l'horloge au centre du monde

This Guardian story (via CT) made me happier than anything I've read in days, perhaps weeks:

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.....

Getting into the building was the easiest part, according to Klausmann. The squad allowed themselves to be locked into the Panthéon one night, and then identified a side entrance near some stairs leading up to their future hiding place. "Opening a lock is the easiest thing for a clockmaker," said Klausmann. From then on, they sneaked in day or night under the unsuspecting noses of the Panthéon's officials.

Read it all. It's marvelous. The authorities managed to be rather churlish about the whole matter, although the horological guerrillas have thankfully escaped legal sanction. I would give them medals. This ardent, clever display of love for a city and its structures--public works as direct-action!--fills me with such joy. And with so many ideas.....

(and the group these intrepid clock-repairers belong to sounds like my kind of secret society: they are "connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since." Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.)