The clock in Christian's bedroom

The clock in Christian's bedroom is more than a marker of the hour: its arrow-shaped hands connect Bénédicte's archery to the afternoon she spends with Christian, and its reading of 6:10 becomes a recurring, private act of remembrance. First part of the bedroom's furnishings, it gradually takes on a more intimate significance, measuring both the happiness of the encounter and the return of ordinary time and family duty.

Setting and Appearance

The clock stands on a dresser beneath the gaze of a large, dense, dark seventeenth-century oil portrait of a cleric. Around it are a bronze nude and perfume bottles. This grouping places a functional household object among images and objects associated with bodies, appearance, and observation: the cleric's portrait overlooks the room, while the clock's hands catch Bénédicte's attention. The scene does not present the timepiece in isolation; its meaning emerges from its position within this charged arrangement.

The hands resemble the arrows Bénédicte has shot, each ending, in her perception, with the sharp shape of a circumflex accent. That visual likeness lets the clock carry an image from elsewhere in her experience into the bedroom. The arrows had belonged to an act of aim and release; here, their shape is fixed on a dial. The clock therefore joins two distinct episodes through an object she can look at, rather than through explanation alone.

The Afternoon at 6:10

Bénédicte notices that the clock has marked 6:10. In the course of the afternoon, that exact reading becomes inseparable from her experience with Christian. The timepiece registers an hour, but the scene makes the hour feel unusually particular: Bénédicte later resolves that each day at 6:10 she will try to look at her watch and think of Christian, the stern cleric in the portrait, and their naked bodies, distant from one another in a mirror. The clock's significance thus extends beyond the bedroom. A glance at her watch will allow her to recall the encounter through a precise time and a cluster of images.

The associations remain strikingly concrete. Her remembrance does not reduce the afternoon to a general feeling of happiness: it holds together Christian, the portrait, and the reflected separation of their bodies. The clock supplies the repeated point of entry into that memory. Its hands, first noticed for their resemblance to arrows, now mark the hour at which the experience can be privately revisited.

A Pause Against Ordinary Obligations

Later, while resting with Christian, Bénédicte looks toward the clock and asks whether the moment has come for it to be truly 6:10. The exchange gives the dial a role in the scene's emotional timing: she is not merely checking the hour but attending to the possibility that the meaningful time of the afternoon has arrived. Christian tells her that it is indeed 6:10, and she asks whether that is really so before he assures her. The brief confirmation makes the exact reading shared between them, even as the clock's significance for her remains tied to her own memory.

The exchange takes place against the knowledge that she is already late. On Thursdays, she is supposed to be home when the children return from school, and they expect their mother and a full refrigerator. She explains that today their mother will be absent and the refrigerator empty. The clock therefore sets the afternoon's happiness beside the domestic schedule she has left unattended. It does not cause her absence or resolve its consequences; it makes the lost hour legible, as 6:10 stands between the bedroom and the home to which she is expected to return.

Memory and Meaning

The clock's importance grows through recurrence rather than any change to the object itself. At first its arrow-shaped hands prompt an association with the arrows Bénédicte has shot; then its 6:10 reading becomes the time she intends to remember daily; finally, she looks at it again and asks whether that moment has arrived. These distinct acts of noticing turn a stationary furnishing into a measure of attention, linking the present scene to future recollection.

That meaning also rests on a contrast. The clock belongs to ordinary measured time, but Bénédicte treats this particular hour as something she might preserve: an hour of happiness that she wants to recognize even while the obligations of home press into the scene. Its hands cannot stop the afternoon or remove the consequences of being late. They can, however, give its memory a precise form. The clock's 6:10 becomes both the sign of an afternoon passing and the hour to which Bénédicte will return in thought.