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

by John Biggs

  Another problem was efficiency. Before Breguet’s improvements to the automatic movement, it was “necessary for the wearer to walk far and energetically in order to wind them up, but they went wrong all the time.”69 Perrelet’s invention improved on this efficiency slightly, but Breguet’s creations brought it to its apex, and Breguet was the first to popularize the automatic movement in common watches.

  Breguet, by changing the shape of the oscillator to one similar to the ace of spades and limiting its rotation to a back-and-forth motion within a circumscribed arc, was the first to successfully and sustainably adapt the technology to watches. His weight would wind the watch without causing internal damage, and it wound the mainspring with a gentle force that ensured that the mechanism would not be overwound. David Salomons, a major collector of Breguet watches in the nineteenth century, would write that “some of the watches Breguet made have been worn constantly for eight years without having been opened (for repair) and without showing the slightest trace of damage.”70 This was a tall order in a world where the average watch was minutes fast or slow and often stopped if the owner looked at it funny.

  To Fersen and everyone he knew, the perpetual was something akin to magic. In an era of clattering clockwork, “watches that wind themselves” – even the description hints at witchcraft – would have been a marvel.

  Many questioned whether such watches weren’t a figment of someone’s imagination. In a letter written in June 1780, a poet and priest named Abbé Desprades requested information from the Société typographique, a publishing house in Neuchâtel that also sold watches:

  People [at the French court] are incredulous about the watches that need never be wound. In order persuade the public of their existence, it might be advisable to send one here; I will undertake this task willingly, if so wished; I would buy one of this type if I were sure it really worked and that in case of accident I could be sure of finding someone here to mend it, but in any case I cannot commit myself.

  The perpetuelle, then, was the first must-have gadget.

  These watches took far longer to build and were much more expensive than the standard “mechanical” hand-wound models, but Breguet spared no expense, and at this point in his long career he made perpetuelles almost exclusively.

  Watchmaker Louis Perrot noted in 1780 that an eight-minute walk would wind the Breguet automatic movement for twenty-four hours and that “not everyone is capable of producing them.”71 In fact, they were so difficult that Breguet eventually began to lose money on every one made due to the time, complexity, and cost of materials involved. However, the perpetual watches made Breguet’s name in Paris, making his automatic timepieces the first loss-leader.

  He had taken a nascent technology and, using simple tools and potentially impure metals, created a device that could last two hundred or more years of constant jostling, winding, and unwinding. It was no wonder that this, Breguet’s first major invention, became so popular.

  Now, his ideas kept coming. Breguet knew that the only way to differentiate himself in the crowded French market was to create a signature design. While many watchmakers worked in the “old school” style, dressing up their cases with pavé diamonds and enamel, Breguet focused on legibility and elegance. His first contribution to the art was what came to be known as the Breguet numerals. They were spider-thin at the joints and dark and bold on the up and down strokes. The 1 looked vaguely Middle Eastern, while the 7 and 8 were whimsically drawn, the 7 featuring a little brow on the top stroke, and the 8 a fat tummy and small head. The markings between hours were simple, small lines, and Breguet often marked hours with diamonds or little pips resembling miniature fleur-de-lis. He cleaved to this style even for export models, creating a similar typeface — long before the concept of branding through typography became commonplace — for Chinese, Turkish, and other Eastern markets.

  Where watch dials had traditionally been covered with enamel, Breguet popularized the use of guilloche, imparting a suave metallic shimmer to the face of a watch. Marie-Antoinette made a gift of one of Breguet’s first guillochéd watches to Axel von Fersen.

  Another innovation was the pomme hand, later to be known as the Breguet hand, which looked like a small poppy bud at the end of a long thin stalk. On a crowded face, it helped with readability, and it also boosted legibility at night. Many watchmakers had already taken to using white dials to make the most of existing light, but long thin hands still tended to disappear in the dark. By crowning the hands with tiny, hollow circles tipped in sharp points, Breguet allowed his customers to see instantly where the end of each hand was pointing, and, in low light, the tiny outline of a circle differentiated the hand from numerals and other shadows. It was an elegant fix to a thorny problem.

  During this time, Breguet also popularized the minute repeater and quarter repeater, functions that allowed a dandy wandering the boulevards at night to tell the time; when he pressed a button, his watch would sound the time using a coded series of dings (for each hour), ding-dongs (for each quarter hour), and dongs (for each minute). Ding, ding..., ding-dong, ding-dong..., dong... told him it was 2:31 and time for bed.

  Breguet changed the sound of those dings and dongs, too, when he invented the gong spring. Previously, watches chimed using tiny hammers striking tiny bells or metal disks; Breguet’s invention used a gong made of wire, which when paired with a delicately calibrated hammer achieved a more precise pitch and volume, with a prettier sound, using less space.

  As his watches became more and more complicated — in 1785, Breguet made his first watch with a power-reserve indicator (the needle informing the wearer how much energy remained in the spring) — Breguet evolved new techniques to bridge their mechanical intricacy with the elegance their exteriors required. A watch Breguet made around the time of Fersen’s commission was a quarter repeater with a retrograde seconds hand — a seconds hand that moved from zero to sixty and then popped back to zero again. Rather than crowding the dial with ornamentation and curlicues, Breguet simply placed the retrograde hand in the corner — a long, thin stick pointing to a condensed collection of numbers and pips — and the current time front and center. Decisions like these almost hid the complication, allowing courtiers a bit more time to enthuse about the functions to a genuinely interested — or politely nodding — lady and creating a conversation piece of muted understatement.

  Breguet’s most brilliant achievements took place out of sight, within his watches’ movements. Nearly all of these innovations were aimed at reducing friction and further miniaturizing watches. Breguet was religious about polishing every part, and then polishing it some more, as a way to cut down on friction. But polishing wasn’t enough and in 1789 he developed a so-called natural escapement. A traditional lever escapement worked by starting and stopping, lending watches their ticking sound but introducing a certain amount of friction. Breguet’s new escapement had a few more parts, but they worked together to cause the escapement wheel to roll, rather than stop, and reduced overall friction to such a degree that lubrication was no longer required for that part of the watch. Different movements used different escapements, and Breguet made similar, friction-reducing improvements to other common escapements including the ruby cylinder and the detente. However, his natural escapement was his most famous.

  As his jealous competitors often noted, Breguet improved on a great many things rather than outright invented them, but the things he pushed to market were accepted without question and would be incorporated into many watches long after his death. “Breguet’s genius,” a collector later wrote, was the “power that he had even over kings, [allowing him to] force upon them anything that he pleased.”72

  Slowly, gradually, Breguet gathered the skills necessary to complete Fersen’s commission. As each part fell into place, the list of potential complications grew. He learned to build a calendar, and also a dead-beat hand — a hand that ticked once a second like a grandfather clock — and added those to the plan for the watch. In his neat, or
derly diaries, he drew a number of his improvements, sketching blue and black circles showing interconnecting gears, the delicate curves of gong springs, the scintillating teeth of escapements. Beside them, he wrote copious notes describing each one in detail.

  For some time, Breguet had been working on his 92nd commission, a watch for his loyal benefactor the Duc de Praslin, and he incorporated his expanding number of innovations into the watch as a kind of rough draft for the 160. The 92 was a miracle of compression and engineering. It had a rose engraved case adorned with delicate patterns and repeating motifs of astonishing fineness for work done by hand. On the back of the watch, a sanguine moon peered out from the moon phase, and the name “Breguet” floated amid bulbous clouds. The setting and regulation features, along with a power reserve indicator, were also hidden on the back.

  The front was busier. One circle, separated into three sections, featured a perpetual calendar, a central seconds hand, and an equation of time. The central hour and minute hands, in Breguet style, were tipped with hollow bulbs, while the rest of the indicators looked like delicate spines that radiated out from the two, six, and ten o’clock positions on the dial. The watch was a minute repeater, which gave off a loud tap — or “toc” — for the ten minutes, and a gong for minutes and hours. Breguet added a small screw to keep the face in place, allowing it to be removed and replaced. Because the screw looked identical to the other small square sockets that controlled the winding and setting of the watch, Breguet made it slightly larger to prevent an overzealous winder from breaking the face. The 92 was a striking predecessor to the 160.

  Even as the wheels and gears in Breguet’s watches clicked and whirred, even as the craftsmen in his shop worked quietly and efficiently to assemble his one-of-a-kind creations, Breguet faced mounting business problems, exacerbated by the early tremors of revolution that were beginning to wrack the world beyond the Quai.

  For years, the royal classes had been in a fury of spending, mostly on credit. To appear at court required ornate costumes, hairstyles, and jewelry, even as most of France lived in grinding poverty. Breguet, a shrewd businessman, had offered easy credit to these spendthrifts. It was understood that eventually even the wastrel courtiers would repay their debts. To fail at business in this court was a personal thing, and no one, not even the courtiers with the most extravagant debts, would dream of defaulting. Bankruptcy was a stain on one’s good name. It was only in the advanced throes of the Revolution that members of the royal court would start to default on their loans — either officially, through lawyers, or unofficially, under the guillotine. In the meantime, they were happy to run up outrageous bills throughout the capital and, if matters became too egregious, ask the king himself to cover their debts.

  But now, the nobles he had so graciously supplied with credit and merchandise were on the run, escaping their creditors the way they were escaping the rabble calling for their heads. Breguet himself didn’t feel entirely safe in Paris. The school for watchmaking set up by the king had lasted only until the beginning of the Revolution, reducing Breguet’s employee base. Breguet’s firm was in a dire situation. Jewelers who sold his watches on commission were not paying and even the Prince of Wales – a customer from whom Breguet eventually extracted a payment – refused to answer correspondence.

  Faced with a growing list of uncollected receivables, Breguet was forced to sell watches abroad, in countries like England, Spain, and Poland, and to pursue new relationships with foreign courts that still had a modicum of disposable income. And in 1787, Breguet took on an investor, the horologist Xavier Gide, who injected 50,000 livres in cash and another 50,000 livres in stock, including a number of mid-range watches. Gide wanted to move the house in a more popular direction, creating large numbers of watches for the middle class instead of focusing on the fickle royals and their sycophants. Breguet, on the other hand, simply wanted to create beautiful and complex watches; though he had keen commercial instincts, he preferred to give his attention to experimenting with the perpetuelle and the other techniques he was slowly adding to the higher-end of the range.

  He spent most of the early revolutionary years travelling, trying to extract payment from his severely delinquent customers. In London, he sought payment from the likes of the aforementioned Prince of Wales (whom Gide, his partner, said was “not considered a good payer”). At almost every manor house he stopped at in England he was rebuffed at first, but the same persistence, patience, and friendly disposition that had won him commissions now won him a full purse as he returned to France with most of his accounts in order. While in England, he had also visited James Watt’s factory in Birmingham, studying the famed inventor’s steam engines and machines. And Breguet had met with John Arnold, a watchmaker who, in 1764, built the smallest repeating watch in the world and set it in a ring worn by king George III. Arnold had a soft spot for the French watchmaker. A few years earlier he had found a Breguet watch in London and marveled at the quality and engineering, amazed that “any thing could be so well executed out of England.” The two met in Paris, and Breguet decided “to give a proof of his esteem and affection for Arnold, desired him to take his son with him to England and instruct him in their art.” A historian notes, with a bit of saccharine, that this decision was “worthy of the imitation of many men of talent, so often divided by jealousy and a spirit of rivalry.”73

  Gide became angry that Breguet was still paying attention to his more complicated commissions instead of spending hours in fancy drawing rooms trying to broach the subject of his customers’ credit accounts. Talleyrand, in January of 1791, brought in a broken watch for repair, but he, too, was often late to pay, and in February 21 Gide entreated Breguet to refuse to return the piece until he paid up and “Try and finish with him!”74

  Gide chiefly wanted to produce cheaper watches and to sell inexpensive watches under the Breguet brand; he wanted the master to spend his time convincing customers that even watches his watchmakers hadn’t touched were worth the livres they were asking. In fact, Breguet was so busy selling watches made by others and branded with the Breguet a Paris name that in 1791 only 3 of the 31 perpetuelles under way in the factory were completed and sold.

  Though Breguet had been away most of the year, he stayed informed about the slow disintegration of France and her monarchy. On June 19, 1790, just as he was preparing to return to Paris, he received a distressing note from his partner Gide: “Here are more new decrees which will dismay the aristocrats: no more counts, marquesses and monseigneurs, no more liveries... And that is not all: the figures representing the nations in chains on the statue in the place des Victories are to go before 15 July. And the inscriptions on the statue of Henri IV are also to be removed. You will find Paris and France recast; little by little the authentic rights of man will appear in their true light... How glorious it is to be alive during such a revolution.”75 Ironically, the very freedom Gide was celebrating was exacting a terrible toll on their business and bringing Breguet’s most loyal customers to ruin.

  When Breguet was in Paris, many of his biggest supporters were still stopping by the shop to discuss the news of the day and have their watches repaired. One evening, he was sitting quietly at his bench, staring at the watch in his hand. He hadn’t had many moments like this during his itinerant last few years. An oil lamp burned nearby, casting shadows around the now empty workshop, and its weak flame flickered in the breeze from the river coming through the open windows. His son Antoine-Louis was safely across the channel in England, but Paris still seemed the best place for Breguet. Excepting the odd cry from below – that afternoon he had heard a crowd yell “Kill the Austrian Bitch” and then a hail of shattering wine bottles crash through the streets below – the Île was quiet. He could easily sit at the bench for hours after his workers had gone home for the night, and he felt he needed to be here.

  Records are lost from that period, but we know that work on the 160 progressed apace, and whether it was an act of loyalty or an effort to surmoun
t a challenge, the watch on Breguet’s workbench continued to come together just as Paris – and France – was coming apart. Some days, Fersen dropped into the shop, his handsome face drawn and tired with worry, to inquire about the watch.76

  A leading Breguet historian, George Daniels, admitted that at best most of Breguet’s life during these years was best conjecture and at worst fabrication. Although orders and some letters pertaining to the business exist, their taciturn brevity leave only tantalizing clues as to Breguet’s actions during the Revolution.

  Breguet had been in Paris on July 14 of the previous year, for the storming of the Bastille, but he only heard secondhand news of the Fête de la Fédération, the celebration of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille that the London Times described as peaceful “excepting the bursting of a cannon, and the fall of a tree by which one man lost his life.”77 It was also reported that the King, fearing assassination, had begun to wear another piece of technology, an armored chest plate called a plastron “to ward off a poniard thrust. Composed of fifteen thicknesses of Italian taffeta, this [shield] consisted of a vest and a large belt.”78

  Even though Breguet rarely played politics he was perceived as soft on the nobles. A royalist, in those chaotic days, was anyone who did business with the royals. This simple equation threatened to get the focused and quiet watchmaker killed on the streets of Paris. The meetings of the National Convention had become less of a circus, but the rabble still took to the streets at the slightest provocation. Thousands of men and women could swarm a prison or palace and call for blood, and these crowds, more often than not, got their due.