A Watch Fit For A Queen,

it was a shame She died before She could wear it,

in 1783 Abraham Louis Breguet was commissioned by an admirer of Queen Marie Antoinette to incorporate all conceivable operations into one timepiece, it would take Breguet over 30 years to perfect this jewel, unfortunately the Queen never received it, She was beheaded in 1793, 20 years before its completion, but if that is not a story enough about this priceless watch there is more to come,

sometime before 10:30 am on April 16, 1983, a car pulled up outside of the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, in HaPalmach Street, Jerusalem, a thief entered the building and stole amongst other items this watch, the watches themselves were too well known to sell on the open market, most were made by Breguet in the late 1700s and 1800s and were well documented—especially this one, known as the Queen, commissioned for Marie Antoinette allegedly by the man rumoured to be her lover, Count Hans Axel von Fersen,

from the article, 'the watch ultimately took 44 years to complete. In the interim, the French Revolution and the resulting European upheaval led to the death of both the man who likely commissioned the watch and its intended owner. (Marie Antoinette, of course, fell under the guillotine. Seventeen years after her death, an incensed crowd, convinced that von Fersen had conspired to assassinate Sweden’s would-be king, beat him to death in a Stockholm square.) Breguet died in September 1823. His son, a talented horologist in his own right, finished the masterpiece in 1827. It travelled in the coat pockets of a French nobleman and later ended up in the collection of Sir David Lionel Salomons, a British polymath who brought the first car shows to England and patented an idea for buoyant soap. Salomons left his watch collection to his daughter Vera, a globe-trotting nurse who settled in Jerusalem after World War I and later used her father’s money to build the museum—and to house his collection of watches',

then it was stolen, today the Queen, (the name given to this watch) is valued at $30 million, it hangs in a bulletproof case in the basement of the L. A. Mayer museum, the watch is well secured now, thanks to a nimble thief, long gone but not forgotten, if you have time and fancy a quick read the story of how the thief broke into the L. A. Mayer Museum and the watches subsequent history makes a good read, other more fortunate clients of Breguet did include the Russian Tsars, Napoleon, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, Churchill, Arthur Rubenstein and even Jean Paul Belmondo, 'any one got the time?'