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

by John Biggs

  As Fersen roared through Europe, seeking ever-more-elusive allies in his bid to save Marie, he bore witness to the advance of the French Revolution, as increasing numbers of bedraggled aristocratic refugees passed him on the road. In November, in Brussels, Fersen was urged by the Russian ambassador, Ivan Simolin, and by Lord Elgin (of marbles fame), to burn the portfolio of the queen’s papers that he had, lest they fall into the wrong hands, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

  Breguet, for his part, remained loyal to the French royal family. While they were still in the Tuileries, his partner Gide had visited the palace to accept for repair a watch that had stopped because the queen had dropped it. Breguet himself visited the Tuileries many times, usually to assist with some horological service, although his exact catalog of work has been lost. It is, however, a compelling picture to imagine the watchmaker to kings puttering through the drafty Tuileries maintaining his ticking charges as they sliced off the seconds before the death of the monarchy.

  On September 4, 1792, now imprisoned in the Temple, Marie-Antoinette sent a request for a simple, steel minute-repeater. Although the 160 was still on the order books, Breguet’s workshop began work on the 179, an austere pocket watch with a winding hole to the right of the central pinion, at two o’clock. The long, thin hands and elongated stem gave the watch an air of delicacy his other pieces could not attain, and the bare, white face, the name Breguet in tiny letters along the bottom, would be the only measure of the downcast family’s hours that year. Around the same time, another member of court, the Comtesse de Provence (the king’s sister-in-law), bought a 3,600 livres watch while living on 400 livres a month. The old ways of the nobles were still prevalent, even in the face of the maelstrom.

  But the easy credit afforded the royal family was drying up, and Gide was fuming. “I hope you have found success with those accursed princes,” wrote Gide to Breguet, when he was in London trying to collect debts from the British royal family. “They are catastrophic to deal with. Thanks to the energy of the French people, we are rid of them [in Paris].”

  Gide saw Breguet as too soft on the English royal family and asked that he “summon up all his courage” in his dealings with them. “If you had received everything due to you, we should now be comfortable,” he wrote. Finally, Gide was done with Breguet’s trips to London and called him back permanently. “Do not sacrifice any longer your health, your time, or the profits we should be making. Try to get your money or letters of exchange and send England to the devil for ever.”

  Gide’s increasingly business-oriented requests were the antithesis of Breguet’s love of experimentation and novelty. On Valentine’s Day, 1791, Gide wrote, in what would be one of his last requests, “I hope, my friend, that on your return the firm will be run differently, for I think the main problem for our business is that you never make two watches the same. Novelties are expensive. You have considerable talents; you should put them to good use.”

  The average Frenchman could now afford to carry a watch, and the novelties Gide so despised were popularly regarded as overly ornate and vastly extravagant, valuable only to decrepit and deposed monarchs or exiled noblemen, relics of a vanishing gilded age of absolute power and endless riches. The sheer act of producing a watch with complications was, in Gide’s eyes, folly. In an era when two hands and a spring were enough to get a peasant to and from Mass on Sunday, a moonphase, an equation of time, or a chronograph were wasteful overkill, the sort of trumped-up frippery that had gotten France into its mess in the first place. In a land of that clamored for table wine there was no call for champagne.

  It is hard to know how Breguet felt about this endless badgering. He was not very literary, never wrote a personal memoir, and left only letters, notes, and scattered fragments of prose behind. A recent trove of documents found to be written in the master’s own hand described little more than his engineering techniques, shedding light on a particularly tricky and unusual method for adding a jeweled arbor to an escapement, but describing little about the man who seated the stone.

  In his effort to maintain the business, Breguet found himself further and further from the bench. Work continued in his shop, but he often couldn’t touch the finished products. He had become a businessman, something he decidedly did not like.

  He did return to Paris to close a few watches made by his workmen, among them the 173, a repeating pocket watch with a jump-hour hand, a hand that “jumped” from hour to hour with each pass of the minutes hand around the dial. Instead of incremental movement, then, the wearer would see the hour hand pointing to the exact hour at all times and the minute hand pointing to the changing minute. The jumping-hours complication would later appear in the 160.

  Breguet’s watches during this time were inspired by John Arnold and the long discussions they had had in London. The 215 was a repeater with a sub-seconds hand (one that spun on its own pivot, lower on the dial than the main hands) and blued main indicators. It looked plain but used a highly complex and delicate bimetallic spring detent escapement, requiring hours of work simply to carve it out, then file it, and then tap in the minuscule holes that would connect it to the watch plate.

  As Breguet prepared to break his partnership with Gide, he knew that he had to instill in his son a sense of pride in the craft. He began organizing an apprenticeship with Arnold for Antoine-Louis, who was now almost fifteen. The boy had his father’s small features. But with his mutton-chop sideburns and husky build he was considerably more strapping a man than the diminutive watchmaker. As a teenager, he looked more like a young barkeep than a watchmaker. In May, Breguet called his son to London, where he began his tutelage with the Dumergue family, a clan of well-known scientists and scholars, and would continue on to John Arnold’s workshop. Thus was Breguet’s only son protected from the riots in France.

  For Breguet himself, returning to Paris after each trip wasn’t hard. He loved his adopted home and admitted as much in letters defending his business to the National Convention. Even in these difficult times, Breguet was trying desperately to keep working, but he took additional precautions to keep the 160 hidden away. Watches for royals and nobles were political gunpowder.

  Unable to find common ground, Breguet and Gide dissolved their partnership on October 1, 1791, just as Gide’s revolutionary fervor was reaching a boiling point. Gide was granted the rights to any outstanding debts he could collect — a job the tactless Frenchman relished — while Breguet took control of some of the company’s unsold timepieces as well as the rent on 51 Quai de l’Horlage. The company was back in Breguet’s name, and in 1792, the firm increased its output, building some sixty-two original watches. But the Revolution was becoming increasingly disruptive.

  By the end of 1792, the revolutionary council conscripted Breguet into the National Guard and was forced to patrol the heart of Paris. During these months, he also applied for and gained French citizenship, claiming that he was descended from French Protestants who escaped to Switzerland from Picardy. This small change in status would protect his business from confiscation and, although it was based on a small lie (recent research has confirmed his family was Catholic and had deeper roots in Switzerland than even Breguet knew), it bought him time until he could decide on a next step.

  Even the art of telling time was facing revision. In the early days of the Revolution, those who wished to publicly identify themselves with one side or the other would wear a watch depicting their support. An illustrated crown on a watch indicated a royalist, while clasped hands, a Phrygian cap (a red bonnet worn by revolutionaries), or the god Mithras symbolized revolutionary allegiance. Breguet made watches featuring the symbols of both sides, but the Revolution was soon to have a more profound effect on his watches.

  In an effort to redefine everything in post-Revolutionary France, the Jacobins commissioned a group of French thinkers to create a calendar that would reflect the forward-thinking nature of the National Convention. The politicians in charge were Charles-Gilbert Romme, Clau
de Joseph Ferry, and Charles-François Dupuis. Romme was a small and clumsy man, a doctor and mathematician by training. His goal, as head of the Committee of Public Education, was to create a simpler calendar than the standard twenty-four-hour/365-day Gregorian abomination. He worked closely with Ferry, a military engineer, and Dupuis, a mathematician and astrologer. They then approached the mathematicians and astronomers Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, Gaspard Monge, and Alexandre Guy Pingré to help with calculations. Finally, pursuing new names for the days and months, they hired the poet Fabre d’Églantine, who in turn consulted André Thouin, a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes of the Natural History Museum in Paris.

  And so came the lowest point, if not the end, of French horology. The new system created twelve months of thirty days each, with year one beginning on September 22, 1792. The extra days at the end of the year were named “festival days” and celebrated the struggle of the sans-cullotes or poorer members of the revolution who could not afford the fashionable knee breeches of the time. That an entire calendar system should end with a summer celebration of unfashionable Parisians probably doomed the effort from the start.

  These last five days (six, during Leap Years) were set aside as holidays and named the days of Virtue, Genius, Work, Reason, Reward, and Revolution. Each day was segmented into ten hours of one-hundred minutes, and there were ten days in a “week,” each named for its place in the order — Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, and so on.

  On October 24, 1793, after almost a year of planning, the French Revolutionary Council would officially accept the French Republican Calendar. France’s new, decimalized calendar was not well received by those who had been happily using the Gregorian calendar for the past two centuries. The Pope in Rome condemned the move, reducing the Revolution’s popularity with the more pious Parisians.

  But watchmakers were willing and ready to assist in the adoption of the new calendar. They began making decimal watches complete with dual time registers, one showing the decimal time and the other showing traditional time. One watch displayed revolutionary time on one half of the dial — five hours worth — and regular time on the other. A famous model featured revolutionary time above a twelve-hour clock, together with a thirty-day calendar register. Liberty, seated with an axe and sheaf of rods, held a level to symbolize concordance, and a trio of soldiers danced gaily around a pole with the Phrygian cap on top.

  Counter revolutionaries also had their watches. Some of these watches looked as if they supported the Revolution — with scenes of lazy bourgeois trodding on the heads of the workers — but concealed hidden crosses or the risen Christ or even crowns in honor of the royals. With Breguet’s influence waning in fashionable circles, watchmakers fell back into their old habit of adding curlicues and adornment to their watches. Breguet’s famous complications — retrograde hands, clever calendar complications, and movements that fit into delicate cases of silver and white gold — were forgotten in the rush to stamp out the old. To Breguet it seemed the artistry of horology had been vanquished forever.

  On Monday, January 21, 1793, at eight o’clock in the morning, Louis XVI left the Temple for the last time. For the previous five weeks, he had been subject to a trial for treason, in which he was dubbed with the revolutionary name Citoyen Louis Capet and condemned to death by guillotine. In one of the trial’s more offensive moments, the locksmith Gamain, who had been happy to serve as the king’s mechanical tutor and take his money for decades, revealed the secret chest he had built for Louis to hold his private papers, and leveled far-fetched accusations that the king had given him a poisoned cup of wine that resulted in a long illness. Throughout the trial, Louis had been kept apart from his wife and children, but the night before, he was permitted to see his family once more.

  It was a cold and rainy day, and the carriage, guarded by twelve hundred men on horseback, moved slowly through the streets, which were lined with a gantlet of armed citizens. Louis was silent for most of the ride, but after an English priest who was accompanying the carriage lent him the king his breviary, Louis began reciting psalms. Two hours later, the carriage arrived in the Place Louis XV, which had been renamed the Place de la Revolution. The king stepped out and, surrounded by guards, undressed. Then he mounted the scaffold. “I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge,” he told the crowd; “I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.”

  He was interrupted by a national guardsman who ordered a drumroll. The axe fell at fifteen minutes after ten, the blade slicing the king’s head off just as a scattering of quarter-repeaters tinkled in the crowd. A young guard took the head by the hair and paraded around the scaffold, holding it up for the crowd to see. “Vive la Republique!,” the crowd chanted, as the mob pressed forward to dab their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood. “Vive la Republique!”

  Marie now became the “Widow Capet,” mourning in simple black dress, sitting for hours in silence, no longer going outdoors for fresh air, dead-eyed except in the presence of her children.

  On January 24, Fersen, unaware of the king’s execution but fearing for the lives of the entire royal family, wrote to his sister Sophie from Dusseldorf. “My happy days are over and henceforth I am condemned to eternal regrets and must finish my sad days in desolation. Their faces will haunt my memory forever. Why, oh God, did I ever know them and why didn’t I die for them?”

  When he learned two days later that the king was dead, the report he heard was that the entire royal family had been killed. “She who was once all my happiness, all my life (for I never ceased loving her nor could I have done so for an instant), she for whom I would gladly have given a thousand lives is no more,” he wrote in another letter to his sister. When he learned that Marie was still alive, it only became cause for more anxiety about what would befall her.

  Over the next nine months, Fersen could think of little else, and his grief tore him to pieces. He grasped at any shred of information about what was happening in France, and consoled himself by ruminating on how to save the queen. By April, he was joyful, having convinced himself that the queen was out of danger. But each day brought news and as the bad surmounted the good, he grew despondent. He fretted about the queen’s failing health, interrogated other travelers for wisps of news that might support his sanguine outlook, and persisted in advocating military invasion by the European powers.

  Breguet’s business continued to suffer, as courtiers chose exile over beheading and disappeared with their jewelry and watches, leaving little else but their baronial estates and debts. His customers and friends in the city’s intelligentsia were also bringing him closer to peril.

  One day in April of 1793, three months after Louis’s death, Breguet went to a house on the rue Greneta, not far from the Les Halles market. He was with his friend Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist and rabble-rouser who, by now, was an enemy of the business-oriented Girondins. Breguet and Marat were an unlikely pair. At first, their friendship had made sense. Marat was a fellow Swiss, whose sister made watch hands for Breguet. As a court physician, he shared with Breguet the ambivalent role of one who was both a member of the elite and a worker subservient to it. And, like Marat, Breguet saw the need for reforms in French society. Breguet himself had joined the Jacobin political club in its early, moderate days. But by the spring of 1793, the men had little in common philosophically. Breguet remained largely apolitical, while Marat, now radicalized, had taken to accusing one-time comrades-in-arms of being “enemies of the Revolution.”

  Nonetheless, they maintained a tenuous friendship (recently, while in London, Breguet had obliged Marat’s request to secretly gather together and sell some jewelry that the revolutionary had left in England), and on this afternoon, they were visiting a mutual acquaintance and talking politics.

  By evening, an angry crowd of protesters sympathetic to the crown had gathered outside the home. The Revolution was entering its most vi
olent period of mob rule and factionalism, and the house was rumored to be harboring an anti-government radical. When the crowd outside began calling for Marat’s head, chanting “Down with Marat!,” Breguet and the home’s owner employed subterfuge to save his life, dressing Marat up as an old woman. Marat suffered from a disfiguring skin disease that had left scabs and open sores on his face, so they lavishly powdered his skin and rouged his cheeks. Then, after hooking his arm through the disguised Marat’s, Breguet stepped outside into the torch-lit gloom. On Breguet’s arm, the crowd saw a woman with slightly exaggerated make-up on her face. Perhaps because Breguet did not dress like the watchmaker to the king more like a common citizen, the crowd held no grudge against him, nor, apparently, against the homely, odd-looking lady who accompanied him. Breguet and his companion discreetly blended in with the shrieking crowd, disappearing into the night.

  Breguet’s own situation was becoming precarious, and he attempted to appease the authorities by taking his part in the National Guard. As a result, on May 29th, he found himself in the terrible position of having to guard a prisoner who had once been his greatest benefactor.

  Through one day and into the next, Breguet worked a twenty-four-hour shift keeping watch at the Temple prison, where Marie-Antoinette, now the Widow Capet, was being kept. It was heartbreaking duty for a man who had once visited the royal family in their private chambers, and who, only months before her husband’s death, had received a commission from the Queen for a repeater watch. This watch, delivered to the Temple by a municipal officer named Coutelle, arrived alongside some toys for the Dauphin from a Parisian shop called the Green Monkey. The package included “a cup and ball, a solitaire, and a beautiful checkerboard.”96

  The queen was held apart from the guards, for fear she would try to send messages out to the wider world, so Breguet’s duty was limited to patrolling the lower halls of the prison, sparing the her majesty from the knowledge of his betrayal, and sparing Breguet the distress of seeing her in her diminished state.