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

Chapter 6

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.