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

by John Biggs

  With his clients all mounting the scaffold and his business in shambles, Breguet decided it was time to leave his adopted city and began preparing his workshop and employees for his departure. He had spent two decades on the Quai, but now he was embattled from left and right: His assistance to Marat was becoming known, and his longstanding relationship with the royal family cast a pall of suspicion on him under the council. Breguet’s landlord, the comtesse de Polignac, had escaped Paris in 1789, and as a natural citizen of Switzerland, Breguet’s property would soon be in question. Patriotism and fraternity were turning into a frenzy of anti-Royalist fervor and violence. It would be only a matter of time before the National Convention acted.

  Only two days after he guarded the queen, Breguet was called before the Convention to explain his refusal to summon the rest of the National Guardsmen in his small district to arms in the Pont-Neuf section of Paris after a call for a general uprising. This traitorous refusal to upset the peace only angered the Convention’s members and, in the end, as he wrote, “assured him certain death.” His son, who was back in Paris now, was also in danger.

  In the middle of June, Breguet went to visit Marat. He found him in his bathtub, having a medicinal soak to ameliorate the constant itching brought on by his skin disease. By now, Marat was a leading member of the most radical Revolutionary group, Robespierre’s Montagnards, while Breguet was a moderate the group viewed as reactionary. But some flicker of their old friendship survived, and Marat had not forgotten Breguet’s life-saving efforts in spiriting him safely through a hostile crowd only months earlier. Marat told Breguet that he would intercede on his behalf with the Convention, but that Breguet must first apply for paperwork through official channels.

  Breguet immediately applied for passports for himself, his son, and his sister-in-law to leave Paris and return to his ancestral home. Now, Marat was able to repay the favor of several months before and help his old friend. On June 24, the National Convention Committee for General Security and Surveillance granted Breguet’s request, but it would take weeks for the passports themselves to be issued. Marat’s intercession had come just in time, for in mid-July, Marat was stabbed to death, while soaking in his tub, by a royalist sympathizer named Charlotte Corday. Finally, on August 10, 1793, the Committee issued the passports.

  On August 12, leaving his firm in the hands of an assistant, Boulanger, Breguet found himself in a stagecoach, together with his son and sister-in-law, clattering away from the city center toward the edge of Paris. The road was full of other carriages heading in the same direction, all fleeing the Revolution. Breguet was in a daze. He felt fortunate to have been permitted to leave the country, but his sense of relief was tenuous. He had left his home and workshop behind. He didn’t know when or if he would return. And, on the road ahead, he saw carriages slowing. Breguet experienced a rush of anxiety. He had left all of his tools and watches behind on the Quai — it was too risky not to — but he hadn’t been able to part with the one object that embodied all of his work and innovation. Secreted in a hidden compartment aboard the carriage, packed in excelsior, was the 160, Axel von Fersen’s watch for Marie-Antoinette. Now, as the carriage approached Fontainebleau, Breguet saw with alarm why the other carriages were slowing. Up ahead, there was a security checkpoint. But his worries proved for naught. After a cursory inspection of his papers, he was waved through. Breguet could rest with relief, at least for a moment, and his carriage rolled onward, toward the border with Switzerland.

  On the 14th of October, Marie-Antoinette went on trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Among the many smears directed at her in her sham trial—from carrying on orgies at Versailles to funneling French treasury funds to her native Austria—by far the most wounding was the accusation that she had sexually abused the dauphin, her son. “If I have not replied,” she said in response, “it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother.” After two days, she was declared guilty of treason. Later that morning, her hair was cut short, and she was wheeled through Paris in a cart. Then, at a quarter past twelve, in the same square where her husband had died nine months earlier, she was executed under the guillotine. Her body was thrown into a mass grave and covered with a sprinkling of wet dirt.

  Chapter 12

  Zurich

  Allen Kurzweil, a journalist, author, and enthusiast of the bizarre, was sitting across from famed watch collector Teddy Beyer on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. Kurzweil, a messily coiffed reporter with a shock of black hair, who was doing research for his first novel, A Case of Curiosities, had come to ask about a mechanical defecating duck, a famous automaton built by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739 which consisted of four hundred moving parts that could, in theory, grind, digest, and then defecate kernels of grain, recreating the entire digestive system of a water fowl in brass. It had been so exciting in its day that Voltaire exclaimed, upon seeing it, “without [...] the duck of Vaucanson, you have nothing to remind you of the glory of France.” Sadly, the duck never really worked, and most exhibitors introduced actual duck droppings into the rude mechanics to simulate the end of the process. Vaucanson, who died in 1782 and probably worked with Breguet on the Quai, had believed that someone would successfully re-create the digestive system of a bird in his lifetime. To his dismay, no one ever did.

  Now, in April of 1983, the conversation between Kurzweil and Beyer ranged over the history of automatons and clockwork. The discussion lighted upon the Marie-Antoinette, Breguet’s famous watch, and Beyer waxed euphoric on the topic. He described the complications and was even able to pull out a few original renderings by George Daniels of London—some of the only technical drawings of the watch in existence.

  Just then, the phone rang. Beyer stood up to answer it and listened. A moment passed, and the collector blanched, his face turning ghostly white. He sat back down, and after he had hung up Kurzweil asked what the matter was.

  “The Queen,” said Beyer. “She has vanished.”

  Kurzweil would later say that when Beyer said vanished he really meant kidnapped. “How could the loss of a half-pound of metal and rock crystal,” wrote Kurzweil, “so devastate a sixth-generation watchmaker who himself oversaw a time museum packed with horological treasures?”

  Similar calls to multiple collectors confirmed the watch world’s worst fears – that one of the most important objects in their field was now missing. Kurzweil, intrigued by the watch and its story, set the defecating duck aside and followed the mystery across the continent and into the United States. Everywhere, when he mentioned the Queen, he encountered the same reaction: sadness intermingled with regret – regret that the watch was probably destroyed, that it hadn’t been better taken care of, that the Marie-Antoinette, like its namesake, was likely dead.

  He visited the Breguet archives and tbe Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. He also travelled by boat to the Isle of Man, where he went to the village of Ramsey, to the home of George Daniels. Daniels, born in 1926, had come to his love of watches at the age of five, when he found a wristwatch on the street, opened it, and found that the inner workings were like looking into “the center of the universe.”

  “I wanted to spend the rest of my time with watches,” he said.

  While serving in the British Army, in 1944 Daniels became watchmaker for his regiment. At that time, watchmakers were in demand to repair delicate field timers and watches of enlisted men who slammed their timepieces into walls and mud. He continued to work as a general repairer and restorer until the 1960s, when he began to study the oeuvre of Breguet and became enthralled by the watchmaker’s miraculous and beguiling work. Daniels, whose pursed lips and precise manner masked his preference for fast cars and the occasional afternoon beer,97 told Kurzweil almost everything he knew about Breguet. He had studied Breguet with such intensity that he often said he could think with the master’s mind. Kurzweil told me, conspiratorially, that many of Daniels’ stories may have sprung from this innate understanding and not from the truths of
historical research.

  Breguet’s work ran like a seam of gold through Daniels’ life. He married Julie Marrayat, the pretty daughter of respected Breguet collector Robert Marrayat. He then met George Brown, proprietor of Breguet, in about 1962. The company, at this time, was wobbling on the edge of bankruptcy but Brown was still proud of the traditions and techniques of the master. Daniels became the London Agent de Breguet á Paris, essentially taking a non-paid position as Breguet’s London distributor. The job had been open since the 1920s when the last distributor retired and it was largely symbolic. However, Daniels did meet a number of collectors in the line of (albeit limited) duty.

  For most of the 1970s Daniels travelled with a Leica camera and a tripod to photograph all of Breguet’s work, a task that later became the body of his book, The Art of Breguet. Daniels’ simplistic photography style was much reviled by professional photographers but, as the clear photos in the book attest, it was more than sufficient. Because he could not shine bright lights on the watches for fear of heating and cracking the enamel he instead took forty or more photos of each watch, ensuring that he accounted for all the vagaries of natural light. Around the same time the Salomons collection was in the process of being moved from England to Israel, a decision that enraged Daniels, he wrote “I made the strongest possible noises to stop the watches going, for they were essentially European and had no Middle Eastern content or relevance.” He suspected political pressure because “all entreaties fell on deaf ears.”98

  Daniels also dealt with the museum curator Ohannes Markarian firsthand and found the Armenian to be “very amusing.”

  “He clearly didn’t trust me (Armenians are not noted for trusting others),” he noted, sagely, and he would fiddle with the watches, pretending not to understand their functions or cases, just to watch Markarian squirm. In reality, Daniels was probably the foremost expert on the pieces at the time, with Markarian running a close second.

  When the watches were stolen, Daniels was furious. The board of trustees wrote him to ask if he could keep an eye on the markets for any of the watches that had appeared in the catalog and Daniels replied that he “would prefer to buy them for my own collection,” reminding them that the move was a disastrous idea in the first place.99 His photographs and detailed drawings were the last known representations of the Marie-Antoinette in the world.

  Daniels himself became a celebrated watchmaker in his own right and had created the co-axial escapement, one of the first improvements to the modern escapement in a century. The new escapement allowed for almost friction-free control of the escape wheel with absolutely no lubrication. Breguet would have been proud.

  Daniels knew as much about the Queen as any man besides Ohannes Markarian. He was one of the few people to have seen and analyzed the entire watch. While Ohannes understood the Queen with his heart, Daniels grasped it with his mind.

  After his day with Daniels, Kurzweil travelled to Israel, where he began to unravel the skein of hearsay and lies that had already accreted around the heist. Kurzweil was one of the first to hear the apocryphal rumor of the “partially eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich” at the scene of the crime. In the offices of the Jerusalem Post he cracked open ledgers marked Crime 1983 and Murders 1979-1985 to research the gangs of Jerusalem, and then he went to visit Markarian himself in his little shop in the Old City, and then at the curator’s quarters at the L.A. Mayer Museum.

  It was there that he saw the Queen’s old “shagreen case” and that Markarian asked him to inhale the scent of its empty compartments. In his novel The Grand Complication, Kurzweil would enshrine the theft in fiction and re-create this moment verbatim:

  “Take a whiff,” he said as he unlatched the red leather box. “I want you to smell a fragrance more enchanting than the finest perfume.” I sniffed the interior of the case. “What you are smelling,” he said, is the odor of sanctity.” I pressed him further. “The Queen was one of my children—my favorite child,” the curator acknowledged. “And now that child is gone.”100

  Kurzweil wasn’t the only detective on the case of the missing watch. Secretly, so as not to draw attention to the investigation and embarrass the Israeli police, the trustees of the museum had hired their own detective to hunt down the lost Queen.

  Chapter 13

  Brussels

  Axel Fersen was visiting his lover Eleanor Sullivan, when he learned of Marie’s death on October 20, 1793. In his diary, the next day, he vowed “an eternal hatred which can never end” against the judges who had sentenced Elle to death. Soon, his rage was joined by profound sadness. “Every day I think of it,” he wrote, “and every day my grief increases. Every day I feel even more all I have lost.” As the days wore on, memories of her face haunted him.

  “It follows me wherever I go I can think of nothing else.”

  Breguet was in Geneva, where he had been for two months, when he heard the news. He had sent his son and sister-in-law to his cousins in Le Locle, a small town in the Jura mountains, far from the hustle and bustle of Neuchâtel. Breguet would join them after conducting business in the capital city, where he was meeting with old friends and partners who had been supplying him with parts for more than twenty years, while contemplating his next move. He had considered remaining in Geneva, but found it expensive and, suffering from a blockade by France, a hard place to live and do business. He had also thought about setting up just over the border in France, at Fernay, where Voltaire had run his watchmaking concern, but such a move would clearly be too dangerous. He was mulling these options when word of the queen’s execution arrived from Paris. If Breguet had any remaining doubts, the death of the queen made clear to him that a way of life, one that had nurtured his livelihood and given him many friends, was over.

  For the next two years, Breguet would do his best to manage his business from afar. Every day brought more distressing news. Boulanger, the assistant he had left in charge, wrote to inform him that the revolutionary calendar had been officially adopted, effectively destroying the value of his current stock of watches in France. Another day, he learned that his former client, Princess Thérèse of Monaco, had been guillotined. In the summer of 1794, the revolutionaries forced Boulanger off the Quai into lesser premises around the corner. His assistant quickly gathered up the stock and papers and locked the doors of the shop, but with little effect. Looters quickly snapped the locks and made off with machinery, records, and tools. They burned many of Breguet’s old logs. Today only a few dozen remain, kept in a sealed vault at the Breguet boutique in Paris and protected by Emmanuel Breguet, one of the master’s remaining descendants.

  As Breguet muddled through the uncertainties of exile, he continued to work on the 160. Occasionally, he would receive a letter from Axel von Fersen, now far away and heartbroken, asking after other watches he had left in Breguet’s care, but never mentioning his grand and tragically moot commission. Breguet would always reply quickly and kindly, if cryptically.

  Fersen was in a stupor of mourning. As if expecting cosmic recompense for everything he had lost, he went to Vienna seeking reimbursement of the 1.5 million livres he had raised for the flight to Varennes. From Brussels, in March of 1794, he wrote to Breguet, his last living connection to Marie.

  Sir,

  You remember perhaps Sir that I was one of your regulars. I already have a military watch from you, in silver, similar to the one you made for the Duke of Guiche, and experience has shown me the perfection of your work. I am rather happy to possess as well a gold watch of those which winds itself, that you made I believe in 1784 or 1785 for the late Queen. There are initials on it and in the interior of the cover there is 1100 14 .

  As these works which wind themselves are rare and there are few clock makers who know how to fix them and that moreover this watch does not ring the minutes, I would like to have the cover and the dial preserved with its same engraving and I’d like the same done to another work by you which ordinarily winds itself and which rings the minutes with a sound like tha
t of a watch Mr. [Crauford] has from you.

  June 20, the anniversary of the flight to Varennes, brought still more unhappy memories. “I can only think of this day in 1791,” Fersen confided to his diary, lacerating himself yet again for the failed escape. In September, Fersen received a reply from the Hofburg, in response to his request for reimbursement for himself and two older ladies who had given most of their savings for the Varennes mission, but it merely suggested his petition would have been better timed had it been filed while the king and queen were still alive. Just then, Fersen learned that his father had died. Two days later, he wrote to Breguet once more, now with a touch of desperation. “Do you know what became of the watch that the unfortunate lady used to wear?” he asked.

  Sir, it was only at the time of my departure from [...] on June 28th that I received, sir, your letter of May nineteenth responding to mine regarding the watch of the late Queen that I had wanted and my planned travels... I replied to your letter on July 2nd or 3rd but as I fear that my letter may not have reached you. I write again to beg you to tell me where I should send my letter and how I might deliver to you my watch and arrange with you my movements to do this. Please send your reply, sir, to Dusseldorf at the home of J.S. Junge Senior. I am honored to be your humble and admiring servant.

  Count Felsen

  General Major in the service of Sweden

  This was Fersen’s last letter to Breguet, and his most despondent. In none of these letters did Fersen mention the Queen, whose original purpose had died with its intended recipient. The secret of the 160’s provenance now remained solely in Breguet’s own records.

  Fersen set out for Sweden to oversee the disposition of his father’s property. October sixteenth, the date of his lover’s execution, found him crossing the Baltic Sea. “Today is a terrible day for me,” he wrote in his diary. “It is when I lost the person who loved me the most in the world and who loved me truly. I shall mourn her loss until the end of my life and all that I feel for Eleonore can never allow me to forget what I have lost.” The date became Fersen’s “day of devotion,” and year after year, he would morbidly note its passing.