The Incredible Story of Marie Antoinette's Watch with Nicholas Parsons

Welcome to Just A Minute!

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

Hello, my name is Nicholas Parsons, and as...

'My life is more than Just A Minute.

'Because if you must count them,

'over 48 million minutes have passed since I was born.

'And together, those minutes add up to 92 years.

'92 years of acting, presenting and creating laughter.

'But I have a secret passion.

'And I suppose you could say it's about time.'

12 o'clock. You'll get 12 chimes.

'Or, more precisely, clocks.'

CLOCK CHIMES

'I adore clocks and watches.

'Every hour, my house echoes to the chimes of antique clocks,

'big and small.'

Big Ben, eat your heart out!

1655, and still going strong in perfect condition.

But there's one watch made by one watchmaker

that I'm desperate to hold in my hand.

Many consider it the greatest watch ever made.

It was conceived for a queen who ran out of time,

by the greatest watchmaker the world has ever known.

A watch begun in the 1780s, sold in the 1880s,

stolen in the 1980s,

it is the most valuable timepiece in the whole world.

I wouldn't expect it to go for less than 50 to 100 million.

It's called the Marie Antoinette,

and it's a watch that I would travel to the other side of the world

just to gaze upon its face.

I may be in my 90s,

but there's still time for another great adventure.

The curse is suspension springs are so delicately poised.

'My passion for clocks began in the 1930s.'

Right, it's on.

I'd always been interested in mechanical things,

and when I was 15, my father was offered

an unwanted collection of old clock parts and pieces.

He said, "Well, we've got an attic. Ship them up to the house,

"and I'll get somebody in who understands about clocks

"to give my son a little bit of tuition."

And in that particular crate was this little chap here,

and I've had the clock ever since. That would be 19...38.

Those lessons from that kindly clockmaker

fired up a lifelong love of clocks and clockwork.

Listen to this.

CLOCK CHIMES Isn't that charming?

I can do this... I'll have to set it again.

CLOCK CHIMES

It is the craftsmanship that has designed all that

so that one wheel interconnects with the other

and moves that one on and then the ratchet was lifted,

on the hour, boom, and it strikes.

That, to me, is poetry in motion.

I always wanted to be an actor. My parents were having none of it.

Having spotted my talent with clocks,

they sent me off to be an engineer.

In 1940, I travelled from the secure home in North London

to the rough streets of Glasgow

to begin an engineering apprenticeship on Clydebank.

It was noisy, it was difficult, it was demanding, it was tough,

building pumps, as well as serving in the firm's Home Guard.

I was only 16 years of age.

In many ways, it was the making of me.

At the end of my apprenticeship, I returned to London.

The war was almost over, and I chose to pursue my first love,

the theatre.

'I've had a long career in show business.

'For many years, I was a character actor.'

..I will not waste your time.

'14 years of Sale Of The Century,

'as well as many guest appearances in films and elsewhere.

'And for nearly 50 years, I've been presenting Just A Minute.'

I would suggest they chose another...

-BELL RINGS Paul challenged.

-Deviation.

-Why?

'In fact, I'm still hosting that show to this day.

'But once an engineer, always an engineer.

'And I've never stopped working with my hands, but in my own time.'

I can't take it too high cos it doesn't like it.

Collecting clocks, mending clocks, tending clocks.

What I do find very frustrating is,

because I am, mechanically, very mature

and I've always been able to use my hands -

make things, create things, repair things -

and I see that as part of the natural creativity of my nature.

I know why it's ticking, I know what's going on behind,

I know the expertise and skills putting all those wheels together.

The clock's working. It's talking to me, telling me the time.

And I give it attention. I pull its chain up every night.

But now, it's time to go in search

of the greatest clockmaker of all time,

and his masterpiece -

the legendary Marie Antoinette watch,

the most precious piece of clockwork in the whole world.

So, I'm on the Eurostar,

time travelling to 18th-century Paris

where his story and the tale of this legendary timepiece begins.

This is a real adventure,

and for someone who grew up with steam trains,

to be on Eurostar, going to Paris, that romantic city.

What better, if you're going to Paris,

the land that created champagne?

The expedition begins here. Cheers.

As a member of the Worshipful Company Of Clockmakers,

I should confess that the great English clockmakers of the past

would not have approved of my unpatriotic direction of travel.

Because, for centuries, it was England

that was to the fore in clockmaking.

In the 17th century, Thomas Tompion, the father of English clockmaking

invented a clock that could run for a year on a single wind.

In the 1760s, English reputations soared

when a brilliant Yorkshireman called John Harrison

invented a series of clocks and chronometers

that solved the life-and-death riddle of navigating via longitude.

English horology was something to be proud of.

In fact, English travellers used to bring watches with them

and sell them on to appreciative Parisians.

Back in the 1750s, one French publication lamented that

even a coach driver wouldn't be seen without a watch

unless it was made in England.

I was trying to work out the last time I was in Paris.

And it's amazing.

It must have been late '40s, or certainly early '50s

and, my goodness, the changes.

In the latter half of the 18th century,

Paris was enthralled by the Enlightenment.

The rulers saw this new era of invention

as something that would empower France,

and the scientists and engineers dared to believe

that reason may triumph over religion.

Mastery of clockwork appealed to everyone.

You've got two things going on in France in the 17th and 18th century.

One is La Grande Nation, the idea of the great nation

in which gloire, glory is...

The French got caught enacting the destiny of God,

and at the same time you've got what you might call les Lumieres,

the Enlightenment, which is about science, technology, rationality.

With something like a watch, you've got the two coming together.

You've got, you know, the poetic idea of France

enacting the destiny of God by making new technology,

but you've got technology which is the product of reason, rationality,

and I think time is really important,

cos mathematics is really important.

This is the law of the universe,

so by carrying a little fob watch around,

you're actually carrying around the laws of the universe.

Clockwork isn't just about clocks.

It's a descriptive phrase for anything mechanical,

like this tympanon player here,

which was designed by two German designers, actually,

in 1784,

and was presented as a gift to Marie Antoinette at the court.

That is clockwork par excellence.

Clockwork embodied the very principles of the Enlightenment.

Who needs religion and magic when intricate engineering

and clever construction can combine to give life to the inanimate?

INSTRUMENT CREAKS

DULCIMER PLAYS

Clockmakers - the mechanical magicians.

But faced with the brilliance of German automata

and a century of English engineering dominance,

the French were ready for a master of the mechanical arts

they could claim as their own.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Or as the French say...

Cometh l'heure, cometh l'homme.

In 1775, the 28-year-old Abraham-Louis Breguet

arrived here in the Quai de l'Horloge,

which was then the clockmaking heart of Paris.

And single-handedly, his genius transformed

this part of the city into the watchmaking capital of the world.

Breguet is rightly regarded as a genius.

I think that's the first word that comes to everyone's mind

when his name is mentioned.

Breguet was the main person,

in terms of producing watches and clocks

and always looking for improvements in his productions.

So he was very important for France.

To position him for someone who doesn't know anything about

the history of watchmaking,

his life is the watershed.

Everything that went before was refined by him.

Before he had reached 45, he had achieved the title

of probably the greatest watchmaker alive then,

and he's still regarded as that by many.

So, who was this incredible engineer,

this conjurer in clockwork.

YODELLING

Like so many of the great watchmakers,

Abraham-Louis Breguet was in fact Swiss.

He was born in 1747 in Neuchatel.

His father died when he was 11,

and his mother remarried his father's cousin,

who was a watchmaker.

He took young Abraham out of school and made him an apprentice.

In the first year of his apprenticeship,

young Abraham-Louis Breguet learned all about the basics of horology

as he was put to work to polish the movements, the gears,

the balance wheels, the pinions, the escapement.

He learnt about clocks, chronometers and watches,

how to make tick follow tock.

After serving just a year of his apprenticeship in Geneva,

he had learned all he could and was dispatched to Paris

to work with more experienced and sophisticated watchmakers.

He wanted to learn the ingenious ways

they created smaller pieces which had greater accuracy.

He was eager to understand what's known in the horological world

as complications.

That is any watch feature that is an addition

to telling the basic hours and minutes,

such as chimes, moon phases, dates.

Complications require a deeper clockwork knowledge

and a deeper understanding of time itself.

So Breguet came to the College des Quatre-Nations,

where he learned of solar cycles, lunar calendars

and choreographing chronology.

He also fell in love, got married, and with help from his wife,

finally set up his own premises here

in the appropriately named Quai de l'Horloge.

The literal translation of that is clock dock.

Now, you would've thought the Parisians, the French,

with their love of the romantic would at least

have called this place Rue de l'Horloge, street of the clock.

And the first amazing invention to emerge from this little shop

was Breguet's perpetuelle watch.

As it sounds, a perpetuelle was a watch

that didn't need daily winding.

Through clever clockwork, it wound itself,

harnessing the energy in the motion of the wearer.

It was the must-have gadget of the 1780s.

But this was just the beginning.

Breguet's shop became the centre

of watchmaking innovations and inventions.

Breguet changed everything.

In the mechanism, in the techniques and in the aesthetic field.

He worked on moon phase,

he invented the gong for the minute repeater,

so the chiming watches today are much more musical

than they were prior to Breguet's appearance when gongs were used.

There is pretty much nothing that he didn't refine.

And he was quite interesting in going always a step further

into inventing new things, new functions, new items

and always keeping this into a very simple and elegant look.

To this day, Breguet's name still lives on

in some of the most exclusive shopping streets in the world.

Rodeo Drive, Bond Street,

and here in the Place Vendome in Paris.

The brand is now owned by the Swatch group,

and the Breguet boutique in Paris is home to

a wondrous collection of his original work.

What Stradivarius was to violins, Breguet was to watches.

He had this unique talent to make time sing,

and he did that so sweetly.

At last, I am getting to see for myself

some of Breguet's exceptional work.

The first thing that strikes you is the design.

Such gems of beauty.

These watches are beautiful but minimal.

They possess that increasingly rare quality of elegance.

And they're all catalogued here beautifully.

Breguet's watches had their own fonts

long before the idea of a font.

The dials of his watches were often engraved

with intricate textured guilloche patterns.

And the hands are thin with a little poppy-type bud

tipped to a precision point.

So, it's a rare privilege to be so close to so much ticking treasure.

Well, I suppose this is one of the reasons I came to Paris,

to have the joy and pleasure of actually holding

a Breguet watch designed by him.

With a Breguet watch, there was always a simplicity.

In fact, this is one of his most minimal watches.

It's from 1798 and is what was called a subscription watch,

where the buyer would make a down payment

and pay off the rest in instalments.

There may be only one hand,

but it's so designed that you can work it out

with the halves and the quarters - even the minutes.

But it has some distinctive Breguet innovations here.

The poppy handle -

and that's usual on nearly all watches now.

The Breguet style is a combination between simplicity and utility.

It's very subtle

and it appears subtle

even if it's very complicated,

and it is a chic of Breguet.

It is wonderful to hold it.

It's like you can really feel the heartbeat

of this beautiful piece of mechanism.

The only thing that's excessive is the price.

These simple watches are highly valued collector's items now.

Earlier this year, one of Breguet's original pocket watches

sold for over 3 million.

But then, from the very beginning, Breguet's watches were luxuries.

Luxuries that required rich patrons with deep pockets.

Fortunately for Breguet's newly established business,

16 miles away from the clock dock shop

was a concentration of wealth, of vanity, of peacocking

like nowhere else in the world.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 3 by Gustav Mahler

Versailles.

Wealth, power, influence, fashion, money, patronage

were all concentrated around the palace,

2,000 acres of extravagance,

with King Louis XVI on the French throne and Marie Antoinette,

his notoriously decadent queen by his side.

And one of the more restrained parts of the palace

is here at the Petit Trianon.

This was a bolt hole that was gifted to the Queen Marie Antoinette.

If she'd had enough of the Golden Palace, the masked balls

or the fine wine, she could retreat down here.

Though, it's hardly a hovel.

Versailles was packed with aristocrats and archdukes

trying to outdo one another.

So how could a courtier compete?

It was a great advantage, socially, to have a talking point,

and what better for this purpose than a watch?

And when that watch was exceptional,

well, then the French would say it was tres a la mode.

And owning a Breguet became the height of good taste.

It was a very close circle of the very wealthy people,

and so if one hold a Breguet watch, then others knew,

so it was spreading inside the sort of rich community.

So this was your iPhone 6 of the 18th century,

and it did stuff that nothing else can do.

And that was the thing about a watch - it wasn't just jewellery,

it was jewellery that did stuff.

And, a bit like today, with people sort of constantly looking

at their tablets and things -

"Oh, I've just got to have a look... Oh, have you seen my fob watch?"

Producing a slim, modern Breguet watch,

showing the moon cycle or the calendar

allowed a courtier to exhibit their wealth, taste and modernity.

Breguet was held in high regard in the highest circles of the palace

and it resulted in the most important commission of his life

when he was instructed to create a watch for the Queen of Versailles,

the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.

Locked away in a secure vault are the original letters

from Breguet's workshop that record this amazing commission.

Emmanuel Breguet,

the great-great-great-great- great-grandson

of Abraham-Louis Breguet is showing them to me.

It is a very interesting piece of archives.

It's a register with all the details

about the construction of the antique Breguet watches.

So Breguet kept a record of

-every single watch or clock he sold.

-Oh, yes.

On each page we have the details of about five watches.

You have the names, the name of the watchmakers

who worked on this specific watch,

and you have the name of the buyer, of the client.

You have the date, the date of sale, and you have the price.

And an interesting page is the page about the watch 160,

because the watch 160 is called Marie Antoinette watch.

-This is the Marie Antoinette!

-Yes, yes, yes.

-Ooh!

You have an idea of the work...

'Breguet's 160th commission -

'to make a watch fit for La Reine.

'In front of me is the original record of all the years of work

'that went into that watch

'and that became known as the Marie Antoinette.

'The details are extraordinary.

'While most entries are a couple of lines,

'this commission covers a page and a half.

'And they had to insert an extra leaf

'just to record all the complexities.'

The watch was to be a ladies' watch

that would chime the hours, the quarter hours,

it should have a thermometer,

it was to display day, date, month, years,

and even leap years.

It should tell solar time, it should be delicate but robust.

Every bearing and roller, without exception, would be in sapphire.

The watch would be the culmination of every complexity Breguet knew.

A stunning, horological tour de force

that was to be as beautiful as it was ingenious.

The commission specifically stipulated...

What was very special is the order was to do the maximum,

the maximum of complications possible,

the most beautiful materials possible,

and probably something very dangerous -

no limitation of time.

And never say something like that to a watchmaker.

It's absolutely a catastrophe.

Bringing all the complications existing at the time into one watch

was some sort of a challenge for him that he wanted to work on.

It was a sort of summary of all which could be done

and showing that Breguet can do each and every thing

that goes into this very many complications.

So, who was this mysterious commissioner

granting Breguet limitless time and limitless amounts of money?

We don't know the name of the commissioner, unfortunately.

It's one of the many mysteries that surrounds the watch.

And over the years, there has been much speculation.

Legend has it that the story of the greatest watch ever made

began with a certain tall, handsome Swedish character,

someone who might be described as a dishy devil.

Count Hans Axel von Fersen, a Swedish nobleman

who, during his grand tour of Europe,

stopped off here in Versailles and apparently created quite a stir.

Fersen met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball.

The Swedish Count and the French Queen became very close friends.

Very close.

It is one of the great mysteries of French history,

whether, as was suspected, they became lovers.

And it was at this same historical moment

that somebody placed that very special order for the Queen.

Whoever it was, the challenge clearly inspired Breguet

because that order for that watch

was to be the culmination of Breguet's life's work.

It would take 44 years to finish,

the Queen of Versailles would never see it,

and the mysterious commissioner would never pay for it.

Even Breguet would die before his masterpiece could be completed.

But the watch that became known as the Marie Antoinette

would be the greatest watch that the world has ever seen.

At the beginning of the 1780s,

France teetered on the brink of seismic change.

But, for Breguet, business was booming.

He was acclaimed by rich patrons,

he became a French citizen,

and was inducted as a master of a clockmakers guild.

High in his workshop, in the Quai de l'Horloge,

Breguet worked assiduously,

experimenting, engineering, of course, creating.

His clockwork creations were horology at its most harmonious,

and for the time, very little friction.

French society, however, was strained and fractured.

The crops had failed, the people starved, conditions were abysmal.

And there were whisperings against the frivolities at Versailles.

The subjects were revolting.

She never underestimates the divisions in French society

in the years, the decades leading up to the French Revolution.

If you like, Paris and Versailles were like two countries,

two cities at war.

They weren't the same place at all.

In Versailles, you've got what I'd call the society of the spectacle,

which is actually a very 20th-century idea,

but really you can see it's all about performance,

it's all about show, all in the name of the great destiny of France.

The real life of the French in Paris is all about disease, death,

poverty, people are dying of hunger,

while the rich are spending their money on parties, fetes galantes

and, you know, this whole spectacular world

that they've created.

Marie Antoinette.

Of course, rumour has it

that she made that famous remark

when told that her subjects were starving

and they hadn't got enough bread

and she said, "Well, let them eat cake."

I think it's really apocryphal, but it did give an indication

of what was going on at the time.

And the hungry people realised that feudal France wasn't working.

Clockwork is a very seductive metaphor.

When things in life go smoothly, we say,

"They're running like clockwork."

If only life could be so predictable,

so logical, so harmonious.

But, alas, it never is.

In July 1789, with bread prices at an all-time high,

an angry and hungry crowd stormed the Bastille fortress

and paraded the governor's head on a pike around the streets of Paris.

What would become known as the French Revolution had begun.

On a national and international level, the revolution was seismic.

On a personal level, events were calamitous for Breguet's business.

The mysterious commission without a limit on price

and destined for the Queen would have to wait...

..because his wealthy and aristocratic customers

had a habit of losing their heads.

The aristocrats who could afford it fled abroad.

The unlucky ones... CORK POPS

Oh!

..faced Madame La Guillotine.

C'est bon. Merci beaucoup.

Breguet was a supporter of the Revolution,

but the mutinous streets of his beloved Paris

were becoming ever bloodier.

And anyone who was even suspected of harbouring sympathy

for the hated royals and, in particular, Marie Antoinette,

was in real danger.

People were being killed left, right and centre

and whatever your political connections -

Breguet was connected to the court cos he sold them stuff -

your life was in danger and the French historian Jules Michelet,

I think he gives a good illustration of just how gory that period was.

He describes, I think about 20 or 30 years afterwards,

the executions on Place de la Concorde -

animals couldn't cross the bridge at Place de la Concorde

cos they could smell the blood

and if you pressed down on a pave,

blood would come to the surface.

We've often got the Blue Peter version of the French Revolution.

It was a gory, bloody, terrible period

and severed heads were everywhere.

In 1793,

when the Terror was at its height,

Breguet feared for his life...

..so he fled Paris and took refuge in his native Switzerland,

taking the Marie Antoinette, still under construction, with him.

The watch was safe,

but the Queen herself was not so lucky.

Now hated by the French people,

she was brought by a cart to the Place de la Revolution.

It is said she had a small, simple steel Breguet watch

pinned to her gown...

..counting down her final hours, minutes and seconds.

And at 12.15,

on 16th October, 1793...

..with the crowds booing her final minutes...

..the guillotine blade sliced through Marie Antoinette's neck.

CROWD CHEERS

The world kept turning.

The clocks kept ticking.

And France began a new era.

MUSIC: La Marseillaise

There was a new anthem,

a new flag

and a new ethos.

France would show the rest of the world

its revolutionary new ways of thinking.

So they decreed that measurements were to be decimalised.

That meant litres, metres and a radical new ten-hour clock.

When you think about it, there's some logic in that.

A day should be ten hours,

an hour should be 100 minutes

and a minute should be 100 seconds.

So the clock makers of Paris started to build decimal clocks.

So there's a little clock,

a little decimal clock.

At the bottom, it actually shows the ten hours.

But though the new-fangled decimal time was logical,

ordinary people brought up on the traditional system

were confounded by it.

I mean, today, can you imagine trying to think in terms of

a decimalised clock? No.

It's too firmly established in our way of thinking and our psyche.

Some of the post-revolutionary watches

tried to show both the old and the new time.

The decimalised system on this side, going up to the ten-hour clock

and the other side, today's system,

going up to the 12-hour clock.

But fortunately for Breguet and his embryonic masterpiece,

decimalisation never caught on.

After just 17 months, that is traditional months,

the French Republic reverted back to the old measurements.

After two years in exile,

Breguet returned to Paris in 1795,

overflowing with ideas and innovations.

It seems that Breguet was a true artist,

not motivated by money or profit,

but by perfection itself.

And perfect he did.

The revolutionary era was when Breguet came of age

as a watchmaker,

inventing such horological wonders

as an overcoil balance spring in 1795.

In 1798, he created a new escapement which had

so little friction that it didn't require lubrication.

All incredible innovations that advanced the art of watchmaking.

It was in 1806, at an exhibition in Paris,

Breguet revealed his greatest innovation to the world,

the tourbillon.

Just one turn.

It is a tourbillon.

It's a special device invented by Breguet and patented in 1801.

A special device to avoid the effects of the Earth's gravity.

Gravity meant some internal components

wore out quicker than others.

Breguet solved this by constantly rotating the internal workings

of the watch itself, thus minimising wear and tear.

We have all the small parts in a cage.

The cage does a revolution in three minutes.

It's a simple solution that requires complex clockwork

that made watches more precise and that is vintage Breguet.

I'm very happy to see the movement working.

It's alive, it's like a human heart.

Versailles was no more, but now there was a whole new court,

presided over by Napoleon Bonaparte, and Breguet made watches for it.

In 1810, he made a watch for Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples.

He mounted a thin watch on a little bracelet of hair and gold

to be worn on the arm.

It was the first wristwatch the world had ever seen,

though sadly its whereabouts are now unknown.

This stunning tact watch,

the idea being that you could touch the watch in your pocket

and tell the time, was made for Napoleon's wife Josephine,

who was very keen that the watch should match her status.

When she bought this watch in 1800,

it was with small diamonds and when she became empress,

she ordered bigger diamonds.

Breguet was the most famous watchmaker in the world.

He was appointed horologist to the French Navy.

He was inducted into the prestigious Academy of Science.

He was presented with France's highest accolade,

the Legion d'Honneur.

No other watchmaker in the world came close.

But all the acclaim did not distract him from his obsession.

The sum of everything Breguet ever learned was channelled into

a watch which became his lifetime's work,

his masterpiece.

As an old man, he began to work on the watch with renewed intensity.

From 1812 to 1814, he worked on little else.

Nobody knew better than Breguet that time on this planet was finite

and precious and his wondrous watch was so close to completion.

But no matter how beautifully Breguet's clockwork creations

measured the passing minutes, hours, days, years,

not even he could control time itself.

TICKING SLOWS TO A STOP

And on September 17th, 1823,

time ran out for Abraham-Louis Breguet.

So I've come to the extraordinary Pere Lachaise graveyard

in the centre of Paris,

where alongside Chopin, Oscar Wilde

and a popular singer called Jim Morrison,

Breguet lies buried.

The greatest watchmaker in Paris lived to the age of 76 years of age.

Now, 76 was a pretty good age to achieve in those days,

but unfortunately the records of the period are pretty scant,

so we don't know very much about the man and what he was like.

I like to think that he was very much like his watches -

reliable, precise, unshowy,

but underneath beat a very warm and genuine heart.

Breguet was above all a magical engineer,

with the ability, the talent to harness all the vagaries

and challenges represented by time.

What an impressive tombstone

and with his statue at the top.

The only thing is I think the hydrangea in front

were probably put there on the day he died.

The master was dead, but his lifetime's work

had yet to come to life.

The watch Breguet had been perfecting for over four decades

was finally finished by his son,

as the New Year fireworks filled the sky on the last day of 1827,

four years after his father's death.

It was the most complicated, sophisticated

and beautiful watch in the whole world.

44 years of work.

The labour time alone would amount to 17,000 gold francs.

Intriguingly, the first recorded owner

was an associate of the late queen,

the elderly Marquis de la Groye,

who had been Marie Antoinette's page boy in his youth.

When the marquis died in 1838,

the watch happened to be in the workshop for repair

and the Breguet family became its custodians once more.

Keeping it under lock and key, the watch began to slip into obscurity.

Not until the late 19th century did it emerge onto the market again.

Finally sold by the Breguet family,

it discretely traded through the hands of various watch collectors.

Then, in 1917, the Marie Antoinette was gleefully purchased

by a British industrialist and passionate collector

called Sir David Salomons.

Astonished by Breguet's work,

Salomons proclaimed...

Salomons idolised Breguet.

He bought more than 100 of his watches

and in the 1920s published a book that catalogued his collection

including the first known photographs of the Marie Antoinette.

He bequeathed the watch collection to his daughter,

who then donated everything to the Museum of Islamic Art in Israel,

which opened in 1974.

That was the unlikely final resting place

of the Marie Antoinette watch.

It stayed in its glass case,

silent and outside the world of watch enthusiasts,

rarely mentioned...

..until 1983...

..when the world's greatest watch was stolen

in the world's greatest watch heist.

On April 15th, 1983,

a small car rolled through the leafy suburbs of Jerusalem.

Around midnight, it quietly pulled into a lane

behind the Museum of Islamic Arts.

A thin man dressed in black got out of the car.

He took a bag of tools from the boot...

..and crept to the back of the museum.

He forced his way through a narrow window...

..and so began the greatest watch heist in history.

He cut circles into the glass cabinets, then carefully lifted out

over 100 antique watches, some paintings and a couple of books.

Millions of dollars of antiquities

and amongst them was the jewel in the museum's crown,

the Marie Antoinette.

SIREN BLARES

There's a bit of the Pink Panther to it.

The brazenness, the scale of it and, ultimately,

that piece being part of the cache,

it's one of the most remarkable thefts of all time.

Police photos of the crime scene

show the Breguet burglar, or burglars,

smoked cigarettes, could squeeze through a small window,

and left some tools behind...

..but bagged a haul worth millions and millions of dollars.

So my Breguet pilgrimage takes me to the Holy Land...

..towards Jerusalem and the scene of the crime.

This well-planned, exquisitely executed horological heist

was the biggest robbery in the history of Israel

and it put Breguet's Marie Antoinette back on the map,

even if it was missing.

The police were left puzzled and confounded.

It seems apt that a thief who's a genius at what he did

should steal a watch which was made by a genius at what he did.

It's the diamond in the crown, the biggest diamond in the crown,

but he took the whole crown.

Maybe he picked out the museum because of this watch, I don't know.

And he did it. He succeeded.

It was the perfect...

It was the perfect job, what do you want?

Who ever thought that somebody will go into this museum,

steal the most expensive watches in the world, not to be caught?

The police looked everywhere.

They watched the airports, they asked Interpol for help,

they monitored the collectors.

But the Marie Antoinette fell silent.

In spite of being the biggest robbery in the history of Israel,

there was no trace of the stolen goods.

I knew this guy who was an officer in the police.

He went all over Europe. He went to everyone.

Nobody knew who did this for years.

The watch had vanished. By 2005,

all hope was gone.

Nicolas Hayek, the owner of the Breguet brand,

was heartbroken and announced an ambitious plan

to create a replica Marie Antoinette.

Using just a few photographs and details from the Breguet archive,

a team of engineers tried to rebuild this astonishing piece of artistry.

Over two years, 823 handmade components

were painstakingly put together

and then, with perfect timing,

just as the replica was about to be unveiled,

there came a glimmer of hope that the original

might still be in existence

when an antique dealer called Zion Jakobov

got a call in his family shop in Tel Aviv.

The caller, a lawyer, repeatedly asked him to come and value

some items which he was handling on behalf of an anonymous client.

Eventually, Zion went along to a warehouse

and the lawyer brought out a box.

TRANSLATION:

When he unwrapped the newspaper,

Zion recognised the museum's priceless collection of Breguets.

In shock and unable to sleep,

Zion needed to speak with the curator of the museum,

Rachel Hasson.

At first, the curator would not believe the claim,

but a meeting was arranged and she came face-to-face

with the missing Marie Antoinette.

96 of the 106 watches were eventually returned to the museum.

They'd been taken by a man called Na'aman Diller,

and whilst Diller was a master thief,

he was a terrible salesman.

Wary of being caught, he left the burgled Breguets

in safe deposit boxes, where they sat abandoned for 23 years.

Diller died of cancer in 2004,

his crime undetected.

On his deathbed, he confessed to his wife about the great watch heist.

She hired a lawyer in Israel who started making calls

to arrange the return of the stolen goods.

And so, finally, after adventures in Paris and Jerusalem,

after guillotines and dead queens,

after cat burglars and wild-goose chases,

it's time.

I'm about to go and gaze on the face,

or more correctly, I should say the dial,

of the most famous watch in all the world.

The recovered watch is once again the shining centrepiece

of the museum's watch collection.

And it's now in a secure case, in a secure room.

Given that the estimated value of the watch is over 50 million,

the museum have arranged for me and Marie Antoinette

to finally meet one another,

away from the visitors, in a secure back room

used by the horologists and, for once, I'm speechless.

And so...

..here it is finally...

..Breguet's masterpiece.

So one has to put on the gloves for this. It is so precious.

This is something you can say is truly unique.

Oh, this is a special moment in my life,

to actually hold the Marie Antoinette,

the watch made by Breguet

for the Queen.

Through a rock crystal glass face,

both back and front,

the internal gold workings of the Marie Antoinette

are there for all to see

and become dazzled.

All points of friction are in sapphire,

the case itself is gold.

There is a thermometer, a power indicator,

a calendar, a tourbillon,

everything Breguet knew in a single watch.

It is truly a poem written in clockwork.

So this watch has survived for over 200 years.

It's survived a revolution,

survived being stolen, disappeared,

out of sight to everybody,

lost and unseen in a safety deposit box somewhere,

and eventually coming to light and being returned

to the museum.

It's emotional to look at it

and I can understand that the curators here were so emotional

when it came back that I believe they actually wept.

The Queen had returned.

'And then, unexpectedly, the watch began to tick.'

Ah!

That's the second hand there.

Breguet's engineering genius meant that just a little momentum

can power up the watch's perpetual mechanism.

So after years of being static,

I held it in my hand

and as if rewarding an elderly man after a long quest,

the 200-year-old watch, for a few miraculous seconds,

came back to life,

before being returned to the safety of its case.

I've often wondered what life would have been like

if I had chosen to pursue a career in engineering,

rather than as an entertainer.

But it's interesting that my great hobby of clocks

is all about the subject of time

and I'm in a profession where the essence of success

is all about timing.

'Graham, it's lovely to have you back,'

so will you start off the show - very apt, "clock-watching".

LAUGHTER

But there's something satisfying that at this point in my long career

in entertainment, I'm once again back with my love of clocks.

You could say an old timer has finally met another one.

Time well spent?

About 75 years ago,

a very long time ago,

I first started taking an interest in clocks -

taking them apart, repairing them, mending them and recreating them.

And it's interesting how times have changed,

because then telling the time was a mechanical process,

then it became digital and now it's even atomic.

So something as beautiful as Breguet's watch here,

the Queen, in one sense it's obsolete.

But it now just exists really as a beautiful machine,

but with a heartbeat.

So what does Breguet's masterpiece tell us?

That it's important in life to count every second,

but it's also very important to make sure every second counts.

MUSIC: Just In Time by Frank Sinatra

# Just in time

# I found you just in time

# Before you came, my time

# Was running low

# And changed my lonely life that lovely

# Lonely life, that lovely

# Lonely life that lovely day. #