Triple Quantième and Moonphase in 18ct Gold, Spanish Discs, c.1890

Around 1890 the Alliance Horlogère in Besançon built a watch that would tell its owner more than the time, and engraved the whole order on the cuvette: ancre ligne droite, levées visibles, spiral Breguet, balancier compensé, triple quantième, phases lunaires, twenty rubis, and beneath it, in the same hand, the name Ernest Baudelot. The calendar discs were made in Spanish. Whoever was to carry it would read jueves and agosto, not jeudi and août, yet the case was assayed with the French domestic mark rather than the export mark: a watch made in France and sold in France, built to be read in Spanish.

It is a large open-face watch, 51.13 mm, in 18ct gold. The back cover is engine-turned in a fine barleycorn that still reads as a grid rather than a blur, and over it a foliate monogram is cut deep into the gold, its scrolls carried out to the edges of the cover and the initials worked so far into the ornament that they read as pattern first and letters second. The band and bezel are plain and polished, and on the band sit four small correctors, one for each display, so the calendar can be set without opening the case.

The dial is the point of the watch. White enamel, black Roman hours and an outer minute track, and under twelve a long aperture through which the day, the date and the month appear on three rotating discs. At six the seconds subdial has a second window cut into it, and behind that window a blue enamel sky with gold stars and a gold moon turns through the month. The hands are gold, pierced and foliate, the seconds hand blued steel. The enamel has no hairlines, no chips and no restoration, which on a dial with two apertures cut through it is not the usual state of things.

The case number 20199 is struck inside the cover and on the cuvette to match. The marks, the movement and the condition are set out in the drawers below.