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

by John Biggs

  Knowing he was unable to remain merely a spectator, and in the winter of 1790 he joined the Club des Jacobins, their meeting hall less than two miles from his home, and began to work with Robespierre in revolutionary politics. Many of his friends and customers were members of the Jacobins, which initially favored a constitutional monarchy, with a separation of powers similar to that in the nascent United States. At the same time, he was no radical, and owed his success, as well as the funding necessary to advance his art, to the wealth of the royal family and the aristocracy. Now he had to negotiate a new breed of noble.

  It saddened him to know that his most trusted customers, the king and queen of France, were around the corner at the Tuileries, the old palace that for years had been used as the Parisian halls of justice. It was a space barely fit for bureaucratic work, let alone habitation, yet Marie-Antoinette and her family were there, locked away like kidnapped royals in a fairy story.

  The royal family had been moved from Versailles to the Tuileries across from the Île on October 6, 1789, a few hours after a crowd of Parisians stormed the royal palace hunting for royal blood. The fracas was a violent one as “the bands of pikemen, the hideous prostitutes of the galleries of the Palais Royal, the infernal viragoes of the Revolution”79 all coalesced on the palace of the Sun king. The looting began, then, and the clocks of Versailles were torn down and stolen, their guts spilled on the hard marble floor, mixing with the blood from the “livid heads of the hapless, decapitated bodyguards.”80

  With characteristic naiveté, when Louis XVI entered the run-down former royal palace attached to the Louvre and visible from Breguet’s window, he said “It is always with pleasure and with confidence that I find myself amidst the inhabitants of my good city of Paris.”

  The palace, unused since the reign of Louis XV in 1722, was a hulking wreck at the heart of the city. It was “gloomy, out of repair, unfurnished, and undecorated” and the “locks closed badly,”81 a poignant affront to the king’s locksmith’s training. It was, in short, the antithesis of the light and airy Petit Trianon and far down the ladder of comfort from the confection that was Versailles.

  By some stroke of luck combined with diplomatic skill, Fersen, who spent most of his time in Paris now, was able to visit Marie often – “I see my love freely in her apartments,” he confided to his diary — although no one knew of his midnight rendezvouses.82 He kept the visits secret.

  All the while, he wrote furious letters to those who might be able to help Marie and her family, often receiving only cold silence in reply. He saw Marie that Christmas, then spent January plotting and talking love with his old friend Baron Evert Taube, an aide to Gustave III who had been sent to France to assess the strength and danger of the Revolution.

  Determined to do something about the situation, with Marie’s approval, Fersen began planning an escape. By this time, their relationship, long suspected, was almost public. The king was thought to know about it and, according to a letter by the Comte de Saint-Priest, a minister close to Fersen, Marie-Antoinette had used all of her charms to keep Louis placated, “repeating to her husband all the public gossip she learnt was circulating about this affair, and offered to stop seeing him.”83 The king, understanding the value of a free, valiant, and well-funded foreigner in this endeavor, looked the other way as Fersen completed the preparations. After all, Marie-Antoinette told her husband, “this foreigner was the only man they could count on.”

  The plan was simple. The royal family would move from Paris to the fortress town of Montmedy, whose Spanish-built citadel and fortifications in northern Lorraine would keep them safe as Louis XVI negotiated the plans for a peaceful move toward what would amount to a new constitutional monarchy. The days of absolute power would come to an end, but the royal family would be safe and they would not have to go into exile. Fersen, on the other hand, had the naive and heartsick hope that his plan would “re-establish everything as it was before the Revolution.”

  He kept his visits to the Tuileries secret by dressing as a “person of the household.” Since at least October, 1789, according to a letter from Quintin Craufurd, an author and intimate of Fersen’s who helped plan the escape, to William Pitt, in the dark of night Fersen would don a “frock, with a round hat” and would see the royal couple in the “king’s closet,” which, understandably, was a bit bigger than a place to keep shoes and clothing. There he saw the king and queen “once or twice a week,” maintaining ties to both throughout the planning process.

  Fersen’s home on Rue de Matignon, a mere five-minute walk from the Tuileries, became a sort of Bletchley Park for those plotting to save the French monarchy. Encrypted letters came and went from Fersen’s desk while secret rendezvouses were planned under his roof. Most letters to Fersen were made out to one Swedish Baron Hamilton while others took the names of other neutral parties including the Russian Baroness von Korff — whom Marie would impersonate during the escape.84

  By March of 1790, Fersen was tapering his social obligations in order to devote himself to working for the release of his beloved. “I now have so much to do and to write that I can scarcely go out, and still I must show myself in society so as not to arouse suspicions,” he wrote to his friend Taube. “I am entirely alone here in the city with this secret, for they have not a single person the king can rely on.” He did not expect to “demand anything” of the king and queen – although he did hope to be “amply repaid” – but he wanted to be of use to “them.”

  Fersen then planned the official route. After transferring from a fiacre to a berline at Porte Saint-Martin, the royal family would stop in Meaux, La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Montmirail, Châlons-sur-Marne, Sainte-Menehould, Varennes, Dun, and Stenay, all towns where the king’s safety was comparatively assured. Troops would be stationed in each place, with successive garrisons quietly taking up with the carriage as it passed, relieving the previous troops, who would then return to Paris. Austria was expected to stage fake maneuvers at the border to distract curious eyes from a lone carriage carrying a second-rate Baroness across the wide expanse of France. Fersen, who wanted to follow the family to safety, was told to stay in Paris, so as not to arouse suspicion.

  The real Madame de Korff ordered the berline on December 22, 1790, for 5,944 livres,85 from the saddler Monsieur Louis, the most famous carriage maker in Paris, who had built many vehicles for the king and queen. Madame de Korff told the carriage maker that her representative, Fersen, would pay for it and drive it away upon completion. By January, Fersen was becoming impatient and threatened Monsieur Louis with cancellation if the carriage didn’t arrive by February 2. The saddler and his staff rushed to complete it, and then it sat, seemingly forgotten, for months as Fersen disappeared, engulfed by the minutiae of the trip. By now – with all the plans in place – it was clear that the carriage would be the least expensive accouterment of the trip. Bouille, the general given charge of moving troops and handling the postilions as the king and queen travelled to Varennes, expected the trip to cost almost one million livres, and he expected payment up front. In all, it is believed that Fersen laid out 600,000 livres of his own money on the expedition, or about $6 to $10 million in today’s dollars.

  On February 3, 1791, Marie-Antoinette sent a letter to the envoy Mercy describing the royal family’s intention to travel from Paris to the French border, announce amnesty to the revolutionaries, and propose a new constitution based on the declaration of the rights of man. She requested the support of Swiss and Austrian troops. “We shall not act in haste,” Marie-Antoinette wrote. “It would be better to spend another year in prison and be sure of getting out than to risk being brought back.” The letter accompanied a box, to be hidden in Brussels for safety, containing diamonds, jewelry, and some of Breguet’s finest watches.

  Chapter 10

  Jerusalem

  Ephraim Mizrakhi woke Zadok Cohen at 10:00 a.m. on April 16, 1983, the Sabbath. It had been a long night, with a new moon, and Ephraim had found it hard to stay awake while m
aking his rounds. He had just patrolled the entire L.A. Mayer Museum, strolling past the vases and rugs, the darkened halls and the locked doors that kept the museum’s more valuable pieces safe. Then he went for a quick walk around the outside of the building, checking for unwanted visitors, but he saw nothing amiss. Soon it would be time for Zadok to open the doors, and for both of them finish their shifts. They would run through one final patrol at 10:30, twelve hours after their last night patrol, and then unlock the doors at 11 a.m.

  Zadok stretched in his chair and yawned, glancing at the clock on the wall. The museum had closed at two the previous afternoon, in time for Shabbat, and they had been free to do as they pleased. Through the night, on a small television in the guard station, he and Ephraim had watched the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson, about a hermit in the Rocky Mountains who fights against an onslaught of Crow Indians. The museum was quiet, an oasis high above the tumult of Jerusalem’s Old City; they usually did one or two rounds and then dozed in the office, confident that no intruder would disturb their sleep.

  Now, Zadok walked past the staircase leading to the lower level and moved toward the family gallery, the room full of old clocks. Most mornings, he could hear them ticking, their strong springs still going after a night’s work. He knew that the family gallery held hundreds of horological marvels, and that most were in perfect condition. Sometimes they were a bit off, depending on the weather, but he could usually set his watch by them. The collection, people whispered, was estimated to be worth about $7.5 million.

  As Zadok paused outside the gallery, he craned his head to listen. Silence. Maybe they had wound down. He stood there a few more minutes. No ticking. He put his key into the lock and turned. The heavy bolts slid back, and the door swung open. He caught a whiff of fresh air that gusted from the open window above the shattered glass cabinets and broken display tables. He rushed back up the stairs to the guard post, calling for Ephraim to contact Rachel Hasson, the museum curator.

  Ephraim, after taking in the scene for himself, described it over the phone to Hasson: locks broken, trash scattered on the floor. The guard couldn’t say exactly what was missing, but it was clearly most of the collection. Hasson, “shocked” by what she heard, asked about the queen, the most important watch in the group. Zadok re-created the scene in his head, but he couldn’t remember seeing the watch amid the jumble of glass and wood.

  Hasson phoned the keeper of the watches, Ohannes Markarian, then drove the few kilometers from her home in Rehavia, north of the museum. The then thirty-nine-year-old Hasson had started working at the museum in 1967, while it was still under construction, but even after all these years, her familiarity with the family gallery was limited. Her background was in Islamic art, and her mission was to bring Arab art to Israel. The watches, to her, had always been an afterthought. When she arrived, Markarian was already in the family gallery, running a tally of the missing pieces. He hid his eyes, for as they swept across the broken expanse of empty exhibits, they began to tear up.

  If Breguet had been reincarnated, it might have been as Ohannes Markarian, the portly, bespectacled watchmaker who had maintained the L.A. Mayer collection for a decade before losing it on that morning in April.

  In Armenian, Markarian’s language of birth, he was called a hanchar, a word that translated to “a genius who took great care of the talent that God gave him.” In Israel, for at least twenty-five years, he was considered the one man who could fix a timepiece and never have it break, a claim that his many satisfied customers repeated after leaving Jerusalem with their newly cleaned and tightly wound watches.

  He was born in Istanbul in 1923. His family had survived the Armenian genocide, and after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Markarians left Turkey. They settled in Jerusalem when Ohannes was four. At fifteen, he began his training in Old Jaffa, where he learned the prerequisites for watchmaking from a “very old man” who taught him carpentry, goldsmithing, and toolmaking. As he grew older and became more established in the watchmaking world, he realized that all of the ancillary techniques he learned from his master helped in his craft. Carpentry helped him rebuild broken clock cases, while goldsmithing taught him to be scrupulous with his materials. He learned to make very small things and very large things, and also learned to create his own tools when there were none to be found in the impoverished Old City.

  He was talented at math and science and maintained high enough marks so that when he graduated he could have studied to become a doctor. But that type of training would have required him to leave the country. His grandfather, however, still bore the mental scars of the Armenian Genocide and said, “I have lost one family in Turkey. I’m not losing this one in Jerusalem.” Ohannes stayed put, instead becoming a doctor to old clocks.

  At seventeen, he moved to Jerusalem’s Old City and apprenticed with a series of watchmakers who still kept stalls there. The winding passages of the ancient neighborhood were, like Breguet’s Place Dauphin, chock full of experts in every field. Markarian was able to refine his craft by working on ancient clockwork and modern wristwatches alike. There were two other watchmakers in the Old City at the time and they guarded their business jealously, an attitude still encountered there today. When I wandered into a watch repair shop by the Tower of David one summer afternoon to ask about Markarian’s old shop, the proprietor pretended not to know the location and then said “I’m the only Markarian you need,” as if the name of the master watchmaker now described a profession in itself.

  As a teenager, Markarian turned his love of clockwork into a paid position with the British High Command, where he maintained office clocks and other delicate mechanical instruments used by the British authorities in Palestine. During World War II he worked for the British Army repairing naval and artillery instruments.

  At twenty-five, he opened his own store in the Old City, on Christian Quarter Road, in a small, rounded stall with a large front room, a 10-by-20-foot rear storage area, and a small corner containing a restroom. Here he cared for and maintained a number of ancient clocks and watches brought to him by distraught curators. And here he kept his replacement parts – a collection that would soon engulf the entire shop – as well as all of his notes. He was a bookworm and meticulous note-taker, examining each piece of a watch and noting its design and problems in a series of notebooks. This habit helped him rebuild the watch when it was time to put all of the pieces together, and it also gave him an intimate understanding of every gear and cog in some of the greatest watches ever made.

  He also helped maintain the bronze artifacts at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and recorded, in his head, a rich history of Jerusalem that he would expound upon from his small shop or over long lunches with friends and admirers. He amassed a personal collection that ran from thirteenth-century carriage clocks to modern quartz pieces. He began wearing a ring of watch keys on his belt, and as his business – and belly – grew he added more and more keys, resulting in a jingling, heavy collection that he carried with him at all times.

  The two rival watchmakers in the Christian Quarter tried to keep up with Ohannes, but “everyone realized he was better than them,” said his daughter. Markarian became known as a horological miracle worker. A relative claimed that “when he fixed a watch once, it never needed repairs again,”86 and he was considered a master of mathematics, engineering and art. Those skills, coupled with his experience in metalwork, enamel and woodwork, encompassed everything he needed to know to be a master watchmaker.

  His reputation expanded from his little shop and into the wider world. Slowly, business trickled in from Paris and London, then America and Asia. He was very protective of his watches, treating them like tiny, broken birds requiring a calm, careful hand. When he received a new watch for repair, he would spend hours – if not days – brooding over his bench. He sometimes brought his work home with him, but often left priceless horological masterpieces in his little shop. He trusted his neighbors implicitly, and knew they would deal quickly
with anyone attempting to steal his broken treasures. When he finished with a watch, he would say, simply, “I made it tick again.” He said this thousands of times over his long career. When nearby shopkeepers came in to swap stories and gossip, if they saw him working at his bench they would quickly scamper off rather than risk his wrath at being disturbed.

  In 1970, Vera Salomons hired him to prepare her father’s watch collection for viewing at the L.A. Mayer Museum, and from its opening in 1974, Markarian presided over the family gallery, maintaining watches so precious and delicate that he was often loath to wind them. But he visited at least twice weekly to wind, oil, and dust off the specimens. Many of them, Markarian said, kept time as well as a “brand new Seiko.”87

  With the esteemed Breguet expert George Daniels, Markarian created a color catalog of the Salomons Collection. Published in 1980 in West Germany, the 318-page book featured notes and images for every item, from the mechanical “Singing-bird in a cage,” a nearly life-sized bird that twittered and tweeted with the turn of a clockwork key, to the crown jewel, the watch they called the Queen.

  On the morning of the theft, Markarian arrived at 11:39 — he was characteristically precise in noting when events transpired — as the sun was high over the pale stone of the museum. He ran to the family gallery and was horrified. The room had been ransacked, but he was surprised by how orderly it still was, even amid the chaos. There was little broken glass, just pita-sized circles cut out from the vitrines and placed carefully on the floor. Some empty food wrappers, Coke cans, and cigarette butts lay there, too, along with something that looked like a blanket, but nothing else was amiss. It was as if someone had come in, made very specific choices about what to take, and then calmly departed with the haul of a lifetime and one of the biggest watch heists in world history.