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

Chapter 15

Geneva

The pre-holiday lights of modern Geneva in November fade into fog as you climb up the mountains into the towns that made this country's fortune. Sunlight is scarce and when it does appear it's bright and flat and comes in at a low angle over the city spires. Even in such weather, you can make it around the tip of the lake, through verdant, well-tended, and advertisement-free suburbs, and up into the mountains in forty minutes, a trip that would have taken Abraham-Louis Breguet days. The summers here are given over to the dairy farming that have made Swiss cheese and chocolate famous, but in the cold winter evenings the farmers, for centuries, stayed inside filing cogs and gears by candlelight, then selling them to merchants in the city.

Some of those selfsame farm families still live in the hills, and their children have abandoned the plow to join the watch industry. The skills generated by decades of piecework were passed down from grandparents to grandchildren, and the resulting concentration of watchmakers in this region is startling. While not everyone is a master, high in these mountains, everyone has brass, gold, and steel flowing in their veins. One watchmaker told me that in Switzerland a good student could either go into banking or watchmaking. There were no other jobs worth having.

The road into the mountains winds through switchbacks that open onto wide vistas of stone and pine and rich farmland. Grapevines scroll up the hills like veins of gold, while dark brown cows meander in the grass. Here, in the towns of the Vallée de Joux, is the world's greatest concentration of factories of the world's leading watchmakers, including Patek Phillipe, Audemars Piguet, and Jaeger-LeCoultre. The Hotel des Horlogers, with its Salon de Chronographes dining room, is one of the few luxury hotels in the area and was renovated in 2008 by Audemars Piguet to supply the horologists of the Vallée and their well-heeled clients with a fine meal to go with their fine watches. The towns here are still quite small, but they are economic powerhouses. Like car lovers travelling to Germany to pick up their sports coupes fresh off the assembly line, rich watch fanatics make pilgrimages to their favorite ateliers to pick up their latest multi-thousand dollar purchases.

Next to a public park on the shore of Lac de Joux, there is a building - all stucco and bright, clean glass - that looks as if it should house a European tech start-up rather than the logistical arm of a luxury Swiss watch company. A giant, complicated watch above the front door announces that you have arrived at the corporate headquarters of Breguet.

A short drive onward, you come to the company's factory and training academy. The complex looks like an upscale office park. Inside, the lobby is empty and unremarkable, save for a 100x-scale replica of Breguet's No. 5 watch, and a comely, if curt, receptionist who opens the mail and guards the inner sanctum.

Through a set of security doors is a room far removed from the workshop of the company's founder, with its smudged gas lamps and lector reading the news of the day. Here, instead, you find something that resembles nothing so much as a microtechnology lab. The ziplock floor, plastic and seamless, is sealed against spills. The walls and work surfaces are spotless. No oil or grease mars the machines; even the heaviest presses and drills are hand-cleaned nightly. About two-hundred workers pad around in clean, white work smocks, white caps, and slip-on shoes. Every door is security-locked, and a collection of blue booties - for guests and inspectors popping in for a peek - sits by the entrance door to prevent the introduction of dirt and dust into the factory's clean rooms.

While many steps in the watchmaking process, such as braising metal, filing, and cutting gears and hands, are now automated, the machines are a mix of old and new. Some were made at the turn of the nineteenth century, and even many of the younger machines, excluding the brand new laser-guided milling machines and automated lamps and movement holders, date from the 1950s.