by John Biggs
Marie-Antoinette’s Watch
Adultery, Larceny & Perpetual Motion
The 200 year pursuit of history’s greatest tech device
by John Biggs
Dedication
for Joanna
Epigraph
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
— Benjamin Franklin
She’s got Elgin movements / from her head down to her toes.
— Robert Johnson, “Walkin’ Blues”
Chapter 1
Tel Aviv
On hot August days, when the thermostat grazed 94 degrees Fahrenheit by the Mediterranean shoreline, there was little traffic in Zion Yakubov’s little shop on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv. The jumbled store – a small room, really, filled with brass and stonework along with jewelry and other knickknacks popular with the grazing tourist antique hunters – had played host to many treasure seekers over the years. But on this sweltering afternoon in 2006, a woman named Hila Efron-Gabai entered with the promise of treasure.
Efron-Gabai was a lawyer, she explained, with a very interesting proposition. She was eight months pregnant with twins, but she was glowing. She had a thin face, an olive complexion, and a no-nonsense demeanor. Her dark brown hair framed her sharp features, and she had large brown eyes over an open, unlined face. She was charming and seemed used to getting her way.
Zion himself was a proper, older man of about sixty with close-cropped, carefully combed hair, and small oval glasses. When he visited clients or went to examine antiques elsewhere in the city, he carried a small leather satchel, under his armpit. He was a trusted confidant to many rare art dealers and had only been in trouble once, back in 1980, when he was accused of fencing two silver vessels from a nearby synagogue. Nothing came of the accusation, although Zion did spend two nights in jail. He had stayed clear of trouble since, focusing on above-board art sales.
Yakubov was a better breed of the kind of antiques and antiquities sellers found in places like Tel Aviv’s Jaffa flea market, a bustling souk where everything from old jewelry to antique cooking pots were available for sale. Yakubov’s taste was more nuanced, and he owned a number of rare items.
Five of these items — clocks and music boxes — he had loaned to the L.A. Mayer Museum when the family gallery reopened in 1989 after a major theft. These items have resided at the museum for almost two decades, making their small contribution to the museum’s efforts to recapture some of the magic and majesty of an original collection of fine watches that had been stolen twenty years before. But it was coincidental that this very pregnant lawyer was about to involve him in further business with the museum, in what would be one of the strangest deals of his career.
Earlier that month, Hila Efron-Gabai had taken on a client with an unusual request. The client, a woman from America, wanted to return some objects to the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. Her only stipulation was that the return be anonymous. The client explained that her late husband had owned a few boxes of clocks and watches and that, under community property laws (he hadn’t left a will), the boxes were now hers. He had only told her about the boxes late into the yearlong cancer that would eventually kill him, revealing some information that took her breath away: The clocks belonged to the Mayer Museum, and he had stolen them twenty years before.
The client said that she had opened the boxes once, to look inside them, and she knew only that these were “beautiful things” and that they didn’t belong to her.1 “Whatever happens, these things have to be returned to the museum,” the client said. The client said she had no interest in making money, but she did want to remain hidden. She left the boxes with Efron-Gabai, asking her to take care of them.
After the client departed, Efron-Gabai took one of the boxes to a conference room in her firm’s office and placed it on a table. She thought carefully about her next step. She could contact the museum directly, but first she wanted to be sure the clocks and watches were authentic. Her father, Nachum, often visited a well-known art dealer in Tel Aviv, Yakubov, who had sold the family some candlesticks long ago and done repair work on some of the family silver. She called her father, asking for the jeweler’s number, and then she rang Zion Yakubov. She asked that he come in for a consultation on what she would only describe as very unusual pieces. Grudgingly, he agreed.
When collectors and dealers are approached with a secretive deal, they mostly prove to be a dead end. Contrary to the myth of Antiques Roadshow and other one-of-a-kind find television programs, the vast majority of items found in attics and basements are junk. The heady days of treasure picking are past. With the rise of the Internet and eBay, collectors know almost to the penny what anything is worth. Even the dealers at the Tel Aviv antiques market rarely sold anything without knowing its provenance and going price — and whether or not it was genuine. That this lawyer would be harboring anything of great value was a long bet, but Yakubov took it.
He arrived on the afternoon of August 16, 2006, driving up the coast through Tel Aviv’s honking, jammed traffic to Efron-Gabai’s office near crowded Milano Square, a part of town popular with ex-pats and higher-end businesses.
After he sat down, the lawyer began to unpack a box. One after the other, on a wooden conference table, Efron-Gabai laid out a number of the most storied and illustrious clocks and watches Yakubov had ever seen.
Some were in medicine boxes marked with cramped, handwritten care instructions in Hebrew. A bottle of watch oil was included with one, along with a note reading: “These watches are very delicate. Use this oil once a month.” It was as if someone had packed up a collection of old trinkets in preparation for a move. The objects lay haphazardly on the table — millions of dollars in watches spread out like a child’s collection of toy soldiers.
Yakubov knew instantly what he was looking at: This was the missing Salomons collection, nearly complete and surprisingly intact. Efron-Gabai had brought out forty watches to show him, and she now unwrapped one that was in faded, dirty newspaper and covered with a thin patina of grime and oil. It was a piece Yakubov had hardly dared hope he might see. Behind a rock crystal face, a movement that had taken one man and his son forty-four years to create was still awake and alive. It was the 160, Marie-Antoinette’s watch, missing twenty years and now bright day it was finished almost two hundred years earlier. He held in his hands a masterpiece of horology, the most coveted, most storied, and most tragic watch in the world.
He held in his trembling hands the Queen. She had returned.
Chapter 2
Paris
A walker in eighteenth-century Paris, his boots caked with mud and much worse, would not come upon the Place Dauphine by chance. To find the quiet triangle one has to traverse Pont Neuf, or the New Bridge (this, the oldest bridge in the city, was also the first one not covered in houses and shops) onto the island where Paris began: the Île de la Cité. A jog to the left, between two four-story buildings, brings him to a small park with a few stunted trees and a bench or two where men speak furiously over plans and scraps of polished metal. The walker, however, could do no better than to sit listening to the quiet susurration of the the trees and the gentle ting-ting of jewelers’ hammers. It was in this courtyard, he would quickly discover, where the mechanical heart of Paris ticked. It was, in fact, the home to some of France’s most illustrious horologers.
To look at the neighborhood today is to glimpse Paris as it was in the eighteenth century, when the city was “the mother and mistress of all cities.”2 From the far bank of the Seine, standing by the crate-shaped kiosks sel
ling postcards and books and gazing across the river at the northwestern cusp of the Île de la Cité, you see the dark uneven teeth of the housetops and the white stone faces of buildings that have changed little over the centuries. Crossing the bridge you are suddenly in a much older France.
Looming to your left are the once-forbidding walls of the Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie (the palace prison once known as the antechamber to the guillotine), the pepperpot-roofed Bonbec Tower, which served as a torture chamber during the middle ages, and the square, soaring Tour d’Horloge. These fortifications, built in 1215, connect the old part of the Quai de l’Horloge, at the towers, to the more modern fifteenth and sixteenth century homes along the bank. Quai de l’Horloge means Clock Dock.
All of the city’s bureaucratic work has been done here for centuries, and the handsome if overly dramatic clock at the tower’s base — built in 1370 by German horologist Henri de Vic and decorated with weather-faded fleur-de-lis, figures symbolizing justice and piety, and two cherubic angels — would have marked the time for vassals coming to their king and, later, for revolutionaries coming to unseat that selfsame royalty. Today it is stopped, due to disrepair, at sixteen minutes past twelve. Farther down the island, however, things changed. The stomping of judges through empty halls was replaced by the sound of hammers. Couriers carrying dockets were replaced by boys carrying small paper packages of glass. Visiting potentates let their care fall away as they entered the warren of houses on the western tip of the Quai. For it was here that the clockwork heart of Paris — and the world — ticked.
Paris had its quarters dedicated to specific branches of manufacture and commerce. Just as Le Sentier in the 2nd Arrondissement was dedicated to clothing and Place Pigalle was the city’s storied red-light district, so the Clock Dock was home to almost all of Paris’s master watchmakers, opticians, and makers of precision instruments, including pedometers and thermometers. From the front, only a few shops were visible, but the open rectangle the buildings backed onto, the Place Dauphine, was a bustle of activity. Inside the buildings enamelists stoked their forges, goldsmiths hammered their precious metal, and casemakers worked alongside artisans who specialized in the smallest movement components, while runners — apprentices to the watchmakers — darted from shop to shop and factory to factory, picking up parts and placing nearly finished pieces in front of various experts.
The workshops were a maze of machinery, with drill presses and mechanical cutters sitting cheek by jowl beside older machines for toothing gears and polishing the tiny parts that made up a fine watch. There were places on the Quai where a clockmaker could have a bit of gold shaped into a fine curlicue and where a goldsmith could get advice on how best to repair a customer’s shattered crystal. This was a site of constant, percolating exploration where, unlike the jealous members of warring guilds and most scientific salons, communication and sharing were the norm. If one watchmaker was unable to perform some feat of clockwork daring, a ready team of experts was willing to take up the cause and perhaps throw a commission back to the original workshop. The occupants of the Quai were in such close quarters that they had no other choice.
At the height of the late eighteenth century, Paris’s golden era of watchmaking, thousands of craftsmen plied their trade here. They were led by a constellation of masters and among these some of them were considered good enough for the king.
For nearly a century, the French monarchy had been appointing various watchmakers as horloger du roi — official watchmaker to the king — and most of these men kept a shop on the Quai or sourced their material there. For most of the century successive watchmakers maintained the clocks at the various royal residences, making the rounds to wind and clean the timepieces that graced countless mantles and salon walls. By the 1780s, however, these royal watchmakers were more than just common clock winders. They were skilled with metal, enamel, glass, and crystal, and were making some of the most complex artifacts of their day. The Quai was also famous for glasswork and lenses, and the watchmakers often consulted with the astronomers who frequented the other shops, discussing methods for calculating various important days and hours using only clockwork. The watchmakers spent hours together, mulling the problems of the era, from how to achieve perpetual motion (many thought it had something to do with friction, although few could pin down the true meaning of entropy) to understanding the nature of time itself. After all, it was impossible to tell time if it could not be codified and defined, and the horologists of the Clock Dock were more interested in advancing science and industry than supplying simple watches to petty nobles – although their royal commissions were always the most lucrative.
The master watchmakers here included members of the Jaquet-Droz family, from which sprang Pierre Jaquet-Droz, creator of miniature and full-sized automata so fine and esoteric that they would one day be credited as the precursors to modern robots. Each was made from some six thousand parts. Jaquet-Droz built a singing bird that worked by using a series of tiny bellows that blew air into small pipes. When the bird was wound, the clever clockwork blew each pipe in a jaunty sequence, creating a random song. The roboticist’s collection also included erotic timekeepers showing rapturous parties making love in various positions. The most popular with the young men at court often featured staid, religious animations featuring Moses and other Biblical figures on the front and considerably more bawdy animations hidden on the back. He was so accomplished at mimicking living motion that he was often accused of witchcraft.
In one particularly fanciful tale, it was said that Jacquet-Droz made a unique clock for the king of Spain that featured a shepherd and a dog under an apple tree. When the clock struck “the shepherd played six tunes on his flute, and the dog approached and fawned on him.”
Droz said: “The gentleness of my dog is his least merit. If your majesty touches one of the apples which you see in the shepherd’s basket, you will admire the fidelity of this animal.”
When the king touched one of the apples the dog turned and barked so loud that the king’s own — living — dog took to his master’s defense.3
Another prominent watchmaker was Ferdinand Berthoud. He was a portly businessman who wore his hair in a short powdered bob and his stern eyes hid a mischievous love of horological debate. Like Jaquet-Droz, Berthoud also came from Switzerland but instead of automata he focused on some of the more mundane, yet most important, aspects of watchmaking, including the management of friction, shock, and environmental effects. He penned the watchmaking entries in the great Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, and had become horloger du roi when he began his work on the marine chronometer, an accurate clock that could survive rough treatment on the high seas. Making clocks for sailors was a particularly lucrative and difficult undertaking given the harsh conditions, including salt spray and violent rocking in storms, faced by the navies of the age.
Berthoud invented the compensated balance, a small wheel made of multiple metals that would grow and shrink, at equal, countervailing rates, in the heat. This mixture of materials would keep a watch from running more slowly in the tropics, and Berthoud sold his technology to the French Navy, giving France the upper hand at sea. While many manufacturers tried to build similar clocks, sea captains knew that “a bad chronometer is worse than none”4 and Berthoud’s were some of the best simply by dint of their precision and sturdy construction.
Here, too, on the Quai was Jean-Antoine Lépine, a dour, long-faced man with a prominent Roman nose who began as a prodigy from Geneva and then married into watchmaking royalty when he wed the daughter of an horloger du roi named Pierre-Augustin Caron, himself noted for creating a ring-mounted watch for Madame de Pompadour (and, later, for writing The Marriage of Figaro under the name Beaumarchais). Lépine devised a series of aesthetic improvements to pocket watches including a thinner case with a hidden hinge, pioneered a keyless winding mechanism, and invented a movement that used considerably less metal for the bridge, the part of the watch that kept everything else i
n place, thereby reducing the weight and size of the movement. Called the Lépine caliber, it looked like a set of piano keys under which were the power train, escapement, and the rest of the transmission system. One had only to see watches from a few decades before Lépine’s reign — lumpen and onion-shaped — to understand the allure of his work.
Together, on this small triangle of land in the middle of the Seine, men like Lépine and Berthoud brought about a golden age of horology in France. The Quai became the country’s engineering hub, and its watchmakers trained others in their art, spreading their techniques throughout Europe and the New World. Every major watch company still in existence owes a debt to the small fraternity of men at the quiet end of the Île de la Cité.
Orders for the military, the monarchy, and well-appointed nobles came in daily, and the Quai’s watchmakers, renowned for inventing new complications, attracted an international clientele. Lépine, in fact, was tasked with creating a watch for America’s first president. In a November, 1788 letter to Gouverneur Morris, the coauthor of the U.S. Constitution who was then in Paris, George Washington would write:5
Dear Sir,
I had the pleasure to receive by the last mail your letter dated the 12th of this month. I am much obliged by your offer of executing commissions for me in Europe, and shall take the liberty of charging you with one only. I wish to have a good gold watch procured for my own use; not a small, trifling, nor finically ornamented one, but a watch well executed in point of workmanship, and of about the size and kind of that which was procured by Mr. Jefferson for Mr. Madison, which was large and flat. I imagine Mr. Jefferson can give you the best advice on the subject, as I am told this species of watches, which I have described, can be found cheaper and better fabricated in Paris than in London. To defray the cost I enclose a bill for twenty-five guineas on London, payable at sight. Should the expense be greater, for I would have a good watch, I will take care to reimburse it to you. I want nothing more with it than a handsome key.