BENGALURU: A few years ago, four generations of my family gathered at my grand- father’s house in the South of France to celebrate his ninetieth birth- day. As we all sat on the terrace that warm July morning, enjoying our usual holiday breakfast of fresh croissants and jam, I barely stopped to think how this wonderful man at the head of the table had lived through more than we could imagine. Born in 1919, Jean-Jacques Cartier had—like so many of his remarkable generation—witnessed cataclysmic world events firsthand. He’d seen the devastating lows of the Depression and fought in the Second World War. He had experienced more years of the Roaring Twenties than of the twenty-first century. And yet, that day, watching him open his birthday cards, he was simply Grandpa, with his neatly combed white hair and mustache and smiling blue eyes. But all that was about to change. I was just moments away from making a discovery that would bring me face-to-face with not only his past but the lives of many of my ancestors.
Finishing off the cafetière of coffee, we made relaxed plans for the day. We wanted to spoil my grandfather, but he hated being the center of attention. As usual, Grandpa just wanted the day to be about others. When we were younger, my siblings and I had been amazed at how he would rather give presents than receive them on his own birthday. One year it had been a large wooden sandbox that suddenly appeared on his terrace, another time a couple of bikes on which we could tear around his garden. This year, he announced he had been saving a bottle of vintage champagne.
Offering to fetch it for him, I headed down to his cellar. In the dim light, I scoured the shelves, and when I couldn’t see the bottle, I began searching the rest of the room. My grandfather was known never to throw anything away, so there were plenty of things lying around, from boxes filled with manuals for long-defunct electrical appliances to cases of old clothes smelling of mothballs, along with umpteen copies of Horse & Hound magazine. Everything, it seemed, except the champagne. I was about to admit defeat and return empty-handed when, just as I was leaving, I noticed a large trunk in the corner near- est the door. Like most other things down there, it was covered with dust and a random mix of objects. It seemed unlikely to house the missing champagne, but I was intrigued.
I set to work removing a tall, thin metal wine rack holding a solitary bottle of out-of-date Orangina and made my way past some yellowing 1970s newspapers until the traveling trunk was revealed in its full battered glory. Black with brown leather straps, its surface was clear of any markings but its sides held clues to a different era: faded stickers from Parisian railway stations and exotic Eastern hotels. Kneeling, I carefully unbuckled the worn straps, willing them not to break off in my hands. And slowly, in that half-dark cellar, all alone, I lifted the lid. Inside were hundreds and hundreds of letters. They were neatly arranged into bundles, each pile tied with a faded yellow, pink, or red ribbon and labeled in beautiful handwriting on a thick white card. My grandfather had been part of the fourth generation of the Cartiers to join the renowned family business, and the last of that generation to run a branch before it was sold out of the family in the 1970s. His father, Jacques Cartier, must have been the original owner of the trunk. Here, I realized as I thumbed through the letters, was the story of a family firm that created some of the most revered jewelry of all time for the world’s biggest names.
Extracted from The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire by Francesca Cartier Brickell, with permission from Penguin Random House