Neuchâtel
The man who, more than anyone else, would provide the greatest timepieces of his age might never have discovered his talent were it not for a tragedy that befell the Breguet family when little Abraham-Louis (or Abram-Louis in the local dialect) was eleven years old.
Abraham-Louis had been born, on January 10, 1747, to an extended family in Neuchâtel, a small city north of Geneva that was built primarily of lake sandstone, which gave the buildings a yellow cast that led Alexandre Dumas to describe it as a "an immense toy carved out of butter." The town nestles against the base of Mount Chaumont along the vast Lake Neuchâtel, where most of the low-lying farmland was reclaimed from the water43 and a stately, palatial collegiate church tower still chimes the hours.
Breguet went to schools in the area but was neither a very precise nor an eager student. In fact, according to contemporary histories, "he appeared hopelessly stupid, and his masters agreed that he was deficient in intellect;" the "young man received his instructions with great repugnance."44 His father, Jonas-Louis, was a merchant - he sold lace and bobbins and cloth - and the boy lived a life of relative comfort, first in the city and later at his family's inn at Les Verrieres, near Switzerland's border with France. At the inn, purchased by his father in order to gain some financial security and to be closer to his family in the area, young Abraham-Louis spent his evenings listening to travelers and merchants passing through as they described the lights of Paris or the mighty ships of Seville.
It would have been an uneventful youth, but in early 1758 his father died of an unknown illness (probably influenza), leaving four children and a pregnant wife, Suzanne-Marguerite. She had already lost two baby boys in recent years, and Jonas-Louis' death pushed the family into despair. It was decided that they would move from the inn back into town, where they would be closer to the extended clan, and the family began looking for a new husband for the widow - someone who could keep the family comfortable while she raised the children.
That summer, Suzanne-Marguerite married her husband's cousin, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Jacques Tattet. Abraham-Louis, now twelve, moved with his family to a wide-gabled house in town, and never attended school again. Though struggling with the loss of his father, his new stepfather intrigued the boy. A lieutenant-captain in the militia, Tattet had studied watchmaking and now had a watch export business that sold Genevese watches to customers in Paris. Tattet, however, wished the trade were the other way around. Disappointed with the quality of most mass-produced Swiss watches, he was enamored with the work coming out of France in those years and so, with his siblings' help, pointed his efforts at Versailles where he could both sell his wares and spy on the watchmakers already working in the state of the art.
The Tattet brothers aspired to a higher echelon. Their name was already well known in Paris and Geneva, and their small firm enjoyed the favor of the French court. Now, they sought still more visibility in that burgeoning and lucrative market. They visited Paris often, and in 1762 they decided that young Abraham-Louis would leave home and school to become an apprentice to a watchmaker in Les Verrieres and then in Neuchâtel, with the expectation that eventually he would join his stepfather and uncles on their trips to the French capital. Having shown little interest in formal education, the boy now had to help support the family. He left his small town and took to the bench, beginning his apprenticeship by cleaning the workshop and organizing and polishing the parts that arrived from the various mountain farms.
The apprenticeship would have appealed to any adolescent boy. Watchmakers' lives weren't all hard work. They were lured from shop to shop with promises of riches, long weekends in the country, private clubs in which to relax, and, in one instance, a master who promised a "new hat with a gold border and a new peruke" to his new employees. They were feted, lauded, and considered singularly respectable in the pantheon of eighteenth-century professions.
Adventure, too, awaited them. Watchmakers were held for ransom by Barbary pirates so often that when travelling by ship, they wrote clauses into their contracts stating that their employer would pay for their freedom if and only if that they would not give up their watches to the captors.45 Jacques Barthelemy, the grandson of the founder of the watch house Vacheron Constantin (then called Vacheron-Chossat), found "banditry" and frontier justice to be another threat to the watchmaker. While travelling to Rome through northern Italy, he found human "arms and legs nailed to posts, as a sign to travelers that brigands had been executed there because they had committed murder." Luckily the watchmakers lost no limbs on the journey.
Dangers aside, a skilled craftsman could make a nice living, even without a full gentleman's education. Breguet's family had been nearly destitute before Tattet stepped in, and if the boy showed even a modicum of talent, he could make good money in the storefronts of London and Paris. Watchmakers typically made 20-25 Swiss francs a day, compared with 3-4 francs for the average craftsman.
The process of entering the guild was arduous, requiring seven years of apprenticeship - five as a water boy, fire tender, and, eventually, beginning watchmaker, and then two travelling from master to master to learn specific techniques including goldsmithing, plate production, and enameling. The more ambitious watchmakers went on to learn the art of complications and often were required to produce a series of complicated watches - watches with multiple features including chimes, moonphase registers, and perpetual calendars - as a final test before being afforded journeyman status. Even as journeymen, however, they were still forced to work under a supervisor who would sign and sell all of the watches in a particular shop.
A watchmaker's training included the creation of parts from whole metal. One test of watchmaking prowess asked the students prepare a miniature rod, adding facets, points, arcs, and holes to a piece of steel the size of a toothpick. This, in turn, led to the carving of hands and fine springs from pure steel, creating thinner and more brittle objects until the student could do it consistently without the aid of machines.
From the moment Abraham-Louis began his apprenticeship under Tattet's tutelage46 he took to watchmaking with unusual zeal. Even as an apprentice, it was clear that he had a flair for the scientific and talents in astronomy and mathematics as well as drafting. His hurried drawings were primitive but effective - just a few slashes on a sheet of paper often distilled extremely complex concepts - and his formal drawings were wondrously detailed. This talent for design gave him a distinct advantage. Because most watchmakers were not formally trained, an understanding of the rudiments of physics and optics was enough to turn an unschooled bench worker into a skilled craftsman and businessman. With a bit of study, the Tattets decided, young Abraham-Louis would become an excellent watch designer.
Watchmaking could be a frustrating and expensive proposition. Each individual piece came from a sheet of metal - usually brass but sometimes gold or silver - and had to be painstakingly cut out, milled, and polished. Safety systems on machines were primitive at best, and when a drill or grinder overshot the mark, an entire day's work could be ruined. The tips of the tools only barely touched the metal in most cases, nipping off thin slices of brass, silver, or gold in a rapid, repetitive motion that could best be described as a dance - a turn, a slide, a return to the start. Gears, for example, were first cut or stamped out as metal disks and then placed on another cutter that moved the disk an infinitesimally short distance to the next spot for the drill or file to come down and cut away a notch. Only a patient and delicate hand could coax the finest and most ornate of shapes out of otherwise imperfect metal. The tools employed, which are still in use today, removed just enough metal from a surface to allow for the addition of gears or jewels or the creation of beautifully engraved surfaces.
The watchmakers who worked at the fabrique, or watch factory, were called fabriquers, and unlike, for example, dressmakers or wigmakers to the wealthy who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring glamour to the merchant's wife or the baroness, these fabriquers enjoyed a quality of life and education shared by few other craftsmen. Because they mingled with the aristocracy, it was expected that they understand philosophy, politics, and science. During the day, many of them would sit working by the large windows of their ateliers while one of them would read aloud from the newspaper or a book, a habit copied later by lectores in tobacco factories in the New World who read the news of the day to busy rollers.
Breguet quickly learned that every clock and watch consisted of the same three parts: a power source, a transmission system, and a register. The power source could be anything that kept the timepiece running: a bucket of water, a spring, a tireless squirrel on a wheel. Pendulum clocks, for example, used a wound spring or cable that pulled a gear down and around and actuated the pendulum itself. Clocks could run on water, air, or heat - anything that could deliver energy to the works.
The tiny wheel that spins back and forth in most modern watches - and some made during Breguet's time - was called the balance wheel. The balance wheel was like a round pendulum. The escapement pushed it in one direction, stopped it, and after it had returned to its original position, the process was repeated, ad infinitum. A small spring connected to the wheel ensured that the balance moved only so far and returned at a regular interval.
The transmission system, better known as the escapement - literally a device that allowed the energy stored in the spring to "escape" at a preset interval - converted the power source into a set of ticks. It was the speed of the escapement that defined how a clock or watch's seconds hand would move. Slower escapements released their energy once per second, creating the tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Modern escapements "tick" at up to ten times per second, creating the illusion that the seconds hand is sweeping slowly across the face of the dial. While today watchmakers pride themselves on building high frequency movements, in Breguet's time a mort hand, or dead-beat seconds hand, was a complication that forced the hand to tick once a second and was highly sought after because it reminded the wearer of the reassuring tick-tock of an old chamber clock.
Many early watches used gut or chains to transfer the power of the mainspring to the escapement. This system, called the fusee or "cone," ensured that the watch remained accurate throughout its unwinding cycle. It consisted of a mainspring and a cone attached to each other with a thin chain. As the wearer wound the watch, the chain would climb up the cone until it reached the top and then unwind, slowly, releasing steadily more slack. It acted like a governor on an engine, allowing the spring to mete out equal amounts of energy at all times, and appeared in Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings as early as 1405. These tiny chains were the Achilles heel of a good watch. They would break on winding or wear out after a few months of use. They also made watches awkwardly thick because the cones had to be quite tall to take up all of the chain.
The final part of a watch was the register or face. The hands, time, and date readouts, and moon phase information were all registers, and each depended on the hummingbird heartbeat of the power source and the transmission.
Looking closely at an open watch, Breguet could see components arrayed in a pattern inscrutable to anyone but the watch's maker. There could be no wasted space, no misalignment, and no sense that anything could be added or removed without destroying the harmony of the whole. A watch's shapes and curves put one in mind of the natural world of shells and planets. If the object was made by a master, it would work for years, decades, even centuries, given proper care. Watches, then, could be considered true perpetual motion machines in that they would stay constantly in motion if certain conditions were met. But almost none of those conditions were present in the eighteenth century. Damp, cold, mud, grit, and inferior oil usually gummed up the works, and the hand of a bad watchmaker could consign a good watch to an even worse fate.
In less than a year, the precocious boy was chafing at the limits of what the Neuchâtel watchmakers could teach him, and Tattet decided to send his stepson to Versailles for further training. This decision was partially financial. The long road between Neuchâtel and Versailles took a week to travel by stagecoach, and Tattet deemed it necessary to have someone he could trust at Versailles who could take orders and make repairs inside the heart of the French court. Ever since Louis XIV had made Versailles his home in the early eighteenth century, French kings rarely travelled outside the palace's plush and luxurious confines. Within Versailles, Louis XV and his retinue were safe from the constant scrutiny of Parisian court life. Paris merchants vying for a royal commission had to travel there to ply their trade.
At Versailles, Breguet's apprenticeship continued under a prominent Swiss watchmaker whom the Tattets knew, but within two years, Abraham-Louis had exhausted this teacher's knowledge as well. He had grown considerably in intellect and discipline. While many watchmakers focused on one aspect of the watch - the ebauche, the complications, the hands or face - Breguet showed an overall understanding of each interfacing part, ensuring he could build a watch from start to finish. The boy had a singular aptitude for taking and using everything he learned, and he had the unusual ability to express every aspect of the watch in both written form and through drafting. His notebooks were full of designs for watches, along with detailed descriptions of various complications - the self-winding feature known as the perpetuelle, for example - as well as discussions of historical examples of previous versions of his work. He did not like to boast. Many of his creations "were kept secret for a long time, not for the sake of secrecy as many thought at the time, but merely out of modesty."47
This formerly poor student was now hungry for knowledge. When his first apprenticeship ended, he asked to stay on. "master, I have a favor to ask of you," he said. "I am sensible that I have not employed all my time to the best of my ability, in your service, and I wish to be allowed to work three months more, under you, without salary."48 He stayed the three months.
He still hungered to study under one of the truly great horologists of the age, men he sometimes glimpsed, from a distance, arriving by gilded fiacre at Versailles to perform their duties as horlogers du roi. In particular, he wanted to learn about pocket watches.
Seeing an opportunity, Breguet's stepfather moved the boy from Versailles to Paris, where he arranged for Abraham-Louis to continue his training on the Quai de l'Horloge, as apprentice to a series of master pocket watchmakers. The intention was to build the Breguet brand in Paris, where the rich were notoriously desperate in their attempts to impress at court. The uncountable dukes, earls, and courtiers often wore a different outfit each day with accessories to match, and to fail to appear with a beautiful pocket watch was akin to arriving at court without pants.
Watchmakers like Berthoud were attempting to simplify and reduce the movements that they were churning out in their shops. For example, bridges, the pieces that held the wheels and gears in place and acted as a structural support for the entire mechanism, were often superfluous and added weight and thickness to the watch movement. A clock movement - all large plates and minuscule gears - was quite elegant in its simplicity, but the same could not be said of a watch movement. Because of the more confined space, watch movements were much denser and had little room to breathe, as it were. So, to reduce overall size, the trick was to either skeletonize the movement - to remove superfluous metal from around the pinions and leave only the essential parts intact - or to create an entirely new form of bridge with only a few essential parts.
This tendency to simplify often ran counter to the prevailing conception of mechanical beauty. Some watches were decorated throughout, with even certain hidden parts covered in fine carvings of leaves, flowers, and birds. Such ostentation, while impressive to the viewer, weakened the metal if taken to zealous extremes. Some watches were so delicately carved that their cases looked like rotten lace when rust and rough treatment took their toll.
Under the masters in Versailles, Breguet learned important lessons about tool making. Whereas previously every watch was unique and almost completely hand-made, the state of the art now was based on tools and reproducible parts. The use of tools to grind gears and watch screws made it possible for Abraham-Louis to dream, subversively, of one day creating a "popular" watch - for everyone, not just the upper classes.
His apprenticeships meant long hours at a watch-smith's bench. The day started early. He tended the fires and prepared the workspace for the rest of the crew, young men who, like him, were usually untrained and uneducated, giving Breguet a slight advantage due to his natural talent. As they carved the gears and gear plates, Breguet fetched metal or did menial tasks like polishing fasteners or watching the enameling kiln and preparing pieces of metal for refining. He would not repair or even begin his own watch for another few years, even though it was clear that he had a unique eye for the complex and miniature machinery that his masters dealt in.
Because light meant everything in a workshop, he quickly learned how to follow the sun as it moved through the atelier, helping the watchmakers turn to receive direct rays as they worked. Watchmaking by candlelight was possible, but not preferable. The flickering flame could trick even the steadiest hand into dropping a screw into the wrong hole or snapping a gear as it was being polished, forcing the watchmaker to start over again from scratch. A single slip could result in a movement being completely destroyed, and watchmakers had to extensively practice creating their own tools and replacement parts, preparing rods, wheels, and gears over and over again until they got them absolutely right.
Even benches were strictly codified, and most were made of mahogany or birch. Cedar was forbidden as, one watchmaker noted, "it exudes a sort of gum which forms a sticky deposit on work and tools, and rapidly spoils any lubricating oil that may be exposed to it."49 Instead harder woods were used and even these became worn and broken with age and use.
Few tradesmen had enough patience to complete these seemingly menial and repetitive tasks, and it was rare to find someone who could accept constant criticism while still maintaining accuracy and thinking about the creative use of limited space. But the best watchmakers knew that their work was unique in every way; they viewed each new watch as a challenge to be engineered rather than as a commodity to be stamped out. This mindset encouraged ceaseless tinkering and improvement of the movements and led to the inclusion, in some watches, of tiny automata such as twittering birds and harp-plucking maidens. If a watchmaker could create a calendar that would stay accurate for centuries without having to be reset, it was fairly trivial to create a watch that displayed a small dog wagging its tail or an erotic scene involving a vicar and one of his more fulsome congregants.
While the average watch took perhaps a week to build, the more complex and expensive pieces took considerably longer. In many cases, complex watches were passed from watchmaker to watchmaker, and each piece, starting with the internal mechanism or movement, was added on in a sort of slow accretion. When a particularly thorny problem arose like the addition of a complication to an already complicated watch, watchmakers spent weeks staring through a loupe each day until the sky darkened and the workers could no longer see, weeks requiring absolute and unflagging concentration and, if the watchmaker was creating a timepiece from scratch without the aid of the master's pre-drawn plans, a flair for invention.
To the untrained eye, these eighteenth-century movements looked less like mechanical things than ornate manuscripts, full of curlicues and dashes, odd shapes and runes etched into the metal, identifying the maker and his employees in miniscule graffito. After repairs watchmakers would inscribe the date and type of maintenance performed on a watch on the inside of the case - small notes from the past to the future, enabling watchmakers to follow each other's work even when they were separated by time and space. The notes could be coded dates or a watchmaker's initials or an invoice number, for when the watch was separated from its case for repair.
From Versailles Breguet moved to the Clock Dock where he studied under both Berthoud and Lépine. His most auspicious tutelage, however, came from Abbot Joseph-François Marie, a professor of mathematics and physics at College Mazarin. Officially named Collège des Quatre-Nations, the college was part of the University of Paris and consisted of sixty students from all over the French empire. Designed as a collecting school for citizens from countries without a university system, it taught its scholars French deportment, math, and science.
The Abbot also taught the young Breguet how to comport himself around royalty, an essential skill.50 While the average watchmaker needed little outside training - rarely being called upon to create anything more than the standard two-handed clock that perhaps chimed the hours and showed the minutes in the day - a watchmaker like Breguet would be expected to create watches with multiple complications, requiring unique skills and education to understand how to re-create these mathematical formulas mechanically and how miniature calendars and astronomical charts found in larger clocks could be shrunk into watches more efficiently.
One such complication was solar mean time - the time indicated by the sun, as opposed to the time on a standard twenty-four-hour clock. Because of intrinsic problems with the Gregorian calendar in the acceptance of the twenty-four-hour day, the measured length of a day often differed by up to sixteen minutes in either direction from the solar length of the day (meaning the time from when the sun was at high noon to when the moon was at its apex). All Breguet had to do was look at a sundial to be reminded of the problem. When the shadow of the sundial's style was gone, meaning the sun was directly overhead, there was a slight and measurable difference between solar mean time and normally indicated twenty-four-hour time. This discrepancy, which was important in measuring the actual time at a given location, was solved, in watches, by adding a bean-shaped cog traced by an indicator hand. The indicator showed the mean solar time - plus or minus up to fifteen minutes - as the date wheel spun. This ingenious solution - essentially creating a miniature representation of the ovoid rotation of the earth around the sun - made possible a number of improvements in timekeeping during Breguet's lifetime.
Years passed and Breguet progressed from apprentice to journeyman quickly. By his twenty-seventh year he was an intellectual juggernaut on the Clock Dock, taking up commissions that frightened other watchmakers. Breguet now had the technical acumen to try to address many of the problems that horology faced including the reduction of friction, the measurement of the heavens, and the general stability of clockwork in rough conditions. He needed the kinds of commissions that could fund such exploration.
Luckily, the Breguet's tutor, the Abbot, was close to the French court and brought young Breguet's watches on visits with the king and queen. With obvious pride he would pull a Breguet from his folds and consult it during the day, mentioning that the maker of his favorite timepieces was a young Swiss artisan named Abraham-Louis. Soon, Breguet was called before the court himself, and a lucrative business bloomed.
Breguet in his prime was handsome in an elfin sort of way and his quiet company and reliable discretion were highly sought after in many circles. It was at court that he met the Polignac family and it was also here that he would meet Axel von Fersen, whose respect and admiration were intertwined with his company's eventual success. It was during the waning years of Louis XV and the ascension to power of Louis XVI that Breguet ingratiated himself with the court, a move that eventually led to his royal commission, which freed the young watchmaker from the toil and drudgery of more retail-minded work. Complicated watches of the sort Breguet was making were expensive, and only in the rarefied air of the French court could he find willing and eager buyers.
Breguet was soon leading a team of watchmakers who were creating some of the most complex clocks and watches of their day. He dressed less like a purveyor of royal watches than a shopkeeper, going about Paris with a high collar pulled up on his dark coat and his hair, and increasingly bald pate, hidden by a cap.
Under Louis XIV, the Sun king, Versailles had been not only the heart of fashion and interior design but also the nexus of watchmaking in France. The first Renaissance clocks had disappeared from the royal possessions before the 1700s - most were made of precious metals and melted down during dips in cash flow. But other clocks survived, including turret clocks based on a German design with attractive but not overly delicate frieze patterns applied to the corners and faces of the hexagonal body. One clock, built in 1696, featured a "rich throne" on which sat a miniature Louis XIV, surrounded by a procession of "Electors of the German States, and the princes and dukes of Italy," while the kings of Europe appeared out of a small window and chimed a bell, then retiring after paying homage to the Sun king with a curt bow. Because of the unyielding will of William III of England, the clockmaker designed that king's mannequin to bow much lower than the others, thereby pleasing the French monarch. However, this extra dip put a strain on the mechanism and one afternoon, during a public exhibition with the king present, the clock broke. Instead of bowing, the French king fell prostrate before the English king while the clock ground and springs clanged inside. The clockmaker was locked up in the Bastille.
Another clock played an hourly chime and featured a small statue of Louis XIV that, on the hour, received a miniature crown from a winged figure of Victory while a cock at the top of the clock flapped its wings and two sentinels appeared to protect the newly crowned king.
From the ridiculous came the sublime. Under the rule of Louis XVI, a distinctive style of French clock evolved. The movements might be sourced elsewhere (most came from Switzerland, although German movements were also popular), but French case makers saw the clock as a part of a whole, something to be connected, stylistically, with the tables, chairs, and commodes in a room. A clock was not a separate device, toiling away in obscurity. It was a room's lighthouse and center of attention and so played an important role in the French household. It tolled the hours, kept the master's appointments, and kept order in the social whirl that was Versailles and Paris.
Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette owned hundreds of timepieces in their lifetime, mostly standard pocket watches and table clocks. Because Louis XVI, in particular, was enamored with technology, during his reign almost every room in the palace had a clock or watch running steadily throughout the day. In an era when a family might own one chamber clock - usually a repeater (a clock which chimed the hours when activated by a button) with a handle on top for easy transport - to fill a palace with clocks was unusual, even for a wealthy king.
Marie-Antoinette, strolling with her ladies-in-waiting from room to room, was exposed to a riot of styles, colors, and inspirations. One clock, complete with Medusas, reclining sphinxes, and a winged Apollo, looked more like a reliquary for spent time than a mere timepiece. The face of the clock itself was staid and out-of-place, for its dark case was covered in curlicues and engraved flowers; golden accents, so finely wrought as to appear vibrantly life-like, popped from the case's face; spiral feet shaped like narwhal horns completed the decadent picture.
Another clock looked like something from an astronomer's fever dream. Over two meters high, it featured a glass globe on the top containing a miniature representation of the solar system and the constellations of the zodiac. The face was chased with gold, and the gold hands looked like sprigs of herbs, while the seconds hand ticked around solidly. Marie-Antoinette was delighted by one feature especially: four tiny windows showing the year, date, month, and day above a unique moon-phase register with a jolly, if wan, moon peeking over two hills of gold.
In the Petit Trianon, the small palace that served as Marie-Antoinette's private redoubt, the clocks were smaller models, featuring a large white face and only a minimum of ornate gilding. Her taste was much more subdued than the Bourbon family's, and amid the oppressive complexity of her life, a clock ticking on a mantle offered quiet reassurance.
Even her dressing room was no safe harbor from time. One piece, a small jewelry box displaying a pair of courtiers at leisure, was topped by a small watch guarded by cherubs and crowned with a small bust of a young girl with flowing hair.
In an era of relative imprecision, all these clocks were kept in perfect synchronization. The king's day was regimented into an hourly plan with special times dedicated to church, affairs of state, and appearances before the people. The royal day was so codified, particularly during the rule of Louis XIV, that members of the citizenry were given leave to watch the king go to bed in a special ceremonial chamber.
And so, among the army of assistants and handymen at Versailles, were the horlogers du roi. The horloger on duty made rounds daily, winding each clock and setting it according to the Regulator - a large-faced watch with the hour hand on one register and the minute hand on another smaller one - that he would carry with him. These portable Regulators were a copy of the larger Regulator clocks that most watchmakers kept on their walls, some of them so well-made that they lasted an entire year without winding.51 Most of the watches that Versailles' many courtiers carried had to be set in the same way whenever they stopped, which was often.
The draftiness of Versailles posed another challenge: While not as difficult as maintaining a clock onboard a ship or in a carriage clattering over rough European roads, ensuring precision in areas of varying temperature and humidity was a struggle. Royal watchmakers also had to deal with broken crystals, snagged gears, and shattered enamel from watches that revelers dropped on the palace's cold marble floors.
At Versailles, the horlogers du roi were considered valets de chambre and, as such, were given access to the king's quarters at eight o'clock each morning, a time when the king was expected to at least feign a deep sleep before being officially awoken by courtiers. There were usually only three horlogers appointed at any one time, and each received two-hundred livres for four months of service a year, splitting the year into thirds. While for the most part they were glorified clock inspectors, their position of power and access to the king's intimate spaces made them an important part of the king's day. In addition, they received from their guild permission to cast bronze - a unique privilege in a guild system that compartmentalized the trades. Watchmakers could not, for instance, cast gold, because that would impinge on the goldsmith's guild, while lockmakers were eventually forbidden from doing clockwork. The king's watchmakers also received a workspace at the Louvre and could hire as many assistants as they wanted. Thus, securing this official appointment ensured a brisk trade.
The ascension of Louis and Marie to the throne took place just when watches were approaching almost a public mania in France. If clocks symbolized success and comfort, then the new pocket watches signified the ultimate version of those attainments. To own a watch was to be connected with the adventure in the New World and to take part in the burgeoning interest in science and technology. Watches weren't just talismans of power. They were now icons of a new, forward-looking era marked by exploration and intellectual inquiry.
As such, they were a staple of literate conversation and naturally on the mind of a well-bred young man making his Grand tour. In Basel, Axel Fersen had been amused to learn that the town clock always ran an hour fast, supposedly ever since the magistrate had learned of plans to murder him and fooled the conspirators by changing the time. At Fernay, on the French border, a wrinkled, scarlet-waistcoated Voltaire had shown Fersen the part of his house where, as Fersen noted in his diary, the satirist put up "all the watchmakers of Geneva." A love of watches was by now trickling down even to the lower classes, and Fersen saw boys of school age running around with tin pocket watches of dubious quality.
Watches frequently served as gifts, and because one looked at them many times a day, they were often painted or inscribed with terms of endearment. Marie-Antoinette passed out fifty-two snuff boxes and fifty-one watches to the guests at her wedding in May 1770.
The Abbé Marie was responsible for introducing Breguet not only to Versailles but also to his future wife, Cécile-Marie-Louise L'huillier, a twenty-three-year-old beauty with whose family he was close. Their courtship was brief and the marriage itself on August 28, 1775, brought further advantages. The girl's older brother was an agent to the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother. Without such inter-family ties, Breguet would never have been able to move in the rarified circles in which he now found himself. Tracing back the skein of happenstance that had brought him to this point must have been baffling and thrilling. If Breguet's father had not died, the boy would probably have stayed in Neuchâtel, perhaps becoming a merchant, or, if family tradition held, a pastor. Now, he was a watchmaker to the French court.
As his wife helped prepare the rooms of No. 51, on the Quai, as a home for their coming family, for the first time in years Breguet settled into a life of domestic happiness. His stepfather saw to it that he was kept in parts and ebauche, with regular shipments from Switzerland, and his family there kept up regular communications.
The French court would supply a ready stream of revenue for the company as it grew. The rise of Louis XVI to the throne made the economy "favorable to both the arts and commerce."52 Even as dark clouds began to mass on the horizon, in the years leading up to the death of the old king, France enjoyed an economic boom. Joseph Marie Terray, Louis XV's finance minister, had increased government revenue - through a series of taxes and reforms - to about eighty million livres and reduced deficits to twenty-five million.53 While his actions angered many French and led to the "flour war," a precursor to the Revolution caused by a rise of bread prices due to government control of reserve flour, the nobles had enough confidence to invest in a young man with a talent for watchmaking.
Breguet's goal was to reduce the size of his watches, at least partly by reducing the number of moving parts and their complexity. While the prevailing baroque style required a great deal of ornate millwork and engraving, Breguet was satisfied with the simplest movement possible. One of his watches contained a large mainspring, connected to a small, square key fitting for winding, and a strikingly simple movement - essentially a few gears connected to a large and finely wrought balance wheel, with a large regulating pin designed to improve the accuracy of the watch. Even in its simplicity, the watch also had a quarter repeater, which chimed the time to the nearest quarter hour. Everything superfluous had been removed - it was a machine designed for one purpose, with little, if any, ostentation, and was so different from the watches his colleagues were making that even masters on the Quai couldn't fathom or re-create the timepieces coming out of Breguet's shop.
Breguet's showroom filled up quickly with customers and employees. It was cramped, but for the time being, the attic atelier was sufficient for his needs. Breguet liked to keep his watchmakers busy making new and ever more impressive complications and often outsourced the assembly of his simpler watches, allowing him to dedicate his time to design and finishing.
Some of his watches made their way into the pockets of courtiers, but many ended up in harsher climates. The war in America was coming to a head, and soldiers of higher breeding needed watches to carry overseas. Breguet's timepieces, stripped of ornamentation and almost impervious to shock and damage, began riding in the coat pockets of allied soldiers bound from France to Boston and parts west.
The business grew steadily. Breguet started receiving regular commissions from royal courtiers, and dukes, ladies, and representatives of the king himself (to judge from the limited records that remain) frequented his shop.
Breguet's young family, too, seemed blessed. His first son, Antoine-Louis, was born in 1776, and two years later his wife gave birth again, to Francois-Louis. The boys were baptized in the church of Saint-Barthelemy, the small parish church of the Île de la Cité.54 Like young Abraham-Louis, sitting in rapt attention at the feet of travelers at his father's Inn in Les Verrieres, the boys spent their days listening to watchmakers describe their discoveries and chat about politics and history. It was seemingly a charmed existence - a young watchmaker with a beautiful family, all living on the most magnificent street in the history of horological science. Breguet was soon selling perpetuelles to nearly everyone at court including the king and queen. He spent long hours at his bench, reveling in the opportunity to think carefully though the thorny problems of horology.
Then calamity struck. Francois-Louis died when he was two. Cecile-Marie-Louise was pregnant again, and gave birth to a girl, Charlotte, but the baby died only hours later. And then Cecile-Marie-Louise herself died on May 11, 1780, perhaps of fever. She was just twenty-eight.
Breguet's world snapped shut like a watchcase. He called for his young sister-in-law Suzanne-Elisabeth to come and raise his child. He would never remarry. The loss changed him, reducing his world to a few primary things - his watches, the business, and his long-term projects. Until then, he essentially ignored little Antoine-Louis. Breguet's wife had been his only love outside of the workshop. Now, he dedicated himself obsessively to the business and his clients, ensuring the shop's continued growth even after three shattering deaths in his small family.
The work was difficult. Fashion changed almost daily at court, and men and women both would clamor for one design one day and another completely different design the next. Breguet boldly removed all fashion-chasing from his watchmaking process, creating one of the first brands that stood on its own merit rather than reacting to national whimsy. No Breguet piece was alike - they did not mass-produce - and so every Breguet piece had its own unique construction but a definite and recognizable style.
As a young widower, he often received invitations to Versailles as well as to major salons in the city. He was also expected to attend balls at the behest of the queen. In this rarified environment, Breguet found himself countless times proposing diamond-studded watches for the ladies (not for the queen, who loved pearls) - and gold or silver hunting watches for the men. The always business-like Breguet disliked, but tolerated, the extravagant frivolity of the balls.
His deference and understanding smile, even in the face of notoriously dissolute royal appointees, made him popular at court. He was close to a number of the most important men and women in the country, and his wide-ranging network of Swiss expatriates gave him entrée almost everywhere else. When he crossed the channel, a close friend and admirer, the delightfully named Mr. Disney-Flytche,55 often gave Breguet a pocketbook full of banknotes "in order that he should be spared want when he came to England."56
The watchmakers at his shop usually cared for his young son and they treated the boy as one of their own even as his stern, taciturn father groomed him to become the next owner of the firm. He had large shoes to fill, as Breguet's shop was now a landmark for Paris' upper classes. From the beginning, Breguet kept a logbook of watch sales, and his notations ("pour la reine" - "for the queen" was a popular one) were a who's who of pre-revolutionary France, as well as a schematic history of timekeeping. He had risen far and fast and the watches he was making were as distant from the earliest clocks as the wooden club was from the flintlock rifle.
He was known on the Quai as a kind employer and a trustworthy shopkeeper, quick to laugh and to offer a young apprentice the chance to learn in a major house. He had a propensity to generosity. When a workman brought in a piece for inspection and then presented a bill, Breguet was said to have added a small tail to any final zeros, turning them into 9s. Young men in Breguet's factory were always encouraged with the words "Do not be discouraged, or allow failure to dishearten you."57
In the pantheon of stars on the Quai, Breguet would shine brightest. For that matter, by the estimation of his peers and customers at Versailles and beyond, he was the finest watchmaker anywhere. Known for his perpetuelles, for never making the same watch twice, for a fresh, modern style that combined technical and aesthetic innovation, he rose to fashion at a pivotal moment. The very concentration of wealth that was subtly beginning to tear France apart was fuelling a golden age of watches, and the very people for whom he was making those watches were running out of time.