Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion

by John Biggs

Breguet quickly learned that every clock and watch consisted of the same three parts: a power source, a transmission system, and a register. The power source could be anything that kept the timepiece running: a bucket of water, a spring, a tireless squirrel on a wheel. Pendulum clocks, for example, used a wound spring or cable that pulled a gear down and around and actuated the pendulum itself. Clocks could run on water, air, or heat — anything that could deliver energy to the works.

  The tiny wheel that spins back and forth in most modern watches – and some made during Breguet’s time – was called the balance wheel. The balance wheel was like a round pendulum. The escapement pushed it in one direction, stopped it, and after it had returned to its original position, the process was repeated, ad infinitum. A small spring connected to the wheel ensured that the balance moved only so far and returned at a regular interval.

  The transmission system, better known as the escapement — literally a device that allowed the energy stored in the spring to “escape” at a preset interval — converted the power source into a set of ticks. It was the speed of the escapement that defined how a clock or watch’s seconds hand would move. Slower escapements released their energy once per second, creating the tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Modern escapements “tick” at up to ten times per second, creating the illusion that the seconds hand is sweeping slowly across the face of the dial. While today watchmakers pride themselves on building high frequency movements, in Breguet’s time a mort hand, or dead-beat seconds hand, was a complication that forced the hand to tick once a second and was highly sought after because it reminded the wearer of the reassuring tick-tock of an old chamber clock.

  Many early watches used gut or chains to transfer the power of the mainspring to the escapement. This system, called the fusee or “cone,” ensured that the watch remained accurate throughout its unwinding cycle. It consisted of a mainspring and a cone attached to each other with a thin chain. As the wearer wound the watch, the chain would climb up the cone until it reached the top and then unwind, slowly, releasing steadily more slack. It acted like a governor on an engine, allowing the spring to mete out equal amounts of energy at all times, and appeared in Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings as early as 1405. These tiny chains were the Achilles heel of a good watch. They would break on winding or wear out after a few months of use. They also made watches awkwardly thick because the cones had to be quite tall to take up all of the chain.

  The final part of a watch was the register or face. The hands, time, and date readouts, and moon phase information were all registers, and each depended on the hummingbird heartbeat of the power source and the transmission.

  Looking closely at an open watch, Breguet could see components arrayed in a pattern inscrutable to anyone but the watch’s maker. There could be no wasted space, no misalignment, and no sense that anything could be added or removed without destroying the harmony of the whole. A watch’s shapes and curves put one in mind of the natural world of shells and planets. If the object was made by a master, it would work for years, decades, even centuries, given proper care. Watches, then, could be considered true perpetual motion machines in that they would stay constantly in motion if certain conditions were met. But almost none of those conditions were present in the eighteenth century. Damp, cold, mud, grit, and inferior oil usually gummed up the works, and the hand of a bad watchmaker could consign a good watch to an even worse fate.

  In less than a year, the precocious boy was chafing at the limits of what the Neuchâtel watchmakers could teach him, and Tattet decided to send his stepson to Versailles for further training. This decision was partially financial. The long road between Neuchâtel and Versailles took a week to travel by stagecoach, and Tattet deemed it necessary to have someone he could trust at Versailles who could take orders and make repairs inside the heart of the French court. Ever since Louis XIV had made Versailles his home in the early eighteenth century, French kings rarely travelled outside the palace’s plush and luxurious confines. Within Versailles, Louis XV and his retinue were safe from the constant scrutiny of Parisian court life. Paris merchants vying for a royal commission had to travel there to ply their trade.

  At Versailles, Breguet’s apprenticeship continued under a prominent Swiss watchmaker whom the Tattets knew, but within two years, Abraham-Louis had exhausted this teacher’s knowledge as well. He had grown considerably in intellect and discipline. While many watchmakers focused on one aspect of the watch — the ebauche, the complications, the hands or face — Breguet showed an overall understanding of each interfacing part, ensuring he could build a watch from start to finish. The boy had a singular aptitude for taking and using everything he learned, and he had the unusual ability to express every aspect of the watch in both written form and through drafting. His notebooks were full of designs for watches, along with detailed descriptions of various complications – the self-winding feature known as the perpetuelle, for example – as well as discussions of historical examples of previous versions of his work. He did not like to boast. Many of his creations “were kept secret for a long time, not for the sake of secrecy as many thought at the time, but merely out of modesty.”47

  This formerly poor student was now hungry for knowledge. When his first apprenticeship ended, he asked to stay on. “master, I have a favor to ask of you,” he said. “I am sensible that I have not employed all my time to the best of my ability, in your service, and I wish to be allowed to work three months more, under you, without salary.”48 He stayed the three months.

  He still hungered to study under one of the truly great horologists of the age, men he sometimes glimpsed, from a distance, arriving by gilded fiacre at Versailles to perform their duties as horlogers du roi. In particular, he wanted to learn about pocket watches.

  Seeing an opportunity, Breguet’s stepfather moved the boy from Versailles to Paris, where he arranged for Abraham-Louis to continue his training on the Quai de l’Horloge, as apprentice to a series of master pocket watchmakers. The intention was to build the Breguet brand in Paris, where the rich were notoriously desperate in their attempts to impress at court. The uncountable dukes, earls, and courtiers often wore a different outfit each day with accessories to match, and to fail to appear with a beautiful pocket watch was akin to arriving at court without pants.

  Watchmakers like Berthoud were attempting to simplify and reduce the movements that they were churning out in their shops. For example, bridges, the pieces that held the wheels and gears in place and acted as a structural support for the entire mechanism, were often superfluous and added weight and thickness to the watch movement. A clock movement — all large plates and minuscule gears — was quite elegant in its simplicity, but the same could not be said of a watch movement. Because of the more confined space, watch movements were much denser and had little room to breathe, as it were. So, to reduce overall size, the trick was to either skeletonize the movement — to remove superfluous metal from around the pinions and leave only the essential parts intact — or to create an entirely new form of bridge with only a few essential parts.

  This tendency to simplify often ran counter to the prevailing conception of mechanical beauty. Some watches were decorated throughout, with even certain hidden parts covered in fine carvings of leaves, flowers, and birds. Such ostentation, while impressive to the viewer, weakened the metal if taken to zealous extremes. Some watches were so delicately carved that their cases looked like rotten lace when rust and rough treatment took their toll.

  Under the masters in Versailles, Breguet learned important lessons about tool making. Whereas previously every watch was unique and almost completely hand-made, the state of the art now was based on tools and reproducible parts. The use of tools to grind gears and watch screws made it possible for Abraham-Louis to dream, subversively, of one day creating a “popular” watch — for everyone, not just the upper classes.

  His apprenticeships meant long hours at a watch-smith’s bench. The day started early. He tended the fires and prepared
the workspace for the rest of the crew, young men who, like him, were usually untrained and uneducated, giving Breguet a slight advantage due to his natural talent. As they carved the gears and gear plates, Breguet fetched metal or did menial tasks like polishing fasteners or watching the enameling kiln and preparing pieces of metal for refining. He would not repair or even begin his own watch for another few years, even though it was clear that he had a unique eye for the complex and miniature machinery that his masters dealt in.

  Because light meant everything in a workshop, he quickly learned how to follow the sun as it moved through the atelier, helping the watchmakers turn to receive direct rays as they worked. Watchmaking by candlelight was possible, but not preferable. The flickering flame could trick even the steadiest hand into dropping a screw into the wrong hole or snapping a gear as it was being polished, forcing the watchmaker to start over again from scratch. A single slip could result in a movement being completely destroyed, and watchmakers had to extensively practice creating their own tools and replacement parts, preparing rods, wheels, and gears over and over again until they got them absolutely right.

  Even benches were strictly codified, and most were made of mahogany or birch. Cedar was forbidden as, one watchmaker noted, “it exudes a sort of gum which forms a sticky deposit on work and tools, and rapidly spoils any lubricating oil that may be exposed to it.”49 Instead harder woods were used and even these became worn and broken with age and use.

  Few tradesmen had enough patience to complete these seemingly menial and repetitive tasks, and it was rare to find someone who could accept constant criticism while still maintaining accuracy and thinking about the creative use of limited space. But the best watchmakers knew that their work was unique in every way; they viewed each new watch as a challenge to be engineered rather than as a commodity to be stamped out. This mindset encouraged ceaseless tinkering and improvement of the movements and led to the inclusion, in some watches, of tiny automata such as twittering birds and harp-plucking maidens. If a watchmaker could create a calendar that would stay accurate for centuries without having to be reset, it was fairly trivial to create a watch that displayed a small dog wagging its tail or an erotic scene involving a vicar and one of his more fulsome congregants.

  While the average watch took perhaps a week to build, the more complex and expensive pieces took considerably longer. In many cases, complex watches were passed from watchmaker to watchmaker, and each piece, starting with the internal mechanism or movement, was added on in a sort of slow accretion. When a particularly thorny problem arose like the addition of a complication to an already complicated watch, watchmakers spent weeks staring through a loupe each day until the sky darkened and the workers could no longer see, weeks requiring absolute and unflagging concentration and, if the watchmaker was creating a timepiece from scratch without the aid of the master’s pre-drawn plans, a flair for invention.

  To the untrained eye, these eighteenth-century movements looked less like mechanical things than ornate manuscripts, full of curlicues and dashes, odd shapes and runes etched into the metal, identifying the maker and his employees in miniscule graffito. After repairs watchmakers would inscribe the date and type of maintenance performed on a watch on the inside of the case — small notes from the past to the future, enabling watchmakers to follow each other’s work even when they were separated by time and space. The notes could be coded dates or a watchmaker’s initials or an invoice number, for when the watch was separated from its case for repair.

  From Versailles Breguet moved to the Clock Dock where he studied under both Berthoud and Lépine. His most auspicious tutelage, however, came from Abbot Joseph-François Marie, a professor of mathematics and physics at College Mazarin. Officially named Collège des Quatre-Nations, the college was part of the University of Paris and consisted of sixty students from all over the French empire. Designed as a collecting school for citizens from countries without a university system, it taught its scholars French deportment, math, and science.

  The Abbot also taught the young Breguet how to comport himself around royalty, an essential skill.50 While the average watchmaker needed little outside training — rarely being called upon to create anything more than the standard two-handed clock that perhaps chimed the hours and showed the minutes in the day — a watchmaker like Breguet would be expected to create watches with multiple complications, requiring unique skills and education to understand how to re-create these mathematical formulas mechanically and how miniature calendars and astronomical charts found in larger clocks could be shrunk into watches more efficiently.

  One such complication was solar mean time — the time indicated by the sun, as opposed to the time on a standard twenty-four-hour clock. Because of intrinsic problems with the Gregorian calendar in the acceptance of the twenty-four-hour day, the measured length of a day often differed by up to sixteen minutes in either direction from the solar length of the day (meaning the time from when the sun was at high noon to when the moon was at its apex). All Breguet had to do was look at a sundial to be reminded of the problem. When the shadow of the sundial’s style was gone, meaning the sun was directly overhead, there was a slight and measurable difference between solar mean time and normally indicated twenty-four-hour time. This discrepancy, which was important in measuring the actual time at a given location, was solved, in watches, by adding a bean-shaped cog traced by an indicator hand. The indicator showed the mean solar time — plus or minus up to fifteen minutes — as the date wheel spun. This ingenious solution — essentially creating a miniature representation of the ovoid rotation of the earth around the sun — made possible a number of improvements in timekeeping during Breguet’s lifetime.

  Years passed and Breguet progressed from apprentice to journeyman quickly. By his twenty-seventh year he was an intellectual juggernaut on the Clock Dock, taking up commissions that frightened other watchmakers. Breguet now had the technical acumen to try to address many of the problems that horology faced including the reduction of friction, the measurement of the heavens, and the general stability of clockwork in rough conditions. He needed the kinds of commissions that could fund such exploration.

  Luckily, the Breguet’s tutor, the Abbot, was close to the French court and brought young Breguet’s watches on visits with the king and queen. With obvious pride he would pull a Breguet from his folds and consult it during the day, mentioning that the maker of his favorite timepieces was a young Swiss artisan named Abraham-Louis. Soon, Breguet was called before the court himself, and a lucrative business bloomed.

  Breguet in his prime was handsome in an elfin sort of way and his quiet company and reliable discretion were highly sought after in many circles. It was at court that he met the Polignac family and it was also here that he would meet Axel von Fersen, whose respect and admiration were intertwined with his company’s eventual success. It was during the waning years of Louis XV and the ascension to power of Louis XVI that Breguet ingratiated himself with the court, a move that eventually led to his royal commission, which freed the young watchmaker from the toil and drudgery of more retail-minded work. Complicated watches of the sort Breguet was making were expensive, and only in the rarefied air of the French court could he find willing and eager buyers.

  Breguet was soon leading a team of watchmakers who were creating some of the most complex clocks and watches of their day. He dressed less like a purveyor of royal watches than a shopkeeper, going about Paris with a high collar pulled up on his dark coat and his hair, and increasingly bald pate, hidden by a cap.

  Under Louis XIV, the Sun king, Versailles had been not only the heart of fashion and interior design but also the nexus of watchmaking in France. The first Renaissance clocks had disappeared from the royal possessions before the 1700s — most were made of precious metals and melted down during dips in cash flow. But other clocks survived, including turret clocks based on a German design with attractive but not overly delicate frieze patterns applied to the corners and faces of the
hexagonal body. One clock, built in 1696, featured a “rich throne” on which sat a miniature Louis XIV, surrounded by a procession of “Electors of the German States, and the princes and dukes of Italy,” while the kings of Europe appeared out of a small window and chimed a bell, then retiring after paying homage to the Sun king with a curt bow. Because of the unyielding will of William III of England, the clockmaker designed that king’s mannequin to bow much lower than the others, thereby pleasing the French monarch. However, this extra dip put a strain on the mechanism and one afternoon, during a public exhibition with the king present, the clock broke. Instead of bowing, the French king fell prostrate before the English king while the clock ground and springs clanged inside. The clockmaker was locked up in the Bastille.

  Another clock played an hourly chime and featured a small statue of Louis XIV that, on the hour, received a miniature crown from a winged figure of Victory while a cock at the top of the clock flapped its wings and two sentinels appeared to protect the newly crowned king.

  From the ridiculous came the sublime. Under the rule of Louis XVI, a distinctive style of French clock evolved. The movements might be sourced elsewhere (most came from Switzerland, although German movements were also popular), but French case makers saw the clock as a part of a whole, something to be connected, stylistically, with the tables, chairs, and commodes in a room. A clock was not a separate device, toiling away in obscurity. It was a room’s lighthouse and center of attention and so played an important role in the French household. It tolled the hours, kept the master’s appointments, and kept order in the social whirl that was Versailles and Paris.

  Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette owned hundreds of timepieces in their lifetime, mostly standard pocket watches and table clocks. Because Louis XVI, in particular, was enamored with technology, during his reign almost every room in the palace had a clock or watch running steadily throughout the day. In an era when a family might own one chamber clock — usually a repeater (a clock which chimed the hours when activated by a button) with a handle on top for easy transport — to fill a palace with clocks was unusual, even for a wealthy king.