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

Chapter 12

Zurich

Allen Kurzweil, a journalist, author, and enthusiast of the bizarre, was sitting across from famed watch collector Teddy Beyer on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse. Kurzweil, a messily coiffed reporter with a shock of black hair, who was doing research for his first novel, A Case of Curiosities, had come to ask about a mechanical defecating duck, a famous automaton built by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739 which consisted of four hundred moving parts that could, in theory, grind, digest, and then defecate kernels of grain, recreating the entire digestive system of a water fowl in brass. It had been so exciting in its day that Voltaire exclaimed, upon seeing it, "without [...] the duck of Vaucanson, you have nothing to remind you of the glory of France." Sadly, the duck never really worked, and most exhibitors introduced actual duck droppings into the rude mechanics to simulate the end of the process. Vaucanson, who died in 1782 and probably worked with Breguet on the Quai, had believed that someone would successfully re-create the digestive system of a bird in his lifetime. To his dismay, no one ever did.

Now, in April of 1983, the conversation between Kurzweil and Beyer ranged over the history of automatons and clockwork. The discussion lighted upon the Marie-Antoinette, Breguet's famous watch, and Beyer waxed euphoric on the topic. He described the complications and was even able to pull out a few original renderings by George Daniels of London-some of the only technical drawings of the watch in existence.

Just then, the phone rang. Beyer stood up to answer it and listened. A moment passed, and the collector blanched, his face turning ghostly white. He sat back down, and after he had hung up Kurzweil asked what the matter was.

"The Queen," said Beyer. "She has vanished."

Kurzweil would later say that when Beyer said vanished he really meant kidnapped. "How could the loss of a half-pound of metal and rock crystal," wrote Kurzweil, "so devastate a sixth-generation watchmaker who himself oversaw a time museum packed with horological treasures?"

Similar calls to multiple collectors confirmed the watch world's worst fears - that one of the most important objects in their field was now missing. Kurzweil, intrigued by the watch and its story, set the defecating duck aside and followed the mystery across the continent and into the United States. Everywhere, when he mentioned the Queen, he encountered the same reaction: sadness intermingled with regret - regret that the watch was probably destroyed, that it hadn't been better taken care of, that the Marie-Antoinette, like its namesake, was likely dead.

He visited the Breguet archives and tbe Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. He also travelled by boat to the Isle of Man, where he went to the village of Ramsey, to the home of George Daniels. Daniels, born in 1926, had come to his love of watches at the age of five, when he found a wristwatch on the street, opened it, and found that the inner workings were like looking into "the center of the universe."

"I wanted to spend the rest of my time with watches," he said.

While serving in the British Army, in 1944 Daniels became watchmaker for his regiment. At that time, watchmakers were in demand to repair delicate field timers and watches of enlisted men who slammed their timepieces into walls and mud. He continued to work as a general repairer and restorer until the 1960s, when he began to study the oeuvre of Breguet and became enthralled by the watchmaker's miraculous and beguiling work. Daniels, whose pursed lips and precise manner masked his preference for fast cars and the occasional afternoon beer,97 told Kurzweil almost everything he knew about Breguet. He had studied Breguet with such intensity that he often said he could think with the master's mind. Kurzweil told me, conspiratorially, that many of Daniels' stories may have sprung from this innate understanding and not from the truths of historical research.

Breguet's work ran like a seam of gold through Daniels' life. He married Julie Marrayat, the pretty daughter of respected Breguet collector Robert Marrayat. He then met George Brown, proprietor of Breguet, in about 1962. The company, at this time, was wobbling on the edge of bankruptcy but Brown was still proud of the traditions and techniques of the master. Daniels became the London Agent de Breguet á Paris, essentially taking a non-paid position as Breguet's London distributor. The job had been open since the 1920s when the last distributor retired and it was largely symbolic. However, Daniels did meet a number of collectors in the line of (albeit limited) duty.

For most of the 1970s Daniels travelled with a Leica camera and a tripod to photograph all of Breguet's work, a task that later became the body of his book, The Art of Breguet. Daniels' simplistic photography style was much reviled by professional photographers but, as the clear photos in the book attest, it was more than sufficient. Because he could not shine bright lights on the watches for fear of heating and cracking the enamel he instead took forty or more photos of each watch, ensuring that he accounted for all the vagaries of natural light. Around the same time the Salomons collection was in the process of being moved from England to Israel, a decision that enraged Daniels, he wrote "I made the strongest possible noises to stop the watches going, for they were essentially European and had no Middle Eastern content or relevance." He suspected political pressure because "all entreaties fell on deaf ears."98

Daniels also dealt with the museum curator Ohannes Markarian firsthand and found the Armenian to be "very amusing."

"He clearly didn't trust me (Armenians are not noted for trusting others)," he noted, sagely, and he would fiddle with the watches, pretending not to understand their functions or cases, just to watch Markarian squirm. In reality, Daniels was probably the foremost expert on the pieces at the time, with Markarian running a close second.

When the watches were stolen, Daniels was furious. The board of trustees wrote him to ask if he could keep an eye on the markets for any of the watches that had appeared in the catalog and Daniels replied that he "would prefer to buy them for my own collection," reminding them that the move was a disastrous idea in the first place.99 His photographs and detailed drawings were the last known representations of the Marie-Antoinette in the world.

Daniels himself became a celebrated watchmaker in his own right and had created the co-axial escapement, one of the first improvements to the modern escapement in a century. The new escapement allowed for almost friction-free control of the escape wheel with absolutely no lubrication. Breguet would have been proud.

Daniels knew as much about the Queen as any man besides Ohannes Markarian. He was one of the few people to have seen and analyzed the entire watch. While Ohannes understood the Queen with his heart, Daniels grasped it with his mind.

After his day with Daniels, Kurzweil travelled to Israel, where he began to unravel the skein of hearsay and lies that had already accreted around the heist. Kurzweil was one of the first to hear the apocryphal rumor of the "partially eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich" at the scene of the crime. In the offices of the Jerusalem Post he cracked open ledgers marked Crime 1983 and Murders 1979-1985 to research the gangs of Jerusalem, and then he went to visit Markarian himself in his little shop in the Old City, and then at the curator's quarters at the L.A. Mayer Museum.

It was there that he saw the Queen's old "shagreen case" and that Markarian asked him to inhale the scent of its empty compartments. In his novel The Grand Complication, Kurzweil would enshrine the theft in fiction and re-create this moment verbatim:

"Take a whiff," he said as he unlatched the red leather box. "I want you to smell a fragrance more enchanting than the finest perfume." I sniffed the interior of the case. "What you are smelling," he said, is the odor of sanctity." I pressed him further. "The Queen was one of my children-my favorite child," the curator acknowledged. "And now that child is gone."100

Kurzweil wasn't the only detective on the case of the missing watch. Secretly, so as not to draw attention to the investigation and embarrass the Israeli police, the trustees of the museum had hired their own detective to hunt down the lost Queen.