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

Chapter 2

Paris

A walker in eighteenth-century Paris, his boots caked with mud and much worse, would not come upon the Place Dauphine by chance. To find the quiet triangle one has to traverse Pont Neuf, or the New Bridge (this, the oldest bridge in the city, was also the first one not covered in houses and shops) onto the island where Paris began: the Île de la Cité. A jog to the left, between two four-story buildings, brings him to a small park with a few stunted trees and a bench or two where men speak furiously over plans and scraps of polished metal. The walker, however, could do no better than to sit listening to the quiet susurration of the the trees and the gentle ting-ting of jewelers' hammers. It was in this courtyard, he would quickly discover, where the mechanical heart of Paris ticked. It was, in fact, the home to some of France's most illustrious horologers.

To look at the neighborhood today is to glimpse Paris as it was in the eighteenth century, when the city was "the mother and mistress of all cities."2 From the far bank of the Seine, standing by the crate-shaped kiosks selling postcards and books and gazing across the river at the northwestern cusp of the Île de la Cité, you see the dark uneven teeth of the housetops and the white stone faces of buildings that have changed little over the centuries. Crossing the bridge you are suddenly in a much older France.

Looming to your left are the once-forbidding walls of the Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie (the palace prison once known as the antechamber to the guillotine), the pepperpot-roofed Bonbec Tower, which served as a torture chamber during the middle ages, and the square, soaring Tour d'Horloge. These fortifications, built in 1215, connect the old part of the Quai de l'Horloge, at the towers, to the more modern fifteenth and sixteenth century homes along the bank. Quai de l'Horloge means Clock Dock.

All of the city's bureaucratic work has been done here for centuries, and the handsome if overly dramatic clock at the tower's base - built in 1370 by German horologist Henri de Vic and decorated with weather-faded fleur-de-lis, figures symbolizing justice and piety, and two cherubic angels - would have marked the time for vassals coming to their king and, later, for revolutionaries coming to unseat that selfsame royalty. Today it is stopped, due to disrepair, at sixteen minutes past twelve. Farther down the island, however, things changed. The stomping of judges through empty halls was replaced by the sound of hammers. Couriers carrying dockets were replaced by boys carrying small paper packages of glass. Visiting potentates let their care fall away as they entered the warren of houses on the western tip of the Quai. For it was here that the clockwork heart of Paris - and the world - ticked.

Paris had its quarters dedicated to specific branches of manufacture and commerce. Just as Le Sentier in the 2nd Arrondissement was dedicated to clothing and Place Pigalle was the city's storied red-light district, so the Clock Dock was home to almost all of Paris's master watchmakers, opticians, and makers of precision instruments, including pedometers and thermometers. From the front, only a few shops were visible, but the open rectangle the buildings backed onto, the Place Dauphine, was a bustle of activity. Inside the buildings enamelists stoked their forges, goldsmiths hammered their precious metal, and casemakers worked alongside artisans who specialized in the smallest movement components, while runners - apprentices to the watchmakers - darted from shop to shop and factory to factory, picking up parts and placing nearly finished pieces in front of various experts.

The workshops were a maze of machinery, with drill presses and mechanical cutters sitting cheek by jowl beside older machines for toothing gears and polishing the tiny parts that made up a fine watch. There were places on the Quai where a clockmaker could have a bit of gold shaped into a fine curlicue and where a goldsmith could get advice on how best to repair a customer's shattered crystal. This was a site of constant, percolating exploration where, unlike the jealous members of warring guilds and most scientific salons, communication and sharing were the norm. If one watchmaker was unable to perform some feat of clockwork daring, a ready team of experts was willing to take up the cause and perhaps throw a commission back to the original workshop. The occupants of the Quai were in such close quarters that they had no other choice.