This is the story of a newspaper whose editorial conference spans years.
His pace of publication is rather peaceful.
It only hits newsstands once every four years.
“The Sapper’s Candle”
is a very curious periodical.
Even rarer, its supplement is only intended to appear on February 29, which falls on a Sunday.
Every 28 years.
Suffice to say that the subscription does not cost much.
Until recently, it was possible to subscribe for an entire century, for the modest sum of 100 euros.
You would have received by post, dear readers, all the issues up to 2100. 2100, in this regard, will also be a special year.
New generations will be able to boast of experiencing an unusual event, and of putting into practice one of the elements of the Gregorian reform which has been lying dormant in manuscripts for half a millennium.
To discover
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Let's go back a little.
At the center of the Gregorian reform sits a pope, Gregory XIII.
As the gap widens between the Julian calendar and the solar calendar, a delay of thirteen days must be made up.
The pontiff chooses to cut straight to the chase, deletes ten entire days, and causes Saint Teresa of Avila to die on October 15 on paper, while she really dies on October 4 or 5, 1582, a night now ghostly in the diary Spanish.
Also read: The unusual history of the Gregorian calendar
A second problem arises, even more thorny.
The gap is made up, either, because by keeping the same count of minutes and hours the same, the hiatus between solar and calendar years necessarily risks starting again with a vengeance.
The second point of the Gregorian reform is therefore the following.
Gregory XIII decides to now attribute 365 days, and not 366, to three out of four years of transition from one century to the next.
The gap will certainly widen, but will be closed at regular intervals.
Every four hundred years.
The years 2000 and 2400 are leap years.
And these only.
The year 2100 will therefore not be a leap year and the month of February will not have a 29th day.
Before the sixth calendar
Contrary to what is often said, the principle of the leap year is not a discovery of Gregory XIII.
But he simply came up with the brilliant idea of keeping just one every four years of the change of century.
The word
“leap year”
goes back further.
It is borrowed from the Latin
“bisextilis”
, dating from the 4th century and itself coming from
“bisextus”
.
Let's anticipate the smirks.
Nothing to do here with bisexuality.
The word means
“twice sixth”
.
What is this number six doing here?
The day intercalated every four years in the Julian calendar was the sixth day before the calends of March and doubled that day.
Superstitious minds quickly feared him.
This exceptional day has been considered a day of misfortune since Roman times, a sort of Friday the 13th which would return periodically.
It is also interesting to note that the Latin root also gave rise to a now obsolete word, that of
“bissêtre”
.
It designates misfortune, misfortune.
" Well !
Don't see my mad master!
“He’s going to give us yet another bissêtre
,” we find under the pen of Molière.
The Decree of Canopus
We actually find this principle of an intercalary day, of a
“leap day”
as it was called then, as early as Julius Caesar.
It was the emperor himself who, in 45 BC, called on the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria to resolve an already blatant discrepancy.
This Greek is then inspired by an Egyptian method.
It is based on a decree engraved on a stele during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy III in 238 BC, the stone of Canopus, near Alexandria.
It is in fact the decision that she acts, decreed by an assembly of Egyptian priests, in hieroglyph, demotic and Greek – like the Rosetta Stone – which establishes the principle of an intercalary day every four years.
In the Egyptian calendar, all months have 30 days.
Five “epagomenal” days, that is to say additional days, are added, which correspond to the birth of the five gods, Osiris, Horus the Elder, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.
Days during which fate is not in favor of mortals.
The decree of Canopus adds a sixth.
Bad luck charm or symbol of hope, who will decide?
A proverb wisely recommends to
“have no fear of the leap year, but of the one before and the one after”
.
As for the day itself, it fuels all the most astonishing fantasies and traditions.
There is an Irish custom, probably legendary, which encourages or at least authorizes women to propose to a man themselves.
According to tradition, Saint Bridget negotiated with Saint Patrick this reversal of the matrimonial initiative.
A 13th century law very seriously threatens recalcitrant men to offer a gift, twelve pairs of gloves, to the rejected woman.