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

Chapter 7

Meanwhile, in Versailles, the elite played by candlelight. It was a glorious night. Marie's closest friends, Fersen included, all dressed in white and retired to Petit Trianon. There, on the lush green lawn, they danced, drank, and wandered in a haze around the grounds. All through the night, the guests took a small ferryboat to and from the Temple de l'Amour in the heart of Marie-Antoinette's private garden. Lights burned at the foot of every bush, casting puckish shadows on the participants. Workers had dug a trench around the temple and lit a bonfire, making the whole structure look like it was floating in a sea of flame. King Gustav of Sweden, whom Fersen was accompanying in Europe, wrote to his brother that it was "a spectacle worthy of the Elysian fields."58

That evening, as the revelers unwound and the dark fell over the palace, Marie-Antoinette gave Fersen a datebook, embroidered by her own hand. In neat stitching, in perfect French, the queen of this fairy kingdom wrote her secret love a short poem:

"Faith, Love, and Hope

Three united forever."59

The page was dated June 21, 1784. That evening, a magical one to say the least, occurred at the apex of Fersen and Marie-Antoinette's close friendship. The intervening years had been hard on both the soldier and the queen. Fresh from the fields of Philadelphia, Fersen cast about Europe looking for work and love in Paris. The queen faced increased scrutiny and she now retired to the Trianon with her children. She had changed much from the coquettish child bride Fersen met at the ball years before.

Fersen, too, was no longer the noble horsemen and icy lover. He was beset economically and emotionally. Marie-Antoinette's favor had cemented Fersen's position in her coterie of friends and, in many ways, made him hers forever. He searched heedlessly for something to light upon, and so on his return he petitioned his father to send him 100,000 livres to buy the Royal Suédois, a Swedish proprietary regiment stationed in France. In the 1700s, proprietary regiments were usually made up of mercenary fighters stationed in a foreign country and led by a non-French commander. While these regiments were military in nature - the Swiss Guards are a well-known proprietary regiment - they offered prestige and entrée to the owners. They brought some income, but as one historian points out, the current analog would be to a rich man owning a baseball team,60 complete with the associated costs.

Only July 15, 1793, a year before the fete at Petit Trianon, many historians believe that Fersen and Marie-Antoinette became lovers. In his correspondence log, Fersen referred to her as "Josephine." In his diaries, he referred to her simply as "Elle": She. His diary notes he stayed "chez Elle." He used the word chez when he meant a sexual dalliance and Elle, as we know, was always and forever Marie-Antoinette. Did he and the queen make love in the octagonal meridienne bedroom that warm summer?61 While all signs point to a consummated passion that year, least of all the commission left with Breguet, and, though much of Fersen's diary was destroyed from those romantic years, we know he yearned for her all his life and that their relationship was closer than most assumed. Further proof appeared in another letter Fersen wrote to his sister describing buying "Josephine" a puppy. In the same month Marie herself describes her new puppy in detail in another letter, thus confirming the Josephine connection. With evidence as obviously circumstantial as this it is difficult to assess the truth. However, all historians agree on one thing: the two were, in the end, as close as blood.

That summer Fersen could not stay in France. His father called him back to Sweden and it was torture. During Fersen's next five weeks in Paris, the soldier was able to see the queen often, spending many evenings at Petit Trianon. Their relationship intensified, and when he left Paris in August, headed back to Stockholm with Gustav, he wrote six letters to Marie in the first nine days. Thus they continued to speak, even as miles and situation separated them. They were lovers crossed by more than one dark star.

Fersen visited Versailles again in May of 1785, and over the next several years would spend extended periods in Paris; rumors spread that he and Marie would meet secretly at the Petit Trianon, arriving separately on horseback. In 1787 the queen gave Fersen a Breguet perpetuelle with a guilloché-engraved dial and the intertwined letters A and F engraved on the case.

When Fersen couldn't be with her, as during one eight month period when he toured Italy and during extended stays in Sweden, he still wrote frequently to her, and she to him. He numbered every letter to her, so she could be certain that every one had reached her. To ensure privacy, they used couriers and intermediaries. Later he wrote using invisible ink or in a fairly simple keyed cipher. They hid their correspondence by forwarding letters within letters. Fersen might mail a friend in Paris who would then open the letter and forward another envelope inside to the queen. In 1789, she gave him her portrait and a small pocketbook with a flyleaf inscription by her.

In the intervening years Marie-Antoinette was taking care of two sons, the sickly Dauphin Louis Joseph, the hearty and robust Louis Charles, and a daughter, Marie-Therese. She was also mourning another daughter, Sophie Helene, who died at one year. Unlike her mother, Marie-Antoinette was reasonably protected from violence and unpleasantness in her youth. Now, as if fulfilling her mother's portents of "worry and sorrow" that had she felt when her daughters first married, she had since faced miscarriages, false accusations of theft and sexual depravity, and now entered the maw of the people's anger.

In 1789, revolution began in earnest. In July, the Paris mob ransacked aristocrats' homes, and the Bastille fell. August brought the abolition of privileges and the "declaration of the rights of man and the citizen." In October, the mob stormed Versailles, and the royal family fled for the Palais des Tuileries. Fersen was in the procession of carriages that choked the road, ever by his queen's side.

The events soon took their toll on the king and queen. Louis XVI suffered a nervous collapse, and Marie's hair began to turn white. Fersen would spend the next year and a half in Paris, continuing to meet secretly with the queen in her chambers as various plans to save the monarchy were proposed and abandoned. In October, the royal family finally decided they needed to leave Paris, and Fersen began to plot Marie's escape.

With France's economic crisis deepening, Breguet was increasingly casting his sights abroad to foreign markets. But he remained very much in the royals' orbit, selling Louis XVI a watch in 1784, and the one Marie would give Fersen in 1787.

As that love affair developed, Breguet found himself focusing more and more on Fersen's order, now called the 160 because it was the 160th commission entered in his firm's ledgers. As the watch took shadowy form, Breguet studied its increasingly complex movement, penetrating the three-dimensional structure with his mind and playing a kind of spatial chess: If he put this complication here, then he would have to put that complication there, which would then mean that yet another complication would need to change position, and on and on. Moments when Breguet could meditate, at length, on the unique challenges of a singular timepiece were the times when he felt most alive. While he found mass production an alluring concept - he dreamed of a day when all men could own a good watch, preferably with the Breguet name on it - the prospect of filling his days stamping out cookie-cutter watches was dispiriting. What he loved was exploration, the creation of new complications and the addition of one complication to the next.

With the 160, the challenge was less in the fabrication of the parts, or even in their assembly, than in the daunting geometries of fitting so many intricate, interlocking parts into such a small space, and having them work properly. By now Breguet had facility with a large and widening range of complications including the perfection of the perpetuelle to the extent that it could now be considered a mass-market addition to a common watch. Many of these complications he had himself invented or refined during nearly two decades in which he had both made his name and experienced devastation that might have crippled another man - but seemed only to spur Breguet to greater heights of his art. He was, in these turbulent years, rising to a fame that would later spur jealousy, spite, and, ultimately, inspire a thief.