The Rhône: a platinum case, a grand feu enamel dial and the hand-wound Calibre V.31, in an edition of forty-eight.
Each Rhône dial begins as powdered glass laid on a copper blank, then fired, cooled and inspected eleven times. One in three survives without a flaw; the others are broken and the copper returned to the melt.
Calibre V.31 is assembled, adjusted and regulated by a single watchmaker, whose initials are engraved beneath the balance bridge. It is never divided between benches, and never handed on unfinished.
Every bridge is bevelled with a gentian-wood peg and diamond paste, its inward angles finished by hand until each holds a single line of light. The hidden side receives the same attention as the side behind the sapphire.
Élise Verane opened her workshop in 1871, in two rooms above the Rhône where the light off the water was steady enough to work by until evening. The house has not moved since.
Every watch that leaves the atelier is entered by hand in a single ledger: its number, its calibre, the watchmaker who finished it and the day it was regulated. The first entry is in her writing.
The tools have changed a little and the method not at all. One watchmaker carries each piece from the first screw to the final regulation, and signs it where only a watchmaker will look.
“We stop polishing when the light stops changing. Until then the watch is not finished, whatever the calendar says.”