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

by John Biggs

  He saw where a line of modeling clay had been placed along the inside edge of the room’s door to prevent the guards from seeing light inside. The clay was devoid of fingerprints. A piece of black cardboard lay below a window that was slightly ajar. A seventeenth-century French table had been broken, probably when the thief dropped a bag onto it as he jumped down into the room from the window. The damage was limited but the theft complete. Markarian could hardly believe it; a large portion of the contents of the family museum, which had survived undisturbed for nearly a century, had vanished overnight. He walked wistfully past the holes and stands that once held the watches and clocks he had maintained for over a decade. He brushed his hand over the empty spaces and idly thumbed the curatorial notes that remained.

  Moments later, the head of the museum board, Dr. Gavriel Moriah, arrived and surveyed the damage. Right away, he saw that the most magnificent pieces were gone: A singing bird gun (a clockwork novelty by the Roche Brothers, which played a jaunty tune on tiny whistles when wound and fired); a Swiss-made automaton of a walking woman; and almost all of the Breguet timepieces, including the Sympathetique, which used a main clock to wind and set a perfectly matched pocket watch, and, most devastatingly, the Queen. In all, the thief had taken one hundred watches, four oil paintings, and three antique books.

  The police had been called, and the first officers on the scene found leftover strips of cloth that had apparently been used to bind the clocks for packing. The officers were amazed that anyone could have gotten the clocks out through the window, let alone that a human being could have slid through the tiny opening undetected. “Only people with a thin build could enter that narrow window,” an officer reported later, matter-of-factly.

  An air mattress lay unfurled on the floor, probably used to cushion the fall of the equipment pushed through the small window. A can of Coca-Cola and a bag of sandwiches lay unfinished near one of the cases, and a bag nearby contained long-handled pliers and a heavy hammer. A rope ladder, probably a spare, was still in its original packaging.88

  By the size of the job, it looked to the police as if at least three men had been involved. That they were able to make off with over half of the collection in the course of an evening suggested that they had gathered all of the clocks together first, then quickly moved them out through the window. One man would have been inside, pushing the bags out, another outside, grabbing them, and a third one sitting in the car waiting for the getaway.

  Felix Saban, Deputy Commander of the Jerusalem police, soon arrived with a mobile forensics van. His team traced the thieves’ steps from the side of the museum, where they must have parked, to the bent bars in the fence, to the climb through the thin window leading into the clock room. They began dusting for fingerprints, but this effort quickly proved fruitless — the room was already full of prints, and the thief had been unusually careful. The police were also surprised to find a listening device: a microphone by the door, attached to a wire running to an amplifier and a pair of headphones that the thief used to listen for the sound of footsteps through the door; there were some prints on the cable, but they were too fragmentary to be useful. Later, as the legend of the theft grew, some police officers would report seeing a half-eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich on the floor, seemingly a taunting gesture given the location and heritage of the museum. In truth, it was quite difficult, if not impossible, to get sliced ham in Jerusalem.

  “This theft was more daring than sophisticated,” Ezekial McCarthy, the spokesperson for the Jerusalem police, told a Sunday newspaper. “The burglars knew the place well and did not leave themselves open to surprise. It is possible that they visited the exhibit several times and they may have also walked in with a catalog in hand and took only what was ordered by their higher-ups. They chose an amazing collection of watches and left a number of uninteresting ones, which suggests a selective knowledge.”

  Another clue came from the tags stolen. Most of the watches and clocks had English and Hebrew curatorial notes, but the thieves had taken only a few, leaving behind the notes for paintings they took and some of the clockwork. This led police to believe it was a planned job, probably commissioned by a dealer in Europe. “They stole what was on their list, and would have been expecting payment for those items,” said a police officer. “The extra stuff [like the paintings] was, well, extra.”

  On further investigation, the police discovered that, almost ten years after the museum’s opening, its directors were still bickering over what kind of security system to install. As a result, there was almost no security at all. The Jerusalem Post reported that “there was a single alarm for the entire building and this had never worked from the day it was installed.” Without the alarm active, the museum had security “about equivalent to that of a medium-sized kindergarten in an old neighborhood,” as one investigator said.

  News of the theft spread quickly through the watch world and beyond. The Swiss watch industry was already suffering a major downturn and consolidation. Japanese quartz watches had decimated the market for low-cost mechanical watches. Smaller houses like Breguet, which had been in continuous business for two centuries, were out of money, and investors were swooping in to buy them in what amounted to a fire sale. Stories about the break-in appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Watchmakers were put on high alert; Interpol scrambled to monitor all prominent collectors moving in and out of Israel.

  Gavriel Moriah, the museum board chairman, was certain that the thieves could not be working for a collector. “There’s no such thing as a collector who keeps his most prized possessions in a safe and never shows them to anybody,” he said. “A collector collects for gratification, and part of that gratification is to be able to show them off.”89

  An Associated Press story, which appeared the week after the theft, pegged the stolen collection’s value at $5 million and mentioned the most famous of the missing watches only in passing, describing it as built of “gold, crystal and glass.”

  Ohannes returned home on Sunday after almost twenty-four hours of nonstop work. He fell, exhausted, into one of the kitchen chairs. His wife, after hearing the story of the break-in, stood quietly looking at her husband.

  “You won’t have a job, now,” she said, finally. “What will you do?”

  He shook his head. “They’re accusing me of the theft,” he said. The police had taken every staffer’s fingerprints, including his, but, for obvious reasons, his were the prints that showed up the most in the family gallery.

  His daughter, Araxi, remembers the weekend vividly.

  “He was very, very upset. I didn’t understand at the time, because I was too young. Nobody spoke to him in the house,” she said.

  Mrs. Markarian told the children to play quietly. “Keep away from your daddy, he is very upset. The watches and the clocks have been stolen and they think he stole them,” she told them. Araxi’s sister Silva laughed.

  “Why would he ever steal them? He’s the one who loves them the most!”

  After the theft, Markarian did the best he could with the remaining timepieces, continuing to visit weekly to wind them. The museum loaned two of the clocks, one made by Hinton Brown of England in 1770, to the presidential palace, where they would presumably be safer.

  Markarian gave tours of the remaining collection by appointment only, and one visitor remembers him sighing when he pulled open a drawer containing the boxes that once held some of horology’s most beloved masterpieces. He ran his hand along the indentations in the soft red silk where the watches once lay and then shut the drawer firmly, as if trying to forget the loss of his beautiful charges.

  He missed all of the watches but the watch that pained him the most, the watch that would later be valued at $11 million dollars and hold the world, for a time, in a thrall, was the Queen, the eighteenth century’s most complex artifact, a watch of such beauty and precision and freighted with such tragedy that it would later become known simply as the Marie-Antoinette.

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nbsp; Chapter 11

  Paris

  On the eve of the summer equinox a fiacre rolled through the narrow cobbled streets of Paris. It was a dowdy carriage, unrecognizable and unassuming, with nothing about it that would attract special notice from the city’s watchmen and lamplighters. It was big enough to hold seven people, and inside the carriage, according to papers accompanying its occupants, were the Russian Baroness de Korff, her servants — Madame Rocher, a governess; Rosalie, a companion; and Durand, a valet de chambre — and daughters Amelia and Aglae. One of the little girls slept soundly on the carriage floor, under the baroness’s petticoats.

  But nothing was as it appeared on this summer evening in 1791. The baroness was in fact Madame de Tourzel, the actual governess to the royal children whom Fersen, not trusting any of the queen’s courtiers or employees, called that “wretched woman-of-the-bedchamber.” The “governess” was the queen herself, Rosalie was her sister Elizabeth, and the butler, Durand, was Louis XVI. Only one of the children was a girl: twelve-year-old Marie Thérèse, daughter of the king and queen. The other, lying on the floor, was her brother, the six-year-old dauphin, Louis-Charles, who had asked, on being told of their late night mission, to be allowed to wear his “sabre and boots” but had been dressed up in girl’s clothing instead. The carriage the royal family was travelling in did not belong to them, and none of their servants had been made aware of its existence. The palace prison that J.B. Gouvion, liaison to the Paris National Guard, said was so secure that “not even a mouse could escape from there” had just been breached.90

  The coachman, who now pushed the horses along, had long before procured the coach and planned the daring journey. Now, weaving through the fetid byways of the darkened city, periodically checking his silver soldier’s Breguet, he kept a wary eye on the empty streets. Axel von Fersen, dressed as a footman, with his face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat, snapped his whip to goad the animals onward.

  Eventually, the carriage ducked through a gate at the city perimeter and came to a stop. Fersen left the party and returned momentarily with another longer carriage, a berline pulled by six horses, large enough to accommodate the entire family comfortably. Its slender iron wheels looked as if they would give them trouble over rough roads, but for passenger comfort the carriage couldn’t be better. No expense had been spared in its construction, at least on the inside. The interior included “white taffeta [cushions], double curtains of taffeta and leather on all the windows, two cooking stoves of iron plate, [and] two chamber pots of varnished leather.”91 All of these perks came from the pocket of Fersen, who also provisioned the carriage with “beef a la mode and cold veal together with a bag of small change for use at the posting-houses, a bottle of still champagne, and five bottles of water:”92 a feast for a king and his retinue, in exile, complete with tolls for the trip.

  At Bondy, ten miles outside of Paris, Fersen said good-bye. He had wanted to continue to accompany the royal family, but the king had amiably but firmly refused, and now did so again. Later, some would suggest that the king had not wished to be chaperoned to safety by a man who was sleeping with his wife. Madame de Tourzel, the queen’s handmaiden who was impersonating the Russian baroness, would write: “The king, in saying good-bye, expressed his gratitude in the most affectionate manner, saying he hoped to be able to do so other than in words, and that he expected to see him again soon.”

  Marie Thérèse later wrote of Fersen’s leaving with a decided finality, noting “he bade my father goodnight, mounted his horse, and disappeared.”93 Fersen was heading north toward Belgium.

  By the time Fersen left, the royal family was already hours behind schedule, and they fell even further behind in their new vehicle. Had the family purchased two or three smaller carriages — rather than the single, larger berline on which the king insisted — they could have travelled farther faster.

  Only after dawn had broken, and they had entered the Marne valley and felt safely away from Paris, were they able to relax for the first time. They ate the food Fersen had supplied, and, ever the explorer, the king unfolded a map of the countryside and began checking off the names of the towns they passed.

  Despite the dangers that still faced them — earlier, Fersen had written to Bouille, “One can only shudder at the thought of the horrors that would take place if they were stopped” – the king became almost reckless, periodically getting out to empty his bladder or stretch his legs, and offering hearty farewells to loyal subjects who recognized him immediately, thanks to a wedding trip north in 1775 and a number of drawings passed out as gifts in the preceding years. At one point, he got out of the carriage and leisurely discussed the harvest with some local farmers. “We’re out of danger now,” he explained to his coachman Moustier, gravely underestimating the power and reach of the Revolution.

  Threats to their mission accrued inexorably. At one relay station, the royal family accepted the posting master’s invitation to come inside for refreshments. They stayed half an hour. Back on the road, they tried to make up for lost time, and in their haste, a wheel came off the carriage, necessitating another half hour’s delay as it was repaired. At Chalons, the king stuck his head out the window, and received many well wishes. After the carriage left the town, even Marie was becoming more confidant, and announced, “We are saved!” But the people of the town had already fallen into argument over how the royals should be treated. An hour later, a lone man on horseback, who has never been identified, approached the coach and said, “Your plans have gone awry. You will be stopped!”

  The royal family was approaching the string of towns on the road to Montmedy where General Louis de Bouillé, the loyal military leader, had moved a succession of garrisons under the pretense of protecting a shipment of money to the provinces. But by now the soldiers had been waiting for hours and were growing nervous that the royal family had yet to appear. In the first town, peasants angry at the unexplained presence of the military began to congregate with guns and pitchforks, and the garrison abandoned its post. Half an hour later, the royal carriage rattled in, the royal family expecting to come under the protection of Bouille’s troops, only to find no one waiting for them. A similar situation arose in the next town, Sainte Menehould, and by the time the carriage reached the town after that, Varennes, the tragedy of errors was complete. A mob surrounded the berline, the family was arrested, and, under guard, they were brought back to Paris and to the end of monarchy.

  At that moment, Axel Fersen, after a night of riding, reached Mons, where he slept soundly, expecting the king and queen to contact him when they arrived at the fortress town in the French hinterlands. Word never came. On the 23rd, he saw Bouillé, who told him what had happened. That night, Fersen wrote to his father: “All is lost, dearest father, and I am in despair. Only imagine my grief and pity me.”

  For six months, Fersen remained abroad. His involvement in the flight to Varennes had been discovered, and he was banned from entering France; a friend with whom he had left his diaries destroyed them, lest they be confiscated by the revolutionaries. Writing to Fersen in cipher and in invisible ink, the queen said, “How worried I’ve been about you and how I feel all that you must be suffering not to have heard from us!” Through an intermediary, she gave Fersen a gold ring inscribed Lache qui les abandonne – “Only the Coward Gives Up.” — before sending the ring off, Marie wore it for two days.

  Though Marie had begged Fersen not to come back to Paris, lest he be killed, on February 13, 1792, wearing a disguise and carrying fake papers, he returned to France. He saw Marie that same night, sneaking into the Tuileries and afterward noting that he “Went to the queen. Took my regular way. Fear of National Guards. Her lodgings marvelous. Did not see the king. Stayed there.” That last “laconic” note94 suggested that Fersen and the queen still had a physical relationship even under arrest.

  It was the first of several visits. Three days later, he was with the royal family from six in the evening until six in the morning. By now, more than
half a year after the failed flight to Varennes, Fersen and King Gustav had taken it upon themselves to attempt another escape. Louis XVI, however, rebuffed the proposl, and Fersen retreated to the Paris home of Quintin Craufurd and his wife Eleanor Sullivan, a long time lover of Fersen’s. For nearly a week, she kept him hidden in an attic room, secretly meeting with him during the day to sooth his sorrow. Fersen came down out of the attic near the end of the week, when Craufurd was home, and knocking on the door, pretending to have just arrived from Tours.95 On the 21st, Fersen returned to the Tuileries and stayed until midnight. Then he departed for Brussels.

  With Gustav’s blessing, Fersen continued his machinations. He travelled Europe much as he had travelled it as a boy, approaching the heads of state for a mission of the heart. However, all was lost. By March 1, 1792 Leopold II was dead of a sudden illness. Fifteen days later, Gustav III was shot and wounded at a masquerade at the Stockholm opera by a group of masked revelers who, it was believed, were fighting for the Jacobin cause. Two weeks later, Gustav was dead, and with him Fersen’s last hope that Sweden might intervene on his beloved’s behalf. “I am afraid of being persecuted if I should return to Sweden and am entirely decided not to go there,” he wrote on April 13 in his diary.

  Fersen continued to write to Marie-Antoinette (during the course of the year, he would send her twenty-two letters, and she would send him seventeen), still scheming how the other European powers might be moved to help her cause. But in August, Marie and her family were moved to the chilling Temple prison, and communication was no longer possible.