Breguet Reine de Naples White Mother of Pearl Dial Ladies Watch 8967ST/51/986

Special Temps, Gazette de Drouot - December 2001 - january 2002

A "grande complication" perpetual calendar watch, initially intended for the Queen. Begun in 1783, it was not until 1827, after several interruptions, that it was completed.

The novelist Allen Kurzweil is currently seducing the American public with elaborate intrigues worthy of Umberto Eco.

His latest work, The Grand Complication, due for publication in France next spring, draws on the incident of the sensational theft from the Mayer Memorial Museum in Jerusalem during the night of 15-16 April 1983. An unforgettable break-in for lovers of antique horology. Among the masterpieces stolen that night was the famous Breguet no. 160 watch, better known as the "Marie-Antoinette watch". Its technical description alone is enough to make even a novice giddy. It is a "perpetual watch with a minute repeater, a full perpetual calendar, an equation of time, a power reserve indicator, a metal thermometer, a large independent seconds hand and a small direct-drive seconds hand, a lever escapement, a gold balance spring, an anti-shock device, the points of friction, holes and bearings all set in sapphire, housed inside a gold case, with a rock crystal dial and gold and steel hands."

Commissioned discreetly a few years before the Revolution by an officer of the Queen's Guards, there is surely little doubt that its inventor was the Swiss-born watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet as purveyor to the Queen at the time.

In 1782, Breguet secured, through Count d'Artois - the Queen's brother-in-law - his first commission for Marie-Antoinette: the perpetual watch no. 2, which he completed in October. Hot on its heels, the King himself ordered one from him, which was delivered in December the following year. It was therefore between these two dates that an order was placed for another watch, incorporating all the refinements imaginable at the time. With no budget or deadline to keep to, the only restrictions imposed on the masterpiece were those of Abraham Louis' genius! The watchmaker set immediately to his task and worked regularly on it from 1785 to 1790. Yet the masterpiece was far from complete when the Monarchy faltered.

As a Jacobin, Breguet the citizen had yet to distance himself from the Revolution. What mattered was that the monarchs held captive in the Temple Prison had approached him to replace the watch stolen from the Queen during the sacking of the Tuileries... The Breguet no. 179, a very simple repeater steel watch, would be delivered on 4 September 1792. It would keep the deposed Queen company during her long night before being worn faithfully by the man who was to become King Charles X. For his part, despite the Queen's demise, Abraham Louis Breguet did not forget the great challenge of the "gold watch".
A most peculiar destiny
Only on the threshold of the 19th century did the watchmaker entrust the construction of the prototype to Michel Weber, one of the best craftsmen in his workshop. Curiously, although undoubtedly completed in 1802, no trace of the watch can be found in the company's records. It turned up again however in 1838 in the fob of a certain Marquis de La Groye who deposited it for servicing ... and never came back to reclaim it! Having thus returned to the bosom of the Breguet Family, the watch was sold in 1887 to an English aristocrat, and was then passed from hand to hand until it joined the collection of Sir David Salomons.
It was this great humanist who bequeathed it to the Israeli foundation from which it was stolen in 1983. Today the gold watch is without doubt in the possession of a clandestine collection who enjoys the undeserved privilege of exclusive access to one of the most perfect pieces of craftsmanship ever devised. It is our bet that the Queen herself would have deemed it unworthy to keep it all to herself in this way, and that she would have given it to her horologist husband so that he could allow all lovers of fine engineering to contemplate it.