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Abstract
Much disparity exists among the metronome marks derived from the tempo numbers for early eighteenth-century French time devices. While some are reasonable, others are implausibly rapid. A newly discovered source, which offers both Raoul Auger Feuillet’s numbers for various forms and a drawing of the pendulum device for which they were intended, solves the mystery of the conflicting numbers. Because only a clockwork mechanism can measure fractions of seconds, his numbers had to measure pendulum lengths (the simpler and most frequent form of measurement). A comparison of his numbers with those for the same dance forms from the two sources with consistently extreme tempos indicates an almost exact correlation when all are measured according to pendulum length, instead of the presumed sixtieths of a second.