understand. Travelling eastward, Fogg has gained a day without realizing it. Each degree crossed in that direction diminishes the day by four minutes; across the earth’s 360 degrees, those minutes add up to twenty-four hours. While Fogg has seen the sun pass the meridian eighty times, his friends in London have seen it pass seventy-nine times. The difference is not a flaw in a watch but a consequence of circumnavigating the globe eastward.

From comic certainty to the final reversal

Passepartout’s family watch could have disclosed the crucial fact if it had marked days as well as hours and minutes. It keeps London time, but its face does not register the calendar discrepancy that has accumulated during the journey. That limitation makes the watch a precise emblem of partial knowledge: it reliably preserves one measure while remaining unable to reveal the measure that matters most. Passepartout celebrates it at the very moment when its blind spot mirrors the travellers’ failure to notice their extra day.

The saying thus changes its force in retrospect. First it captures Passepartout’s cheerful resistance to explanations he has rejected; later, the watch’s inability to record the days helps explain how Fogg can arrive in London believing the wager’s deadline has passed when he has actually returned a day earlier. Fogg wins, not because his watch or Passepartout’s has mastered the sun, but because the journey’s eastward course has altered the count of days. The boast remains comic, while the ending gives its central object an unexpected narrative importance: the watch cannot make the world conform to its face, yet its very limits help conceal the fact that saves the wager.