Digital jumping seconds had never been done in a wristwatch before this one. The Vagabondage III shows the hours and the seconds through apertures, both changing instantly, and a jumping seconds display demands energy sixty times more often than a jumping hour does, which is why nobody had attempted it. Journe solved it with a constant force device that stores and releases power once a second. This is the platinum version, sixty-nine pieces, in the flat tortue case the series has used since 2004. It is long sold out. The Vagabondage watches were never sold through the retail network and exist outside the main collection entirely.
The case is platinum in the flat tortue shape, 45.2 by 37.5 mm, which is a form Journe took from the pocket watch prototypes he made in the 1980s rather than from anything in the modern range. It is longer than it is wide and curved to the wrist, so the size on paper bears very little relation to how it wears. The dial is smoked sapphire, which means the movement is visible behind it rather than covered, with two apertures cut in 18K white gold for the hour and the seconds. Around the outside sits a chapter ring for the minutes with steel elements screwed into place. The hand for the minutes is the only conventional indication on the watch. Everything else is read through a window, and because the sapphire is tinted rather than clear, the mechanism appears as a shadow behind the numerals rather than as a display in its own right. Reading the watch takes a moment of adjustment. The hour sits where a dial would normally be blank and the seconds sit below it, so the eye has to learn two new positions before the time registers at a glance. The minute hand travelling the outer ring is the one familiar element and it does most of the work in practice. After a week the arrangement stops feeling strange, which is the usual pattern with any watch that abandons the standard layout.
The remontoir d'egalite is the device that makes the whole thing work. It is a secondary spring rewound by the mainspring at fixed intervals, and it does two jobs at once: it delivers constant force to the balance regardless of how wound the watch is, and it stores the energy needed to drive the jumps. On the Vagabondage III it releases once a second, which advances the seconds disc in a single step and, once an hour has passed, the hour disc as well. That release rate is the reason the watch is difficult. An hour jump asks for a large amount of energy twenty-four times a day; a seconds jump asks for a smaller amount eighty-six thousand times, and the mechanism has to survive that indefinitely. Journe had been building remontoirs since 1991 and this is the most demanding application he has put one to. There is a second consequence worth noting. Because the constant force device sits between the mainspring and the balance, the rate of the watch is largely independent of how much energy remains in the barrel, so a Vagabondage III running low keeps time as well as one freshly wound. That is the original reason remontoirs were built, long before anyone thought of using one to drive a display. Journe has kept both purposes alive in the same component here, which is efficient in the way the best solutions usually are and also the reason this movement exists only in this watch.
The Vagabondage series stands apart from everything else the house makes. It began in 2004 with a wandering hours watch in a tortue case, sixty-nine pieces in platinum, sold without any of the usual collection markings. The second arrived in 2010 with digital hours and minutes and no hands at all. The third followed in 2017 and completed the idea by making the seconds digital too. Each was issued in the same case, each in a run of around sixty-nine pieces per metal, and none was ever part of the catalogue in the way the Souveraine or Octa watches are. Owners tend to treat them as a set, and a complete trilogy in one metal is one of the harder things to assemble in modern independent watchmaking. That the third watch took thirteen years to arrive after the first is part of the appeal. Journe did not run the series on a schedule and there was no expectation that a third would exist at all, so its release in 2017 read as a conclusion rather than as a product launch. The jumping seconds were the technical reason it was worth doing; without them the watch would have been a variation rather than a step. Nothing has followed it, and the house has given no indication that anything will, which effectively closes the series at three.
This is a watch for a collector who already understands what Journe does and wants the version of it that nobody else has. The display is unlike anything in the rest of the collection, the case shape appears on nothing else, and the platinum execution is the one the series has always led with. Sixty-nine pieces is a small number in any context and a very small one for a watch this widely discussed. As a sold out limited series the questions are provenance, completeness of the box and papers, and the state of the sapphire dial, which cannot be replaced. The jumping seconds should be watched for a full minute, since a step that hesitates or drags is the first sign that the constant force device needs attention. Servicing is a manufacture matter rather than something a local watchmaker should attempt, and the intervals are worth establishing before purchase rather than after, since a watch of this construction left unserviced for a long stretch is a slow thing to bring back.
