Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny & Perpetual Motion by John Biggs

Author:John Biggs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Ray Bridge Press
Published: 2015-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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