Breguet

A.-L. Breguet passed away ten score and one year ago today. The newspaper Le Constitutionnel, journal du commerce, politique et littéraire on September 20th, 1823 published an account of Breguet's funeral...a ragged translation is enclosed for the curious.

Personal comment (neither shared by nor appreciated by anyone): in his time the sui generis A.-L. Breguet was venerated and Breguet watches were the non-plus-ultra of horology; dispiriting (at least to me) that in modern times Breguet is just a "brand"...but I guess time marches on and the dead remain with the dead.

Is there anything more beautiful than genius devoting its efforts and perseverance to discovering means that can push back the limits of our knowledge, that can increase the empire of the human species over all nature, and contribute to the well-being, to the pleasure of men by useful works? Yes, without doubt, there is something more beautiful than this sublime use of a high intelligence.

And what more precious gift can God himself give to humanity? It is virtue. Talent without virtue is nothing, while virtue without talent still has the right to our admiration, and commands all our respect; but when a friendly providence fills a mortal with these gifts that embellish each other, it offers to our eyes the most admirable spectacle that it is given to us to contemplate on earth.

However, one succeeds, with study, in measuring genius by its works; but virtue, so often affected under a deceptive mask, in what places, at what times judge it? on the edge of the tomb, at the time of the funeral, in the presence of all those who, whether in secret or in public, knew and judged the works of him whose role has just ended here below.

You, great of the earth, if, always selfish, you appeared alternately slave and dispenser of power, it is in vain that you forced all the voices of fame to celebrate qualities that you did not have, benefits that you did not spread, and actions of grace that you never knew how to deserve; I was dazzled, deceived during your life; to judge you I await you at death. The procession that leads you to the tomb is superb, it is true; four steeds adorned with purple, silver and plumes, drag you to the cemetery, in a golden coffin. Your chariot, empty as your heart, still displays your pomp and all your pride. Behind this traveling catafa [sic], a hundred mourning carriages are deployed in the wake of your remains; however, these parasites that they contain, these flatterers who seemed so desolate at your pains, before they had robbed you of knowledge, I see that in following your remains, they smile with grace, they joke with elegance, and the regret of your loss is not in the soul of any of those who form the court of your funeral. I look for poor mourners in the wake of your procession, and I see only a crowd gathered who enjoy this spectacle with a dry eye and a satisfied look. Let a sacred or non-sacred speaker strive to praise you, O great one of the earth, what does it matter to me if you have not deserved it!.... I have just read your life and your sentence on the foreheads of your friends and the entire public; your lie has ceased for me. Did it ever exist for the Eternal!..

Ah! how very different is the spectacle of the funeral of the good man, whatever the mediocrity of the rank he occupies in the hierarchy of social vanities! My heart is still full of the touching ceremony of which I was yesterday the witness, and I cannot resist the need to recall its inspiring scenes. The writer has his duties too, he has his good deeds to perform. The noblest of all is to show virtue in what it has of attractive and majestic, to bring to its worship the hearts made to know it and to practice it.

The central jury of the exhibition of industrial products has just lost one of its most famous members, M. Breguet, the most famous and the best watchmaker in France and Europe, even according to foreign sources. It was yesterday, at noon, that his funeral was to take place; I left the Louvre at that time, and I made my way to the Place du Pont-Neuf, near where this excellent man lived.

Do you see, next to the home of our most skilled optician, this little house which has, per floor, only two windows on the quay? It is his. Two floors are filled with his friends and his pupils who are even more friends. This house, larger however than that of Socrates could not contain all those who cherished the master; the rest weep at the door.

They leave. Fifteen carriages are filled with five and even six people each; the poor of the neighborhood have rushed after him; it is without costume and without lesson that they shed their tears. By his kindnesses, the deceased has paid during his life for a pain that they feel and that cannot be affected.

We arrive at Père Lachâise; we plunge into the vast labyrinth of the city of tombs. We stop on a small mound where three famous men already rest: Fourcroy, who had the happiness of being a chemist and the misfortune of being a statesman; Charles, the companion of Mongolfier, in the first aerostat that opened the way to the atmosphere for man; finally Van Spandonck, the painter, of the flowers of the Garden of the Fir and the rival of nature.

The coffin was placed in a grave prepared next to the tomb of Charles, Breguet's old friend, whom he had preceded by only three months.

During this time, an immense circle was formed of all the people in the procession, and of all those whom an involuntary respect had drawn following a funeral ceremony animated by such rare and true sorrow.

A minister of the reformed religion, for Mr. Breguet was a Protestant, pronounced with dignity words of consolation, peace and hope; he confidently called upon divine mercies on the one who was just and good during his life; this evangelical simplicity had penetrated all hearts. When the minister of the altars had finished his speech and given his blessing, the interpreter of the sentiments of the Academy of Sciences, Mr. Charles Dupin, who was part of the same mathematical section as Mr. Breguet, paid homage to the memory of his colleague. He simply expressed what was good, touching, and generous in the character of his old friend; he could not help weeping as he told this story, and all those around him sobbed with him. M. Arago succeeded him as the organ of the sentinels of the Bureau of Longitudes, of which M. Breguet was a member. One is always sure to find M. Arago wherever there are noble tributes to be paid; he recalled in the most touching manner the loss so close together of the two deans of this illustrious institution, Messrs. Delambre and Breguet. How I loved to see the youngest of the scholars of our Observatory express his regrets over the loss of the two famous men who, he said, had been his friends and his Mentors! Mr. Arago, Mr. Breguet's colleague on the jury of the exhibition, knew with what interest and virile warmth this generous old man pleaded in favor of young, unknown artists, without support, without predecessors, and having for them only their works and their genius; I know it too! and I will say it, when I speak of the works of a young workshop manager of the conservatory of arts and crafts, who, I hope, will obtain the gold medal of which the honest judge whose loss we deplore judged him worthy.

Mr. Ternaux ended the touching scene that we seek in vain to depict, by speaking on behalf of the general council of manufactures, of which Mr. Breguet fulfilled the gratuitous functions, with the zeal of a promoter of French industry, with the goodness of soul and the kindness which presided over each of his actions. Among all the people in the procession, M. Ternaux was the oldest friend of M. Bréguet, and one of the most devoted, because he had had more time to know and cherish him; he recalled his qualities, so rare and so sure, which he had tested by the most difficult of trials, that of the years and revolutions. He praised him for having been not only a great artist, but an excellent citizen, and the character of the orator making of these months so simple, a magnificent eulogy: he praised him for his social virtues, for this happiness which he found in binding together men whose virtues seemed to him to suit each other. Thus he exclaimed: "In losing you, my dear Breguet, it is not a single friend that each of us has lost, but several friends at once. Farewell, farewell, my dear Breguet. "

Around the men who spoke thus, there was a Freycinet who twice went around the world, and for whom the instruments of our friend were at once instruments of discovery, salvation and glory; there was a Duke of Choiseul-Praslin, whom the polytechnic school had formed in the esteem of rare talents, in the forgetfulness of dangers, in the contempt of servility, and who, like another Choiseul, puts his nobility in living as a noble citizen.

There was a Langlès who defended the treasures of the cabinet of medals against the armed rapacity of foreigners in 1815, and who went up for science, according to the expression of a man who knew bravery, to the breach of his state; there was a Prony who, for two years, braved death in the Pontine marshes to open, by learned lines, a course to these stagnant waters from which a pestilential air exhales, and thus save from annihilation the sad remains of a population formerly flourishing and numerous; there was a Girard who bore arms with the heroes of the army of Egypt; sat in the institute of Cairo, and resumed on the banks of the Nile useful works, interrupted since the Ptolemies. Finally, of the three speakers I have cited, the first fought the foreigner invading France and was soon pushed back in the memorable campaigns that Yalmi, Jemmapes and Fleurus have reported; a second, surprised by the foreign and civil war, in the midst of his scientific works, passed from the measurement of the earth and the observation of the sky, into the harshest captivity, among the ignorant and ferocious Spaniards; then to Algiers from which he emerged, as Regnard once did, by his audacity and his presence of mind; a third finally who, on some seas and in some countries of Europe, ran other risks.

All these men who have seen death so close, and who have so long contemplated it with an impassive gaze, suddenly moved, wept around the grave of their old friend; they bade him an eternal farewell; then, without saying a word, without raising their eyes, they filed past, shaking hands, as if to unite their regrets and their pain.

O my fellow citizens, it is your heart that I question: tell me, what pomp, what praises, what honors more touching and more beautiful could you imagine, to illustrate the funeral of the one you would have loved the most! Well! these are the tributes that deserve and obtain the immortal union of genius and virtue.

And you, young artists, may your pure and generous imaginations be struck by such a sublime spectacle! Penetrate your souls with the sacred fire of a noble enthusiasm. Are you ardent and robust, enterprising and persevering, industrious, educated, ingenious? that is not enough; be honest and be good; love and you will make friends; be helpful, and when need reaches you yourselves, as it always reaches somewhere the man most favored by fortune, you will be helped in turn; your esteem will grow like your fame. Finally, when you must pay tribute to nature, your children will also see illustrious men weep over your tomb, honor your memory, and consecrate it among the memories reserved for the example of posterity.

I wanted to show in this article devoted to the memory of a watchmaker, how high the destinies of the industry can rise, in the social system of modern peoples. I wanted to show that, in this era so decried, and which we pretend to represent as infested with all vices and degraded by all turpitudes, the most beautiful qualities which do honor to man still have their sanctuary in truly French hearts; It is in the alliance of science with industry that I have sought my models.

It seems to me that such an example will enhance, in the minds of all those who read the story, the importance that they must attach to the work of this industry, which, proud of its work, happy with its successes, honors itself by practicing all the acts of gentle humanity and active benevolence.

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