"The traveller regrets taking so much money with him. He looks at his Breguet watch — perhaps it’s for the last time. He would have been happier if it were hanging safely from his mantelpiece in Paris."
Prosper Mérimée
Lettres d'Espagne, 1830-1833
Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870), member of the French Academy, whose father, the painter and chemist Léonor Mérimée (1757-1836) was a client and friend of A.-L. Breguet and his son, himself became a client of the firm in his turn.
Besides his third 'Letter from Spain' (1830), in which he described the dangers posed to travellers in Andalusia by bandits and footpads, Prosper Mérimée was to return to the theme of watches, a favourite target for robbers, on several occasions, in his correspondence as well as in his short story Carmen, published in 1845, in which the author is robbed of his repeating watch, only to find it again a few days later.