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

Chapter 14

Paris

After Antoine-Louis Breguet and Michel Weber celebrated the completion of the 160 in 1827, the watch remained in the Breguet showroom, a silent testament to its late architect's genius and a marketing beacon for the firm he had left behind. His son, less obsessed with the art of watchmaking, stayed busy expanding the company as a major supplier to European navies.

Some years later - records of the exact date were lost - the firm priced the 160 at around 17,000 gold francs and sold it to an unnamed buyer. By 1838, it was in the possession of the aged Marquis de La Groye, Marie-Antoinette's former page, who had it for a few years before sending it back to the firm for repair. The childless Marquis died soon after, and when no one came to reclaim the watch, ownership reverted to the company.

The watch then sat, untouched, for the next half-century, until, in 1887, an English collector named Sir Spencer Brunton bought it for six hundred pounds. Brunton was a financier whose daughter, Enid, a stage actress in London, would in 1905 take up the role of the mother in J.M. Barrie's popular new play, Peter Pan ("the revival has been received with such acclamations that there seems a serious danger of 'Peter Pan' being made not a little ridiculous, as the object of a cult," wrote one reviewer).112

By this time, the allure of a watch such as the Marie-Antoinette had only increased from the days when Breguet was alive. In the eyes of industrial Britain, with its electric lights and new modes of thinking, the previous century possessed a sepia charm. Reminders of a more chivalrous age were a welcome distraction from the dirt and grease of industrial London.

The 160 kept changing hands. Brunton sold it to one Murray Mark, another collector who left no trace of his purchase save a note in the Breguet firm's ledger. Eventually, he, in turn, seems to have sold the watch to David Lionel Salomons, an inventor and industrialist who was passionate about Breguet and his work.

Like Axel von Fersen, Salomons, born in 1851, was a man out of time. But if Fersen was trapped in a courtly past, Salomons' thinking penetrated far into the future. He was hindered only by the limits of his age. An early proponent of electricity, traffic control systems, and "horseless carriages," he helped pull England into the twentieth century.

He noted that he "was born a mechanic," and that his favorite toys in childhood were "a clockwork engine, some building bricks, and a box of tools." His great-grandfather had been an astronomer and mathematician, his father an art collector. "Thus," he wrote, "it comes about that I admire the beautiful when combined with mechanics."

He had a decidedly Victorian grumpiness about him, along with the air of a sly professor. His biography described memberships in societies dealing with "astronomy, chemistry, civil engineering, geology, geography, meteorology, commerce, physics, military, inventions, archaeology, law, statistics, zoology, botany, agriculture, electrical engineering, photography, microscopy, and 'self-propelled traffic'."113

He wore impeccably tailored but slightly rumpled suits and kept a beard and mustache in the style of Freud over his sharp eyes and prominent nose. He often carried a watch attached to a long chain. At the other end was a small mechanical gun, a miniature six-shooter with an inch-long barrel. Some of his stolidity, as well as whimsy, comes out in his description of his early years, which he spent banging tools together rather than playing with soft toys: