CZAPEK | Collections - Promenade - L'Écume des Jours

A promenade between water lilies and music. The Promenade L'Écume des Jours features a dial layered in blue enamel, mother-of-pearl and jade, beneath a titanium water-lily seconds hand, and is powered by the Manufacture's Calibre SXH5.1. Limited to just 18 pieces, it draws inspiration from Boris Vian's famous novel L'Ecume des jours, which tells the story of Colin and Chloe, a love story undone by illness and by a world that bends under the weight of its own imagination. Two of the novel's inventions have entered popular culture in their own right: the pianocktail, a piano that creates a cocktail to match the mood of the music played on it, and the water lily that takes root in Chloe's lung-a surreal metaphor for a love as fragile as it is inexorable, and for the illness that ultimately consumes it. Visible through the sapphire caseback, the automatic Calibre SXH5.1 features a variable-inertia balance fitted with four gold inertia-blocks and beating at 4Hz (28,800vph). Power comes from a micro-rotor in recycled 950 platinum. Its seven skeletonised bridges are inspired by François Czapek's nineteenth-century pocket watches, finished with open-worked ratchets, sandblasted black bridges, bevelled angles and straight-grained sides.