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

by John Biggs

  When Fersen couldn’t be with her, as during one eight month period when he toured Italy and during extended stays in Sweden, he still wrote frequently to her, and she to him. He numbered every letter to her, so she could be certain that every one had reached her. To ensure privacy, they used couriers and intermediaries. Later he wrote using invisible ink or in a fairly simple keyed cipher. They hid their correspondence by forwarding letters within letters. Fersen might mail a friend in Paris who would then open the letter and forward another envelope inside to the queen. In 1789, she gave him her portrait and a small pocketbook with a flyleaf inscription by her.

  In the intervening years Marie-Antoinette was taking care of two sons, the sickly Dauphin Louis Joseph, the hearty and robust Louis Charles, and a daughter, Marie-Therese. She was also mourning another daughter, Sophie Helene, who died at one year. Unlike her mother, Marie-Antoinette was reasonably protected from violence and unpleasantness in her youth. Now, as if fulfilling her mother’s portents of “worry and sorrow” that had she felt when her daughters first married, she had since faced miscarriages, false accusations of theft and sexual depravity, and now entered the maw of the people’s anger.

  In 1789, revolution began in earnest. In July, the Paris mob ransacked aristocrats’ homes, and the Bastille fell. August brought the abolition of privileges and the “declaration of the rights of man and the citizen.” In October, the mob stormed Versailles, and the royal family fled for the Palais des Tuileries. Fersen was in the procession of carriages that choked the road, ever by his queen’s side.

  The events soon took their toll on the king and queen. Louis XVI suffered a nervous collapse, and Marie’s hair began to turn white. Fersen would spend the next year and a half in Paris, continuing to meet secretly with the queen in her chambers as various plans to save the monarchy were proposed and abandoned. In October, the royal family finally decided they needed to leave Paris, and Fersen began to plot Marie’s escape.

  With France’s economic crisis deepening, Breguet was increasingly casting his sights abroad to foreign markets. But he remained very much in the royals’ orbit, selling Louis XVI a watch in 1784, and the one Marie would give Fersen in 1787.

  As that love affair developed, Breguet found himself focusing more and more on Fersen’s order, now called the 160 because it was the 160th commission entered in his firm’s ledgers. As the watch took shadowy form, Breguet studied its increasingly complex movement, penetrating the three-dimensional structure with his mind and playing a kind of spatial chess: If he put this complication here, then he would have to put that complication there, which would then mean that yet another complication would need to change position, and on and on. Moments when Breguet could meditate, at length, on the unique challenges of a singular timepiece were the times when he felt most alive. While he found mass production an alluring concept — he dreamed of a day when all men could own a good watch, preferably with the Breguet name on it — the prospect of filling his days stamping out cookie-cutter watches was dispiriting. What he loved was exploration, the creation of new complications and the addition of one complication to the next.

  With the 160, the challenge was less in the fabrication of the parts, or even in their assembly, than in the daunting geometries of fitting so many intricate, interlocking parts into such a small space, and having them work properly. By now Breguet had facility with a large and widening range of complications including the perfection of the perpetuelle to the extent that it could now be considered a mass-market addition to a common watch. Many of these complications he had himself invented or refined during nearly two decades in which he had both made his name and experienced devastation that might have crippled another man — but seemed only to spur Breguet to greater heights of his art. He was, in these turbulent years, rising to a fame that would later spur jealousy, spite, and, ultimately, inspire a thief.

  Chapter 8

  Jerusalem

  Near midnight on April 15, 1983, a small car rolled unnoticed through down HaPalmach Street in Katamon, a leafy suburb west of the Jerusalem’s Old City. Katamon, spread over a cluster of hills, had long been home to Israel’s elite. They favored the area’s expansive gardens and twisting tree-lined streets, and it was far from the tumult of the city. It was Friday night and the streets were empty as families prepared for the sabbath.

  By day, residents were accustomed to seeing caravans of long, dark state cars threading their way to the Presidential Palace, located in the heart of the district. But few ventured into these parts at night and foot traffic was scarce. While the days were often broken by the loud clarion calls of the presidential guard welcoming visiting potentates with trumpets, the evenings were quiet and undisturbed.

  The car, a tiny French Simca 1000,62 continued north along HaPalmach Street. It slowed as it neared the back of a pale, three-story building, which housed the L.A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art. Constructed from coarse, beige Jerusalem stone, the museum resembled a strikingly well-preserved Egyptian temple. A broad set of stairs rose to the entrance, and two wings of galleries extended behind it, forming a courtyard in the rear that was invisible from the street.

  For almost a decade the museum had mostly played host to Jerusalem’s school children and the odd Islamic scholar. It was too far from the tourist center for most sightseers, and only odd buffs and collectors who knew its secrets made the trip past the old walls of the city to this posh district. About fifteen-thousand visitors trod its halls that year, many of them Muslims who were amazed by the richness of the Islamic collection. One visitor, a “West Bank sheikh,” found the exhibits to be exhilarating, noting in a newspaper article in 1974 that “The world thinks of us Muslims as being men of the desert, with no culture of our own. Seeing what I have today, I now know better.”63

  The museum, however, was hardly a likely target for a thief – the Korans, textiles, and Ottoman edicts or firmans, while historically priceless, wouldn’t interest the traditional burglar as it would be possible to resell them to only the most reckless of collectors. They would be identified immediately and the thief would be caught. But here he was, idling briefly, assessing the scene before popping the car back into gear.

  The driver steered the car right onto a service road flanking the near side of the museum, then right into a small parking lot behind it. The car slid into a parking space and the engine cut out with a cough. The driver switched off the lights, and a moment later he stepped out onto the pavement. He was whippet-thin and sandy-haired and he moved with purpose. He blinked rapidly, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  He had chosen this time and place carefully. The east side of the building abutted a tree-shrouded retirement center, and to the north was an empty lot. The museum had closed early that day and the surrounding streets were empty. After assuring himself that no one was watching, the man moved confidently toward the building and disappeared into a narrow passage, which led from the parking lot into the inner courtyard.

  A heavy steel gate blocked his passage, but the man was prepared. He approached the gate and ran his fingers over the bars, their institutional green paint gleaming dully in the lamplight.

  Over the previous few months he had filled his home with equipment and wrote out detailed plans in a set of spiral-bound notebooks. To stay slim and alert he drank fruit juices and ate a little vegetarian food most evenings. He trained himself to work quickly and quietly and with little sleep. He kept strong and lithe, exercising on a handmade gym cobbled out of pipes and makeshift weights.

  Now he was ready.

  He carried with him a collection of odd tools he used for these sorts of jobs and, after listening carefully for a moment, he brought out a metal apparatus he had used many times before to ease his way into tight spots: a hydraulic jack. He inserted the jack between two of the bars and pumped the handle. Slowly, the bars spread apart, the jack releasing a muted hiss, which was quickly swallowed by the evening breeze. The man turned sideways to the gate and squeezed through
the opening.

  Chapter 9

  Paris

  One bright summer morning in 1784, a few months after Breguet, now thirty-seven, received the title of master Watchmaker from the notoriously protective Parisian Guild, king Louis XVI called him into his study to place a royal commission. It was unusual for the king to make such a request directly – he placed most orders by post and sent notes to the city requesting tools for himself and baubles for the queen.64

  The king already owned many Breguet pieces, mostly pocket watches with white faces and the trademark blued Breguet hands shaped like small, closed poppies, a detail much beloved by Breguet’s customers. But now he wanted something special — the “perfect watch,” he told Breguet.

  It was clear that the king didn’t expect much of an answer, perhaps an obsequious agreement and a bill, later on, when the “perfect” watch arrived at Versailles. But instead of scraping and bowing, the serious if distracted watchmaker answered truthfully within his capacity as watchmaker to the king. He knew there could be no perfect watch, for nothing he tried in his efforts to remove friction — from adding jewels to the pivots in order to reduce the contact of metal on metal, to polishing every spindle and gear, to shrinking the parts — got rid of it altogether. Instead of a bow and a quick retreat, Breguet contemplated the request for a moment. “Provide me the perfect oil, Sire,” he said finally, “and I will provide you the perfect watch.”

  When Breguet was coming up as an apprentice, he had seen firsthand the extent to which friction impeded the advance of the watchmaker’s art. Friction was the bête noire of watchmakers, an ever-present, entropic force working to shorten the life of a watch and diminish its accuracy. Each gear inside the watch that met with another – and that meant all of them – was affected by friction. Because of friction, the rubbing of metal on metal slowed the clock down and would eventually cause the whole mechanism to seize. Because of friction, gears could slip, and teeth and pivots could be rubbed away. Given enough time, a watch movement could conceivably turn into a pile of metal powder.

  Breguet’s predecessors had tried to combat the problem using solutions that could themselves be problematic. For centuries, the inner mechanisms of watches and clocks had been made of iron, and in an effort to mitigate friction watchmakers lubricated them with animal or fish oil (which is why some older clocks still stink of mackerel). But the oil itself would seize and bind, creating a gummy glue that kept gears from turning and left timepieces with an unpleasant odor — thus Breguet’s plea for the perfect oil.

  In an effort to find a new and better way, at a time when watches were becoming both more ornate and more precise, watchmakers began using rubies at pivot points for the gears. Although these polished jewels were considered rarities, they possessed a “hardness and capability of taking a high polish”65 that metal parts didn’t have, often didn’t require oil, and were relatively immune to temperature changes. There were a number of types of jewels, including “hole” jewels that kept wheel axles (called arbors) in place, and cap jewels that tipped arbors inside their holes. Jewelers eventually also used pallet jewels on the tiny fork that drives the escape wheel and, in turn, spins the registers. In all cases, the jewels acted as a sort of “glove” or cap to prevent metal from touching metal.

  Similarly, watchmakers began polishing almost every surface of their creations both for aesthetic reasons and because smooth surfaces meant less friction. In Switzerland, what came to be called the Geneva style — beveled edges, mirrored surfaces, and minuscule tolerances between parts — was invented, presaging the science of precision instruments by almost a half-century.

  Friction was only one of several issues confronting watchmakers. Others included the effects of gravity, the fragility of these increasingly intricate timepieces, and the tendency of watches to expand as their mechanical innards became more complex.

  One of Breguet’s masters, Jean-Antoine Lépine, made one of the great leaps forward in reducing watch size. He had originally been a master at enamel-work, and as an enamelist, he knew that bulbous watches in rounded cases were almost impossible to cover in colored glass. What he needed was a flat, large watch onto which he might place his designs and drawings.

  His great innovation was the Lépine caliber, the piano key caliber that reduced the main plate in a movement to little more than a few crossed pieces of metal. Over the years, watches had become thicker and thicker, with some watches approaching two centimeters from front to back. Lépine, after experimenting with different gearing systems, eventually created his caliber, a flat, disconnected series of small metal plates or bridges that simply held the gears in place. The difference in movements was striking. Prior to Lépine’s invention, watch movements looked like thick sandwiches of metal held together with little pillars of brass or iron — in short, they looked like miniaturized mantle clocks. Lépine’s first improved bridge looked like that same sandwich stripped of its filling — the gears and the springs — and spread out on a plate. The rearrangement allowed watches to be thinner and offered “economical advantages, and removal of the fusee also eliminated an important source of friction.”66

  Gravity, too, continued to bedevil watchmakers. With a clock’s pendulum, the arc of motion was constant. However, watches used spring a with a balance wheel, which served the same regulating function by “swinging” quickly back and forth. Gravity, especially when compounded by the haphazard position of a timepiece bouncing around in an aristocrat’s pocket, could distort the wheel’s equilibrium, causing the watch to run slow or fast.

  Gravity in the form of a watch hitting a hard marble floor could also put an end to a nicely ticking Breguet or Lépine caliber. Inadvertent shocks could cause the crystal covering the watch face to break, and parts to become misaligned. Wind and rain could get into non-watertight cases, wreaking havoc on the delicate mechanisms within.

  Thanks to wine-soaked evenings, and because the king enjoyed hunting, many elegant Parisians’ watches ended up falling to the ground or, more harmfully, onto the hard marble floors of Versailles. Breguet saw the effects first hand. When the Comptesse de Provence, the king’s sister-in-law, dropped her watch, breaking both the dial and the crystal face, it was to Breguet that she, like many of her peers, sent the watch to be repaired. To address the problem of fragility, in 1790 Breguet developed an antishock mechanism, a taut spring that held the escapement and balance wheel in place. Because it hung in space, he called it the para-chute. When a watch with a para-chute dropped, the springs took the brunt of the force. Breguet’s ability to shockproof watches became so renowned that, on one occasion, Talleyrand, a powerful French diplomat under Louis XVI, asked him to give a demonstration. Breguet threw a watch to the ground and lifted it again, showing that it was still running. Talleyrand was surprised and delighted, commenting that Breguet was really practicing wizardry and not watchmaking.

  The strength of his watches was also demonstrated by the straight-laced yet curious British General Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, a governor of New South Wales and science buff, who, “possessing one of these chronometers, subjected it to great trials by constantly wearing it on horseback; and during several long voyages, in sixteen months the greatest variation was only a second and a half.”67

  The extremes of temperature and humidity in the New World posed daunting challenges to the durability and accuracy of the watches worn by soldiers and sailors. Breguet worked to make his parts and screws ever more precise, allowing for a more watertight case, and made the first bimetallic thermometer small enough to incorporate into a watch.

  At a time when built-in winding crowns did not yet exist, Breguet invented a clever new key to wind watches. It worked perfectly when used properly, but disengaged if turned in the wrong direction, sparing innumerable courtiers from inadvertently damaging their Breguets while tipsy on Burgundy.

  In the ten years after Fersen commissioned the 160, Breguet embarked on a wildly creative period of exploration and innovation that would
not only address such problems but also dazzle the world with ingenuity and beauty. Breguet had spent most of his early years learning how a watch was made and, then, unlearning those same techniques. He had made his first major breakthrough a few years before, when he improved on the technique of harnessing a person’s kinetic energy to wind his watch. When the owner moved — or, in the queen’s case, glided — the miniscule movements of the weight would wind the mainspring.

  The perpetuelle – or perpetual – movement had been a long time in the making and was only just then coming into vogue. The history of the complication is murky, but Breguet’s assistant, Moinet, wrote that it was “a German invention copied in France.” A number of contemporary watchmakers claimed the title of inventor of the perpetual movement, including a man named Abraham-Louis Perrelet.

  The perpetual watch embodied the multitude of scientific disciplines that went into the manufacture of a new complication. Earlier “perpetual” clocks, described but not built in the seventeenth century, were to have been wound using bands strapped across the owner’s chest. As he inhaled or exhaled, a worm gear would wind the clock. Because of the obvious discomfort to the wearer, the patent was abandoned and the dream of an automatic watch unfulfilled until around 1770.

  The first concern about a perpetual watch was that the weight would pull free and become the proverbial bull in a china shop. If the weight were to crash into the rest of the gears, it would cause quite a mess. Second, if the wearer swung the watch too excitedly it could overwind the mainspring and seize the movement or, worse, the spring could go off like a bomb and shred the insides.

  Perrelet had created a form of automatic watch with a free weight that spun in a full circle when the wearer moved, but the weight could spin too fast and strip the movement to ribbons of brass. Perrelet’s watches were “double-action” in that the weight spun freely in both directions. This required a transmission system that was quite complex in that the gears that “accepted” this spinning had to be able to control for energy input in both directions. Such early automatics were massive things, weighing at least six ounces, and one collector complained “old-time horologists feared neither size nor weight for their mechanisms. They then overstepped the mark, as they later recognized, by making the power of winding by the oscillating mass so excessive that it jeopardized the running of the movement itself and inconvenienced the wearer.”68