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

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 .