The workshop smells of machine oil and old wood. Light enters through a single north-facing window, falling across a bench cluttered with calipers, tweezers, and brass filings. Édouard Favre, seventy-three years old, is doing what he has done every morning for fifty years: he is making time.
An ébauche — the French word for a rough movement blank — is the skeleton of a mechanical watch. It is the baseplate, the bridges, the wheels and pinions before they are finished, decorated, or assembled. Most of the industry sources ébauches from a handful of large suppliers. Favre makes his own.
"Every movement I make carries a small imperfection. That is how you know a human being made it."
— Édouard Favre
His father taught him. His grandfather taught his father. The family has occupied the same building in Le Sentier since 1887, surviving two world wars, the quartz crisis, and the consolidation of the Swiss industry into a handful of conglomerates. They survived by being too small to acquire and too stubborn to quit.
Favre produces perhaps forty ébauches a year. Each takes between three and four weeks. He sells them to independent watchmakers — a community that has grown, paradoxically, as the major houses have grown larger. The people who buy from him are not looking for efficiency. They are looking for provenance.
I ask him whether he worries about what happens when he stops. He sets down his loupe and looks at me for a long moment. 'My daughter is learning,' he says. 'She is better than I was at her age.' He picks up the loupe again. The conversation, apparently, is over.
Outside, the Vallée de Joux is quiet in the way that only very old places are quiet — not empty, but settled. The lake reflects a grey August sky. Somewhere in the building behind me, a machine is running. It has been running, in one form or another, for a hundred and thirty-nine years.