BENGALURU: Ten years ago, during the 90th birthday of her grandfather Jean-Jacques Cartier, Francesca Cartier Brickell went to fetch a bottle of champagne from his cellar. The last of the Cartiers to own and manage a branch of the family firm, he had retired and moved to the South of France a few years before Francesca was born. “While looking for the birthday bottle, I stumbled across a battered travelling trunk and thinking the champagne might be inside, I opened it. But I was wrong: I was facing hundreds of long-lost family letters,” says Francesca, who recently released her book in India.
These letters tell the story of her family and the firm they had founded over a century and a half earlier, the discovery being the “catalyst” for her 600-plus page book, The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire, which follows the highs and lows of four generations. Francesca had grown up listening to stories at the lunch table about the past from her grandfather – his worry that the curse affecting the Hope diamond might affect his family because his uncle, Pierre Cartier, had at one time owned the Hope; how her grandfather’s parents had travelled to India by Rolls Royce, and their adventures – staying in palaces, riding on elephants, seeing panthers in the wild.
“I heard about how my great-grandfather Jacques travelled to Bahrain and Dubai to buy pearls, and how he spent hours on the blistering hot pearl fishing boat, watching the divers put pegs on their noses and weigh themselves down with buckets of stones in order to be able to scramble around on the seabed, looking for shells in the hope that one might contain a precious pearl. The reality was that pearls were very rare -- Jacques told his son that even a whole day, when hundreds of shells were collected, did not yield a single pearl – and that explained why they were the most valuable objects in the world, and why his brother Pierre Cartier had managed to exchange a pearl necklace for a Fifth Avenue mansion that became, and remains, Cartier’s New York headquarters,” she says.
The research that went into the book was intense, so much so that it became a challenge at one point, until Francesca had to stop herself from researching and start writing. “I spent a decade in museums, libraries and archives; tracking down people connected with the past and following my ancestors’ footsteps through foreign lands, using their diaries as a guide. My grandfather felt that there were many unsung heroes in the Cartier story, so I wanted to understand their lives -- people like the Cartier London lead designer Frederick Mew who created the Queen’s Williamson brooch (a pink diamond flower brooch that she wore on important occasions, from the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, to a meeting with the Obamas at Buckingham Palace), or the French salesman Etienne Bellenger, who barely survived a vicious robbery in the 1930s before quietly helping General De Gaulle from the Cartier boardroom during WW-II,” she adds.
Francesca admits that there are several stories that would likely have been kept untold by the Cartiers at the time. “Rumours in the 1930s such as Louis Cartier’s wife supposedly having an affair with the ex-king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, or stories of a robbery at Cartier Paris, with a family member suspected. I decided I should include these stories because they add to the history, and reveal something important about the characters who had long since passed away,” she says.