"Master Zacharius, or the clockmaker who lost his soul" (French: Maître Zacharius ou l’horloger qui avait perdu son âme) is an 1854 short story by Jules Verne. The story, an intensely Romantic fantasy, is a Faustian tragedy about an inventor whose overpowering pride leads to his downfall. On a small island in the middle of the Rhone within the town of Geneva, in an era "before new and regular buildings were constructed on this island," the clockmaker Master Zacharius lives with his daughter Gerande, his apprentice Aubert Thun, and his elderly servant Scholastique. Zacharius is celebrated throughout France and Germany for having invented the escapement, and is fiercely proud of his successes. When the story opens, he is troubled by an inexplicable mystery: for several days, all of the many clocks he has made and sold have begun to suddenly stop, one by one. Unable to fix any of them or to find a reason for the phenomenon, Zacharius falls into mental torment and becomes seriously ill. As he begins to think that his soul exists in the clocks that he created, Zacharius is wildly driven to preserve the only operable piece that remains - in hopes of achieving immortality.
Author
Novels of French writer Jules Gabriel Verne, considered the founder of modern science fiction, include Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). This author who pioneered the genre. People best know him for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before people invented navigable aircraft and practical submarines and devised any means of spacecraft. He ranks behind Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie as the second most translated author of all time. People made his prominent films. People often refer to Verne alongside Herbert George Wells as the "father of science fiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules\_V...
