by John Biggs
Morris swiftly replied:6
Paris 23 Feb 1789
Dear General,
Upon my arrival at this Place I spoke to Mr. Jefferson on the Subject of your Watch. He told me that the man who had made Maddison’s [sic] was a Rogue and recommended me to another, Romilly. But as it might happen that this also was a Rogue I enquired at a very honest Man’s Shop, not a Watch Maker, and he recommended Gregson. A Gentleman with me assured me that Gregson was a Rogue and both of them agreed that Romilly is of the old School and he and his Watches out of Fashion. And to say that of a Man in Paris, is like saying he is an ordinary Man among the Friends of Philadelphia. I found at last that Mr. [Lépine] is at the head of his Profession here, and in Consequence asks more for this Work than any Body else. I therefore waited on Mr. Lépine and agreed with him for two watches exactly alike, one of which be for you and the other for me.
Even with Lépine’s momentous commissions, in 1775 a precocious young watchmaker prepared to take his place among the luminaries on the Quai. His name was Abraham-Louis Breguet and he was just twenty-eight years old. He was five feet tall. His hair was curly at the sides, and beneath a high forehead he had a beetled, clinched brow topped with short but bushy eyebrows. His mouth was prim and closed over a prominent chin. His nose was not delicate, looking almost broken, and his eyes had the narrow focus of a man accustomed to looking at the world through a loupe. He was given to wearing a dark frock with a delicately tied cravat, a seashell-like knot at his throat.
Although technically not yet a master, Breguet showed ability far beyond his years, was already a favored watchmaker at court, and had begun to earn a considerable income. After ten years of apprenticeship, including stints under both Berthoud and Lépine, he was intent on starting his own business.
The launch of the Breguet business in Paris was painstakingly well-executed. The young Breguet, while a prodigy, was a relative unknown in Paris, having plied most his trade in Versailles. His stepfather had invested a good deal in the boy, and he expected great things. But before opening his own shop, Breguet had a matter of the heart to attend to. That August 28, he wed Cecile-Marie-Louise, a beautiful counterpoint to her smaller, gnomic husband.
Hunting for a shop in the city proper, Abraham-Louis inevitably ended up on the Clock Dock, where the very men from whom he had learned so much were concentrated. And he eventually decided on Number 51, at the northern tip of the Quai, where boats coming down Seine would stop to leave shipments for the artisans clustered there.
The four-story building, owned by the well-connected Polignac family, was large and imposing, made of brick and gray stone, with finely wrought decoration around the window of alternating brick in a sunburst pattern. Front windows would allow the watchmaker to show his wares to passersby. But the kind of customer Breguet expected at his shop would not spend much time window browsing, so he also made sure it was a space that, as he expanded, would be able to accommodate a comfortable office and showroom where he could discuss potential commissions with the lights of Paris society. When Breguet climbed the stairs to the atelier on the floor above, he was delighted to find broad windows facing both the Seine, in the front, and the triangular Place in the rear. They made the room bright and sunny — perfect for putting together tiny gears and screws. One floor above that, tall windows in the attic would make excellent additional workspaces for the watchmakers. This would be Breguet’s new home in Paris, and although at first he was to rent only the attic and ground floor, he would soon own the entire building, along with a smaller apartment next door.
Because Breguet was officially still an apprentice in 1775, he needed to receive a special dispensation to open his own business without the supervision of a master. It was an unusual move. The watchmaking guild was powerful; membership was necessary to begin building movements and cases for sale in France. The guild had only seventy-two French masters in the horological arts, and each could have just one apprentice at a time. The only way to open a shop was to be either the son of a master or to be married to a master’s widow. Breguet, who met neither of these requirements, likely received the favor to do so thanks to his close relationship with the French court. Gabrielle de Polastron, Duchesse de Polignac, was his landlord and one of the royal family’s closest friends.
It was here, in this beautiful building with a view on Place Dauphine, that the measure of time with true fidelity − and a beguiling love story whose fire would eventually engulf the whole of Europe — began.
Chapter 3
Paris
Past midnight on January 30, 1774, eighteen-year-old Count Hans Axel von Fersen, the son of a powerful Swedish nobleman, found himself in the middle of an enchanting conversation. He had no idea with whom.
In the plush, oval auditorium of the Paris opera, a thousand candles flickered off the faux marble and pastel frescoes and tall mirrors and gilded bronze reliefs. The opera house was new, having replaced one that had burned down four years earlier. It was a magnificent room: Ionic columns along the side walls soared past curved tiers of loges, and on the elliptical ceiling an elaborate fresco depicted Apollo and the Muses. Normally it could seat one thousand, but for this evening’s event the orchestra had been raised to the same level as the stage, creating a seamless ballroom floor. Couples spun around each other in perfect minuets as lutes and harpsichords played baroque melodies.
As they did so, Fersen was becoming increasingly intrigued by the young woman nodding attentively at his words and responding with such charming bon mots. She was eye-catchingly slender. Beneath a white taffeta dress, her girlish figure seemed still to be taking shape, but there was nothing awkward about her. Her blonde hair was terraced in lustrous curls and adorned with feathers. Her skin was striking for both its whiteness and the delicate flush glowing beneath it. She carried herself with great dignity, yet exuded a natural kindness, and her walk – “indolent, half-swaying, one might say caressing”7 – gave her the air of grace that could only come with fine breeding.
This was all Fersen could tell, for like all the mysterious and fashionable people in the room, including him, she held one of the small half-masks known as dominoes up to her face. The opera was the scandalous destination of the season. Open to all comers, provided they could pay the admission, it allowed for mixing of the classes and sexes. Thanks to the masks, it also afforded an air of mystery and, importantly, a veil of secrecy to the dalliances that took place there. For nobles who spent most of their time scrutinizing and being scrutinized these balls offered a welcome respite. Men and women both enjoyed the privilege of going incognito and mingling flirtatiously, if only for a few hours.
Fersen, for the last three years, had been taking his grand tour, an aristocratic rite of passage that had brought him tumbling through the continent like a polite, taciturn Viking raider. He was tall and slim, with blue eyes and light brown hair, and from the moment of his arrival in Paris a few weeks earlier, he had been accepted into the ranks of the French court. His skills at languages, swordsmanship, riding, and music were much in demand as entertainments, and he quickly fell into the swirl of events in the city and at Versailles. The ladies at court dubbed him “le beau Fersen;” one described him as looking like the “hero of a novel.”
“No one could have been more correct or distinguished in his bearing,” Count Creutz, the Swedish ambassador, reported to his king, Gustav III. “With his good looks and his charm he could not help but be a great success in society here.”8 His name did much to pave his way. So respected was his family that one Swedish wag even said that he knew three types of men: “Frenchmen, Fersens, and rabble.”9
This day alone, in the hours before Fersen’s meeting with the strange and alluring woman at the opera, had been a dazzling blur of engagements. After a late lunch with the Danish ambassador, he had gone to the home of another aristocrat, Madame d’Arville, for a half hour of banter. Then Count Creutz had driven Fersen to the home of the Princesse de Beauvau, and on to a concert by Stroganoff.
At nine, it was back to Madame d’Arville’s for supper, which went until one in the morning. Finally, the group went to the opera for the masked ball.
Shortly after Fersen’s arrival, a distinguished looking trio came into the room and began mixing anonymously with the crowd. One of them, the lady with feathers in her hair, engaged Fersen in conversation, and for nearly half an hour he enjoyed their exchange, never growing bored and becoming ever more eager to see behind her mask. In his short time in Paris, Fersen had found the city’s aristocracy to be world-weary and jaded, but this lady’s conversation was lively, even slightly risqué, without being frivolous. Although he detected hesitancy in her speech, which he took to be shyness, he felt an easy rapport with her.
When, finally, she removed her mask, he discovered that he had been speaking with Marie-Antoinette, the Dauphine, next in line to be Queen of France. He had seen her from a distance at a ball at Versailles three weeks earlier, but this was his first direct encounter. He could take in her full face now: Her eyes were a sparkling blue (imperial blue, the color was called), alive with intelligence and framed by handsome eyebrows; her nose was prominent but well proportioned; she had full lips. The overall effect was of a beauty at once vivacious and dignified with a touch of imperfection that made her all the more approachable.
So much made sense now. The hesitancy he had taken for shyness was, of course, her relative unfamiliarity with the French tongue. He had heard of her tendency to speak to foreigners when she was masked, lest her Austrian accent give away her identity to a native French speaker, and he imagined that someone had described him to her as an interesting and important young man from Sweden. Now, realizing who she was, he spoke in German to her, and mentioned that during his recent visit to Florence he had met her brother, Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Her two companions, who were speaking to other guests, had also dropped their masks, revealing themselves to be the Dauphin, Louis XVI, baby-faced and already exhibiting a tendency toward overweight, and his brother, the Comte de Provence whose broad chin and pursed lips had been passed on from his mother, Maria Josepha of Saxony. Now that their identities were revealed, a crowd of people quickly gathered around the group. Marie, at nineteen, was already the belle of Paris, and her normally withdrawn husband was unusually outgoing this evening, chatting freely with the revelers. People assumed this was the beneficial influence of his young wife, but jealous courtiers took note of something else — the handsome young foreigner with whom the Dauphine had spent so much time speaking. The Dauphine, perhaps sensing this, retreated with her party to the royal box. Afterward, Fersen, in his habitual laconic fashion, would write in his diary merely that the Dauphine “talked to me for a long time,” a fair bit of understatement. When he left the ball, it was three o’clock in the morning, as any of the many watch-carrying guests could have told him.
Before the rise of Marie-Antoinette and a decidedly more youthful turn of fashion, such balls had been visions of a dissipated hell peopled by ghouls in powder and poufs. “The ball was almost over, the candles had shortened, the musicians, drunk or asleep, no longer made use of their instruments,” a contemporary wrote about one of Louis XV’s balls twenty years before. “The crowd had dispersed, everyone was unmasked, rouge and powder flowed down the painted faces offering the disgusting spectacle of dilapidated stylishness.”10 These spectacles quickly changed as a younger and more flamboyant generation took to the opera and Fersen and Marie-Antoinette were at the vanguard of this transition.
The balls of 1770s Versailles, if more modern in sensibility, were no less serious affairs. Preparations were begun months in advance; guest lists solidified and reordered to ensure respect to every rank and privilege. The dances, glittering dresses, rich food, and heady perfumes could be intoxicating, but Fersen, who wore a waistcoat, ruffled cravat, and stockings to such events, was of more modest taste, although he did enjoy balls and dinners. He did, however, have a teenager’s ambivalence about all the frippery and wrote, after one ball, that “[a]s I was leaving, I thought that the French don’t know how to enjoy themselves. They have the bad habit of constantly saying ‘I’m bored,’ and it poisons all their pleasures.”
In 1774, when Axel and Marie met, the ancien regime was at its fragile apex. France was nearly bankrupt, having incurred calamitous debts in the Seven Years War that would soon be compounded by the expenses of the American War of Independence. Britain was starting to eclipse France as an economic power, wounding national pride. And the Bourbons’ self-indulgence had been stoking anti-royalist sentiment for half a century. Louis XIV, the Sun king, had instituted all manner of rules and regulations, regimenting the day into ceremonial sections and bringing on a large number of hangers-on, including pensioners and special appointees who received money simply for displaying the proper obsequiousness to the king. When Louis XV died three years later, some Parisians would travel to Versailles to mourn his passing, but more people in Paris would celebrate his death. Already the seeds of revolution had been planted in a city that was now divided into, on the one hand, a warren of heated and lushly decorated palaces and mansions, and on the other, a dark tangle of streets where hunger was the norm and bread was increasingly hard to come by. By 1777 the expenses of Versailles would consume one sixth of the French budget,11 much of that spent on gadgetry like watches and automatons for the introverted king and champagne for the queen’s admirers.
It was under these precarious circumstances that Fersen arrived in Paris in 1773, travelling with his tutor, the patient and well-connected Jean Bolemany, a Hungarian baron. They had already ranged through Italy and Switzerland, studying the arts of war — horsemanship, history, and tactics — so that Fersen might follow in his field-marshal father’s bootsteps.
In many regards, Fersen was born in the wrong century. He defined himself as a tragic and romantic figure and found comfort in order and beauty.12 While he was not a poet sighing into a bunch of white lilies, his diaries point to a sensitive young man well aware of his status in a world that was swiftly disappearing. His training and upbringing put him on a trajectory toward a lifetime of service and governance, while his situation and society forced a soft decline on him and his contemporaries. Whereas his father and uncles fought in war after war, there were no similar conflicts to define and hone his skills as a military man. This is not to say Fersen could not have gone to war — many were being waged on continental soil — but none had the same European import as the skirmishes that brought glory to his ancestors. He moved in a circle that was slowly losing its center. Fersen and his ilk were “no longer needed as leaders of their race and vassals in the harsh primary struggle against the oppression of a king or the depredations of some rival lord.”13
Upon his arrival in Paris, Fersen journeyed to Versailles to see the installation of knights into the Order of the Holy Spirit, a chivalric brotherhood for French courtiers consisting of a hundred boys from noble families and led by the king himself. Bolemany, his tutor, wanted to introduce him at the French court, and viewing a royal order of knights meshed well with the boy’s military bent.
The setting of this first visit was Versailles’ sepulchral white chapel. The tall room was covered in gold-leaf detailing, and statues of cherubs hung from almost every eave. A balcony allowed visitors to view the proceedings; an almost ten-foot-tall “false window” at the end of the aisle, seemingly out of place, had once hid the Madame de Pompadour, late mistress to Louis XV, in her private prayer room. The king himself sat on a throne topped with a canopy of rich green cloth and tufted in gold thread. It was far more ornate than anything Axel had seen, and the novices, arriving in Louis XIII costumes complete with knee breeches, tunics, dashing cloaks, and neck ruffles, looked like something out of a child’s fairy tale. It was a heady way for a young man to make an acquaintance with one of the most magnificent courts in Europe.
During that first visit to Versailles, Axel scored a social coup by meeting with Madame du Barry, the powerful mistress
of Louis XV, who was angling to maintain her power even as Marie-Antoinette had begun to rise in rank and importance. Du Barry invited the young man out to court again, to the Dauphine’s Monday pre-Lenten carnival ball where courtiers came to dance and grovel, hoping to catch the eye of the next queen. These visits were exciting for a young man angling for influence abroad, and they garnered him still more invitations and interest.
He could speak fluent French, German, Italian, and English and was invited to the homes of France’s upper crust, who were fascinated by this handsome soldier. Ambassador Creutz and his secretary, Ramel, accompanied him consistently. They were keeping an eye on him for his father and for King Gustav III, both of whom felt young Axel would make an excellent go-between. Axel enjoyed the dinners immensely, often giving impromptu performances – he travelled with a clavichord – when his hosts at Versailles or in the city proper requested a recital.
The Comte de Saint-Priest, a diplomat, described the young Swede as “having a striking face. Tall, slim, perfectly well made, with beautiful eyes, he was made to create in the eyes of a woman who sought his [eyes] deeper impressions than she expected.” Contemporary paintings show him with high, arched eyebrows and a long, thin nose with thin nostrils that “are sometimes a sign of shyness, or, at least, of caution and reserve.”14 His lips, usually pursed in thought, were delicately formed. A half-smile sometimes played on his face, but real joy seldom broke through the wall of his breeding and stern military training.
Fersen had long kept a meticulously detailed diary, noting the hours he spent at various activities, and he was a prolific letter-writer, keeping a copy of each missive he sent in his own files so as never to be at a loss in conversation. When he was a boy, Fersen’s journal had recorded hours spent riding (two per day), studying languages and music (another two), and the time he went to bed (usually by 10 in the evening, with an expectation of rising again at seven to dress and prepare for his lessons). Now that he was a young man, with considerable amorous experience, his writing increasingly turned to a chronicle of conquests.