Only a man like Swatch chairman Nicolas G Hayek, driven by passion for art and a sense of history, could have dared to make a replica of the Breguet watch No. 160, better known as the Marie-Antoinette after the last Queen of France for whom it had been ordered by an admirer in 1783.

Marie Antoinette was driven by a truly passionate desire for Breguet watches. Keen to possess any auspicious novelty, she had acquired a number of timepieces, including a perpetuel watch embellished with a self-winding device developed by Abraham-Louis Breguet at the Quai de l’Horloge on the Ile de la Cite in Paris.

According to Hayek, Marie Antoinette was a true admirer of Breguet’s work, “So much so that she mounted the scaffold in 1793 with one of his watches in her hand.”

So whilst commissioning the watch ordered from the workshops in the Quai de 1’Horloge, the admirer wanted a watch incorporating the entire body of horological science of the time - perpetual calendar, repeater, thermometer, chronograph, power reserve and pare-chute - as a gift to the queen.

The order specified that gold should, wherever possible, be used instead of other metals, and that the complications should be both multiple and varied. There were to be no limits to the original price;