Paris
On the eve of the summer equinox a fiacre rolled through the narrow cobbled streets of Paris. It was a dowdy carriage, unrecognizable and unassuming, with nothing about it that would attract special notice from the city's watchmen and lamplighters. It was big enough to hold seven people, and inside the carriage, according to papers accompanying its occupants, were the Russian Baroness de Korff, her servants - Madame Rocher, a governess; Rosalie, a companion; and Durand, a valet de chambre - and daughters Amelia and Aglae. One of the little girls slept soundly on the carriage floor, under the baroness's petticoats.
But nothing was as it appeared on this summer evening in 1791. The baroness was in fact Madame de Tourzel, the actual governess to the royal children whom Fersen, not trusting any of the queen's courtiers or employees, called that "wretched woman-of-the-bedchamber." The "governess" was the queen herself, Rosalie was her sister Elizabeth, and the butler, Durand, was Louis XVI. Only one of the children was a girl: twelve-year-old Marie Thérèse, daughter of the king and queen. The other, lying on the floor, was her brother, the six-year-old dauphin, Louis-Charles, who had asked, on being told of their late night mission, to be allowed to wear his "sabre and boots" but had been dressed up in girl's clothing instead. The carriage the royal family was travelling in did not belong to them, and none of their servants had been made aware of its existence. The palace prison that J.B. Gouvion, liaison to the Paris National Guard, said was so secure that "not even a mouse could escape from there" had just been breached.90
The coachman, who now pushed the horses along, had long before procured the coach and planned the daring journey. Now, weaving through the fetid byways of the darkened city, periodically checking his silver soldier's Breguet, he kept a wary eye on the empty streets. Axel von Fersen, dressed as a footman, with his face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat, snapped his whip to goad the animals onward.
Eventually, the carriage ducked through a gate at the city perimeter and came to a stop. Fersen left the party and returned momentarily with another longer carriage, a berline pulled by six horses, large enough to accommodate the entire family comfortably. Its slender iron wheels looked as if they would give them trouble over rough roads, but for passenger comfort the carriage couldn't be better. No expense had been spared in its construction, at least on the inside. The interior included "white taffeta [cushions], double curtains of taffeta and leather on all the windows, two cooking stoves of iron plate, [and] two chamber pots of varnished leather."91 All of these perks came from the pocket of Fersen, who also provisioned the carriage with "beef a la mode and cold veal together with a bag of small change for use at the posting-houses, a bottle of still champagne, and five bottles of water:"92 a feast for a king and his retinue, in exile, complete with tolls for the trip.
At Bondy, ten miles outside of Paris, Fersen said good-bye. He had wanted to continue to accompany the royal family, but the king had amiably but firmly refused, and now did so again. Later, some would suggest that the king had not wished to be chaperoned to safety by a man who was sleeping with his wife. Madame de Tourzel, the queen's handmaiden who was impersonating the Russian baroness, would write: "The king, in saying good-bye, expressed his gratitude in the most affectionate manner, saying he hoped to be able to do so other than in words, and that he expected to see him again soon."
Marie Thérèse later wrote of Fersen's leaving with a decided finality, noting "he bade my father goodnight, mounted his horse, and disappeared."93 Fersen was heading north toward Belgium.
By the time Fersen left, the royal family was already hours behind schedule, and they fell even further behind in their new vehicle. Had the family purchased two or three smaller carriages - rather than the single, larger berline on which the king insisted - they could have travelled farther faster.
Only after dawn had broken, and they had entered the Marne valley and felt safely away from Paris, were they able to relax for the first time. They ate the food Fersen had supplied, and, ever the explorer, the king unfolded a map of the countryside and began checking off the names of the towns they passed.
Despite the dangers that still faced them - earlier, Fersen had written to Bouille, "One can only shudder at the thought of the horrors that would take place if they were stopped" - the king became almost reckless, periodically getting out to empty his bladder or stretch his legs, and offering hearty farewells to loyal subjects who recognized him immediately, thanks to a wedding trip north in 1775 and a number of drawings passed out as gifts in the preceding years. At one point, he got out of the carriage and leisurely discussed the harvest with some local farmers. "We're out of danger now," he explained to his coachman Moustier, gravely underestimating the power and reach of the Revolution.
Threats to their mission accrued inexorably. At one relay station, the royal family accepted the posting master's invitation to come inside for refreshments. They stayed half an hour. Back on the road, they tried to make up for lost time, and in their haste, a wheel came off the carriage, necessitating another half hour's delay as it was repaired. At Chalons, the king stuck his head out the window, and received many well wishes. After the carriage left the town, even Marie was becoming more confidant, and announced, "We are saved!" But the people of the town had already fallen into argument over how the royals should be treated. An hour later, a lone man on horseback, who has never been identified, approached the coach and said, "Your plans have gone awry. You will be stopped!"
The royal family was approaching the string of towns on the road to Montmedy where General Louis de Bouillé, the loyal military leader, had moved a succession of garrisons under the pretense of protecting a shipment of money to the provinces. But by now the soldiers had been waiting for hours and were growing nervous that the royal family had yet to appear. In the first town, peasants angry at the unexplained presence of the military began to congregate with guns and pitchforks, and the garrison abandoned its post. Half an hour later, the royal carriage rattled in, the royal family expecting to come under the protection of Bouille's troops, only to find no one waiting for them. A similar situation arose in the next town, Sainte Menehould, and by the time the carriage reached the town after that, Varennes, the tragedy of errors was complete. A mob surrounded the berline, the family was arrested, and, under guard, they were brought back to Paris and to the end of monarchy.
At that moment, Axel Fersen, after a night of riding, reached Mons, where he slept soundly, expecting the king and queen to contact him when they arrived at the fortress town in the French hinterlands. Word never came. On the 23rd, he saw Bouillé, who told him what had happened. That night, Fersen wrote to his father: "All is lost, dearest father, and I am in despair. Only imagine my grief and pity me."
For six months, Fersen remained abroad. His involvement in the flight to Varennes had been discovered, and he was banned from entering France; a friend with whom he had left his diaries destroyed them, lest they be confiscated by the revolutionaries. Writing to Fersen in cipher and in invisible ink, the queen said, "How worried I've been about you and how I feel all that you must be suffering not to have heard from us!" Through an intermediary, she gave Fersen a gold ring inscribed Lache qui les abandonne - "Only the Coward Gives Up." - before sending the ring off, Marie wore it for two days.
Though Marie had begged Fersen not to come back to Paris, lest he be killed, on February 13, 1792, wearing a disguise and carrying fake papers, he returned to France. He saw Marie that same night, sneaking into the Tuileries and afterward noting that he "Went to the queen. Took my regular way. Fear of National Guards. Her lodgings marvelous. Did not see the king. Stayed there." That last "laconic" note94 suggested that Fersen and the queen still had a physical relationship even under arrest.
It was the first of several visits. Three days later, he was with the royal family from six in the evening until six in the morning. By now, more than half a year after the failed flight to Varennes, Fersen and King Gustav had taken it upon themselves to attempt another escape. Louis XVI, however, rebuffed the proposl, and Fersen retreated to the Paris home of Quintin Craufurd and his wife Eleanor Sullivan, a long time lover of Fersen's. For nearly a week, she kept him hidden in an attic room, secretly meeting with him during the day to sooth his sorrow. Fersen came down out of the attic near the end of the week, when Craufurd was home, and knocking on the door, pretending to have just arrived from Tours.95 On the 21st, Fersen returned to the Tuileries and stayed until midnight. Then he departed for Brussels.
With Gustav's blessing, Fersen continued his machinations. He travelled Europe much as he had travelled it as a boy, approaching the heads of state for a mission of the heart. However, all was lost. By March 1, 1792 Leopold II was dead of a sudden illness. Fifteen days later, Gustav III was shot and wounded at a masquerade at the Stockholm opera by a group of masked revelers who, it was believed, were fighting for the Jacobin cause. Two weeks later, Gustav was dead, and with him Fersen's last hope that Sweden might intervene on his beloved's behalf. "I am afraid of being persecuted if I should return to Sweden and am entirely decided not to go there," he wrote on April 13 in his diary.
Fersen continued to write to Marie-Antoinette (during the course of the year, he would send her twenty-two letters, and she would send him seventeen), still scheming how the other European powers might be moved to help her cause. But in August, Marie and her family were moved to the chilling Temple prison, and communication was no longer possible.
As Fersen roared through Europe, seeking ever-more-elusive allies in his bid to save Marie, he bore witness to the advance of the French Revolution, as increasing numbers of bedraggled aristocratic refugees passed him on the road. In November, in Brussels, Fersen was urged by the Russian ambassador, Ivan Simolin, and by Lord Elgin (of marbles fame), to burn the portfolio of the queen's papers that he had, lest they fall into the wrong hands, but he couldn't bring himself to do so.
Breguet, for his part, remained loyal to the French royal family. While they were still in the Tuileries, his partner Gide had visited the palace to accept for repair a watch that had stopped because the queen had dropped it. Breguet himself visited the Tuileries many times, usually to assist with some horological service, although his exact catalog of work has been lost. It is, however, a compelling picture to imagine the watchmaker to kings puttering through the drafty Tuileries maintaining his ticking charges as they sliced off the seconds before the death of the monarchy.
On September 4, 1792, now imprisoned in the Temple, Marie-Antoinette sent a request for a simple, steel minute-repeater. Although the 160 was still on the order books, Breguet's workshop began work on the 179, an austere pocket watch with a winding hole to the right of the central pinion, at two o'clock. The long, thin hands and elongated stem gave the watch an air of delicacy his other pieces could not attain, and the bare, white face, the name Breguet in tiny letters along the bottom, would be the only measure of the downcast family's hours that year. Around the same time, another member of court, the Comtesse de Provence (the king's sister-in-law), bought a 3,600 livres watch while living on 400 livres a month. The old ways of the nobles were still prevalent, even in the face of the maelstrom.
But the easy credit afforded the royal family was drying up, and Gide was fuming. "I hope you have found success with those accursed princes," wrote Gide to Breguet, when he was in London trying to collect debts from the British royal family. "They are catastrophic to deal with. Thanks to the energy of the French people, we are rid of them [in Paris]."
Gide saw Breguet as too soft on the English royal family and asked that he "summon up all his courage" in his dealings with them. "If you had received everything due to you, we should now be comfortable," he wrote. Finally, Gide was done with Breguet's trips to London and called him back permanently. "Do not sacrifice any longer your health, your time, or the profits we should be making. Try to get your money or letters of exchange and send England to the devil for ever."
Gide's increasingly business-oriented requests were the antithesis of Breguet's love of experimentation and novelty. On Valentine's Day, 1791, Gide wrote, in what would be one of his last requests, "I hope, my friend, that on your return the firm will be run differently, for I think the main problem for our business is that you never make two watches the same. Novelties are expensive. You have considerable talents; you should put them to good use."
The average Frenchman could now afford to carry a watch, and the novelties Gide so despised were popularly regarded as overly ornate and vastly extravagant, valuable only to decrepit and deposed monarchs or exiled noblemen, relics of a vanishing gilded age of absolute power and endless riches. The sheer act of producing a watch with complications was, in Gide's eyes, folly. In an era when two hands and a spring were enough to get a peasant to and from Mass on Sunday, a moonphase, an equation of time, or a chronograph were wasteful overkill, the sort of trumped-up frippery that had gotten France into its mess in the first place. In a land of that clamored for table wine there was no call for champagne.
It is hard to know how Breguet felt about this endless badgering. He was not very literary, never wrote a personal memoir, and left only letters, notes, and scattered fragments of prose behind. A recent trove of documents found to be written in the master's own hand described little more than his engineering techniques, shedding light on a particularly tricky and unusual method for adding a jeweled arbor to an escapement, but describing little about the man who seated the stone.
In his effort to maintain the business, Breguet found himself further and further from the bench. Work continued in his shop, but he often couldn't touch the finished products. He had become a businessman, something he decidedly did not like.
He did return to Paris to close a few watches made by his workmen, among them the 173, a repeating pocket watch with a jump-hour hand, a hand that "jumped" from hour to hour with each pass of the minutes hand around the dial. Instead of incremental movement, then, the wearer would see the hour hand pointing to the exact hour at all times and the minute hand pointing to the changing minute. The jumping-hours complication would later appear in the 160.
Breguet's watches during this time were inspired by John Arnold and the long discussions they had had in London. The 215 was a repeater with a sub-seconds hand (one that spun on its own pivot, lower on the dial than the main hands) and blued main indicators. It looked plain but used a highly complex and delicate bimetallic spring detent escapement, requiring hours of work simply to carve it out, then file it, and then tap in the minuscule holes that would connect it to the watch plate.
As Breguet prepared to break his partnership with Gide, he knew that he had to instill in his son a sense of pride in the craft. He began organizing an apprenticeship with Arnold for Antoine-Louis, who was now almost fifteen. The boy had his father's small features. But with his mutton-chop sideburns and husky build he was considerably more strapping a man than the diminutive watchmaker. As a teenager, he looked more like a young barkeep than a watchmaker. In May, Breguet called his son to London, where he began his tutelage with the Dumergue family, a clan of well-known scientists and scholars, and would continue on to John Arnold's workshop. Thus was Breguet's only son protected from the riots in France.
For Breguet himself, returning to Paris after each trip wasn't hard. He loved his adopted home and admitted as much in letters defending his business to the National Convention. Even in these difficult times, Breguet was trying desperately to keep working, but he took additional precautions to keep the 160 hidden away. Watches for royals and nobles were political gunpowder.
Unable to find common ground, Breguet and Gide dissolved their partnership on October 1, 1791, just as Gide's revolutionary fervor was reaching a boiling point. Gide was granted the rights to any outstanding debts he could collect - a job the tactless Frenchman relished - while Breguet took control of some of the company's unsold timepieces as well as the rent on 51 Quai de l'Horlage. The company was back in Breguet's name, and in 1792, the firm increased its output, building some sixty-two original watches. But the Revolution was becoming increasingly disruptive.
By the end of 1792, the revolutionary council conscripted Breguet into the National Guard and was forced to patrol the heart of Paris. During these months, he also applied for and gained French citizenship, claiming that he was descended from French Protestants who escaped to Switzerland from Picardy. This small change in status would protect his business from confiscation and, although it was based on a small lie (recent research has confirmed his family was Catholic and had deeper roots in Switzerland than even Breguet knew), it bought him time until he could decide on a next step.
Even the art of telling time was facing revision. In the early days of the Revolution, those who wished to publicly identify themselves with one side or the other would wear a watch depicting their support. An illustrated crown on a watch indicated a royalist, while clasped hands, a Phrygian cap (a red bonnet worn by revolutionaries), or the god Mithras symbolized revolutionary allegiance. Breguet made watches featuring the symbols of both sides, but the Revolution was soon to have a more profound effect on his watches.
In an effort to redefine everything in post-Revolutionary France, the Jacobins commissioned a group of French thinkers to create a calendar that would reflect the forward-thinking nature of the National Convention. The politicians in charge were Charles-Gilbert Romme, Claude Joseph Ferry, and Charles-François Dupuis. Romme was a small and clumsy man, a doctor and mathematician by training. His goal, as head of the Committee of Public Education, was to create a simpler calendar than the standard twenty-four-hour/365-day Gregorian abomination. He worked closely with Ferry, a military engineer, and Dupuis, a mathematician and astrologer. They then approached the mathematicians and astronomers Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, Gaspard Monge, and Alexandre Guy Pingré to help with calculations. Finally, pursuing new names for the days and months, they hired the poet Fabre d'Églantine, who in turn consulted André Thouin, a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes of the Natural History Museum in Paris.
And so came the lowest point, if not the end, of French horology. The new system created twelve months of thirty days each, with year one beginning on September 22, 1792. The extra days at the end of the year were named "festival days" and celebrated the struggle of the sans-cullotes or poorer members of the revolution who could not afford the fashionable knee breeches of the time. That an entire calendar system should end with a summer celebration of unfashionable Parisians probably doomed the effort from the start.
These last five days (six, during Leap Years) were set aside as holidays and named the days of Virtue, Genius, Work, Reason, Reward, and Revolution. Each day was segmented into ten hours of one-hundred minutes, and there were ten days in a "week," each named for its place in the order - Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, and so on.
On October 24, 1793, after almost a year of planning, the French Revolutionary Council would officially accept the French Republican Calendar. France's new, decimalized calendar was not well received by those who had been happily using the Gregorian calendar for the past two centuries. The Pope in Rome condemned the move, reducing the Revolution's popularity with the more pious Parisians.
But watchmakers were willing and ready to assist in the adoption of the new calendar. They began making decimal watches complete with dual time registers, one showing the decimal time and the other showing traditional time. One watch displayed revolutionary time on one half of the dial - five hours worth - and regular time on the other. A famous model featured revolutionary time above a twelve-hour clock, together with a thirty-day calendar register. Liberty, seated with an axe and sheaf of rods, held a level to symbolize concordance, and a trio of soldiers danced gaily around a pole with the Phrygian cap on top.
Counter revolutionaries also had their watches. Some of these watches looked as if they supported the Revolution - with scenes of lazy bourgeois trodding on the heads of the workers - but concealed hidden crosses or the risen Christ or even crowns in honor of the royals. With Breguet's influence waning in fashionable circles, watchmakers fell back into their old habit of adding curlicues and adornment to their watches. Breguet's famous complications - retrograde hands, clever calendar complications, and movements that fit into delicate cases of silver and white gold - were forgotten in the rush to stamp out the old. To Breguet it seemed the artistry of horology had been vanquished forever.
On Monday, January 21, 1793, at eight o'clock in the morning, Louis XVI left the Temple for the last time. For the previous five weeks, he had been subject to a trial for treason, in which he was dubbed with the revolutionary name Citoyen Louis Capet and condemned to death by guillotine. In one of the trial's more offensive moments, the locksmith Gamain, who had been happy to serve as the king's mechanical tutor and take his money for decades, revealed the secret chest he had built for Louis to hold his private papers, and leveled far-fetched accusations that the king had given him a poisoned cup of wine that resulted in a long illness. Throughout the trial, Louis had been kept apart from his wife and children, but the night before, he was permitted to see his family once more.
It was a cold and rainy day, and the carriage, guarded by twelve hundred men on horseback, moved slowly through the streets, which were lined with a gantlet of armed citizens. Louis was silent for most of the ride, but after an English priest who was accompanying the carriage lent him the king his breviary, Louis began reciting psalms. Two hours later, the carriage arrived in the Place Louis XV, which had been renamed the Place de la Revolution. The king stepped out and, surrounded by guards, undressed. Then he mounted the scaffold. "I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge," he told the crowd; "I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France."
He was interrupted by a national guardsman who ordered a drumroll. The axe fell at fifteen minutes after ten, the blade slicing the king's head off just as a scattering of quarter-repeaters tinkled in the crowd. A young guard took the head by the hair and paraded around the scaffold, holding it up for the crowd to see. "Vive la Republique!," the crowd chanted, as the mob pressed forward to dab their handkerchiefs in the king's blood. "Vive la Republique!"
Marie now became the "Widow Capet," mourning in simple black dress, sitting for hours in silence, no longer going outdoors for fresh air, dead-eyed except in the presence of her children.
On January 24, Fersen, unaware of the king's execution but fearing for the lives of the entire royal family, wrote to his sister Sophie from Dusseldorf. "My happy days are over and henceforth I am condemned to eternal regrets and must finish my sad days in desolation. Their faces will haunt my memory forever. Why, oh God, did I ever know them and why didn't I die for them?"
When he learned two days later that the king was dead, the report he heard was that the entire royal family had been killed. "She who was once all my happiness, all my life (for I never ceased loving her nor could I have done so for an instant), she for whom I would gladly have given a thousand lives is no more," he wrote in another letter to his sister. When he learned that Marie was still alive, it only became cause for more anxiety about what would befall her.
Over the next nine months, Fersen could think of little else, and his grief tore him to pieces. He grasped at any shred of information about what was happening in France, and consoled himself by ruminating on how to save the queen. By April, he was joyful, having convinced himself that the queen was out of danger. But each day brought news and as the bad surmounted the good, he grew despondent. He fretted about the queen's failing health, interrogated other travelers for wisps of news that might support his sanguine outlook, and persisted in advocating military invasion by the European powers.
Breguet's business continued to suffer, as courtiers chose exile over beheading and disappeared with their jewelry and watches, leaving little else but their baronial estates and debts. His customers and friends in the city's intelligentsia were also bringing him closer to peril.
One day in April of 1793, three months after Louis's death, Breguet went to a house on the rue Greneta, not far from the Les Halles market. He was with his friend Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist and rabble-rouser who, by now, was an enemy of the business-oriented Girondins. Breguet and Marat were an unlikely pair. At first, their friendship had made sense. Marat was a fellow Swiss, whose sister made watch hands for Breguet. As a court physician, he shared with Breguet the ambivalent role of one who was both a member of the elite and a worker subservient to it. And, like Marat, Breguet saw the need for reforms in French society. Breguet himself had joined the Jacobin political club in its early, moderate days. But by the spring of 1793, the men had little in common philosophically. Breguet remained largely apolitical, while Marat, now radicalized, had taken to accusing one-time comrades-in-arms of being "enemies of the Revolution."
Nonetheless, they maintained a tenuous friendship (recently, while in London, Breguet had obliged Marat's request to secretly gather together and sell some jewelry that the revolutionary had left in England), and on this afternoon, they were visiting a mutual acquaintance and talking politics.
By evening, an angry crowd of protesters sympathetic to the crown had gathered outside the home. The Revolution was entering its most violent period of mob rule and factionalism, and the house was rumored to be harboring an anti-government radical. When the crowd outside began calling for Marat's head, chanting "Down with Marat!," Breguet and the home's owner employed subterfuge to save his life, dressing Marat up as an old woman. Marat suffered from a disfiguring skin disease that had left scabs and open sores on his face, so they lavishly powdered his skin and rouged his cheeks. Then, after hooking his arm through the disguised Marat's, Breguet stepped outside into the torch-lit gloom. On Breguet's arm, the crowd saw a woman with slightly exaggerated make-up on her face. Perhaps because Breguet did not dress like the watchmaker to the king more like a common citizen, the crowd held no grudge against him, nor, apparently, against the homely, odd-looking lady who accompanied him. Breguet and his companion discreetly blended in with the shrieking crowd, disappearing into the night.
Breguet's own situation was becoming precarious, and he attempted to appease the authorities by taking his part in the National Guard. As a result, on May 29th, he found himself in the terrible position of having to guard a prisoner who had once been his greatest benefactor.
Through one day and into the next, Breguet worked a twenty-four-hour shift keeping watch at the Temple prison, where Marie-Antoinette, now the Widow Capet, was being kept. It was heartbreaking duty for a man who had once visited the royal family in their private chambers, and who, only months before her husband's death, had received a commission from the Queen for a repeater watch. This watch, delivered to the Temple by a municipal officer named Coutelle, arrived alongside some toys for the Dauphin from a Parisian shop called the Green Monkey. The package included "a cup and ball, a solitaire, and a beautiful checkerboard."96
The queen was held apart from the guards, for fear she would try to send messages out to the wider world, so Breguet's duty was limited to patrolling the lower halls of the prison, sparing the her majesty from the knowledge of his betrayal, and sparing Breguet the distress of seeing her in her diminished state.
With his clients all mounting the scaffold and his business in shambles, Breguet decided it was time to leave his adopted city and began preparing his workshop and employees for his departure. He had spent two decades on the Quai, but now he was embattled from left and right: His assistance to Marat was becoming known, and his longstanding relationship with the royal family cast a pall of suspicion on him under the council. Breguet's landlord, the comtesse de Polignac, had escaped Paris in 1789, and as a natural citizen of Switzerland, Breguet's property would soon be in question. Patriotism and fraternity were turning into a frenzy of anti-Royalist fervor and violence. It would be only a matter of time before the National Convention acted.
Only two days after he guarded the queen, Breguet was called before the Convention to explain his refusal to summon the rest of the National Guardsmen in his small district to arms in the Pont-Neuf section of Paris after a call for a general uprising. This traitorous refusal to upset the peace only angered the Convention's members and, in the end, as he wrote, "assured him certain death." His son, who was back in Paris now, was also in danger.
In the middle of June, Breguet went to visit Marat. He found him in his bathtub, having a medicinal soak to ameliorate the constant itching brought on by his skin disease. By now, Marat was a leading member of the most radical Revolutionary group, Robespierre's Montagnards, while Breguet was a moderate the group viewed as reactionary. But some flicker of their old friendship survived, and Marat had not forgotten Breguet's life-saving efforts in spiriting him safely through a hostile crowd only months earlier. Marat told Breguet that he would intercede on his behalf with the Convention, but that Breguet must first apply for paperwork through official channels.
Breguet immediately applied for passports for himself, his son, and his sister-in-law to leave Paris and return to his ancestral home. Now, Marat was able to repay the favor of several months before and help his old friend. On June 24, the National Convention Committee for General Security and Surveillance granted Breguet's request, but it would take weeks for the passports themselves to be issued. Marat's intercession had come just in time, for in mid-July, Marat was stabbed to death, while soaking in his tub, by a royalist sympathizer named Charlotte Corday. Finally, on August 10, 1793, the Committee issued the passports.
On August 12, leaving his firm in the hands of an assistant, Boulanger, Breguet found himself in a stagecoach, together with his son and sister-in-law, clattering away from the city center toward the edge of Paris. The road was full of other carriages heading in the same direction, all fleeing the Revolution. Breguet was in a daze. He felt fortunate to have been permitted to leave the country, but his sense of relief was tenuous. He had left his home and workshop behind. He didn't know when or if he would return. And, on the road ahead, he saw carriages slowing. Breguet experienced a rush of anxiety. He had left all of his tools and watches behind on the Quai - it was too risky not to - but he hadn't been able to part with the one object that embodied all of his work and innovation. Secreted in a hidden compartment aboard the carriage, packed in excelsior, was the 160, Axel von Fersen's watch for Marie-Antoinette. Now, as the carriage approached Fontainebleau, Breguet saw with alarm why the other carriages were slowing. Up ahead, there was a security checkpoint. But his worries proved for naught. After a cursory inspection of his papers, he was waved through. Breguet could rest with relief, at least for a moment, and his carriage rolled onward, toward the border with Switzerland.
On the 14th of October, Marie-Antoinette went on trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Among the many smears directed at her in her sham trial-from carrying on orgies at Versailles to funneling French treasury funds to her native Austria-by far the most wounding was the accusation that she had sexually abused the dauphin, her son. "If I have not replied," she said in response, "it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother." After two days, she was declared guilty of treason. Later that morning, her hair was cut short, and she was wheeled through Paris in a cart. Then, at a quarter past twelve, in the same square where her husband had died nine months earlier, she was executed under the guillotine. Her body was thrown into a mass grave and covered with a sprinkling of wet dirt.