Francesca Cartier Brickell was visiting her grandfather when she discovered in his cellar a trunk of letters long thought lost. Together, the two began reading this trove of correspondence and unraveling their family’s history, beginning with Ms. Cartier Brickell’s great-great-great-grandfather, Louis-François Cartier, who in 1847 founded the family’s eponymous jewelry business in Paris. The result is “The Cartiers,” the tale of a clan united in single-minded dedication to the success of their enterprise, with walk-on parts from the world’s most glamorous princesses, heiresses and maharajas.
Louis-François Cartier became a jeweler’s apprentice when his family could no longer afford to send him to school. He worked 15-hour days in a workshop where he was “not spared slaps, boxes on the ears, and kicks.” At the age of 27, when the average wage was less than 2 francs a day, he scraped together 20,000 francs to buy his employer’s old shop. This was mere months before the 1848 revolution sent business spiraling. But just when things really began to look bleak, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, possessor of Europe’s most beautiful décolleté, started buying from Louis-François. Cartier was on its way.
The firm’s early days are sketched rapidly in the book, but it’s clear that Cartier’s progress came in spite of appalling circumstances. In 1871, Louis-François hid most of his stock and retreated to Spain’s Basque country to wait out France’s war with Prussia, while his 30-year-old son, Alfred, stayed in Paris eating dog meat and rats and buying up gems from desperate Parisians.
With the third generation, Cartier flourished. Alfred had three sons, which meant they could open branches in three cities. When Jacques, the youngest, was only 7, the brothers made a pledge to create the world’s leading jewelry firm. Hardly a cross word, it seems, passed between them for the rest of their lives. They also combined remarkably complementary talents with a knack for marrying heiresses.
