The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 Books & arts 771B
y the ageof 40, Louis-François Cartier
had not only risen from poverty to open
his own jewellery shop in Paris, he had
seen it through revolution and a coup
d’état, economic doldrums and a fire. Fis-
cal prudence and pragmatism were vital
virtues, he considered, and he instilled
them in his son and grandsons. He also im-
parted a less routine lesson: “Be very kind.”
Francesca Cartier Brickell—Louis-Fran-
çois’s great-great-great-granddaughter—
has drawn on a forgotten cache of family
correspondence to string together a dy-
namic group biography studded with de-
sign history and high-society dash. Its stars
are the founder’s grandsons, who, during
the first half of the 20th century, trans-
formed Maison Cartier into an internation-
al luxury brand with a clientele as glittering
as its bejewelled wares, pulling off feats of
social climbing as they went.
The brothers faced their own chal-
lenges, including two world wars, the Great
Depression and an inexorable drift towards
more casual fashions. Their strength lay in
their closeness and complementary tal-
ents. Louis, the eldest, could be hot-head-
ed: he once challenged a Rothschild baron
to a duel over a snub. But his creativity fu-
elled innovations such as the use of plati-
num for more delicate settings and Car-
tier’s famous “mystery clocks” (their hands
appeared to hover in thin air as if “woven
from moonbeams”). J.P. Morgan was a fan.
Pierre, meanwhile, had an innate grasp
of markets and motivation. He allowed un-
decided clients to take jewels home with
them for a few days, confident that they
would find it hard to return them—evenwhen the piece in question was the legend-
ary Hope Diamond. In 1916 he traded a pearl
necklace for the town house on Fifth Ave-
nue that remains the company’s American
headquarters. The youngest brother,
Jacques, who had yearned to become a
Catholic priest, travelled to India and the
Persian Gulf, expanding the firm’s reach.
From gem-hunting expeditions to a
heist, theirs is a dramatic saga. It is further
enlivened by the jewel-encrusted mahara-
jahs, mistresses and movie stars who pa-
raded through the Cartier showrooms. For
sheer zaniness, the most memorable is Al-
berto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian coffee
heir and aviation nut who held aerial din-
ner parties (waiters had to be agile), and
bar-hopped across fin de siècle Paris in a
tiny airship. He later inspired Louis-Fran-
çois to pioneer wristwatches—previously a
feminine accessory—for men.
The jewels themselves are stupendous:
gems the size of birds’ eggs, rope upon rope
of perfectly matched pearls, whimsical cre-
ations such as the panthers that became
synonymous with the Duchess of Windsor.
Ms Cartier Brickell is alert to their diverse
connotations, from love letter to grovelling
apology to glaring status symbol. In occu-
pied France, a brooch depicting a caged
bird sat as a protest statement in Cartier’s
flagship shop in Rue de la Paix. For all that,
as many an exiled Romanov princess came
to appreciate when forced to sell her pur-
chases back to Cartier, a jewel is first and
foremost a portable store of wealth.
What took three generations to build
was quickly dismantled by a fourth. Cartier
passed from the founding dynasty’s hands
in the 1960s and 1970s, but the jewellery
created under the brothers still surfaces at
royal weddings and auctions, where it of-
ten smashes reserve prices. (At Sotheby’s in
London in 2010 Wallis Simpson’s panther
bracelet became the world’s most expen-
sive bangle.) It is tempting to look back on
the firm’s heyday as a more graceful era; yet
as Ms Cartier Brickell intimates, the only
real difference between the excess-loving
courtesan or scheming Gilded Age hostess
who was the first owner of a Cartier bauble,
and the reality-television star who snaps it
up at auction, is an Instagram account.
Not that the author dwells on the com-
parison; discretion is among the ways in
which her meticulous, elegantly wrought
narrative bears the Cartier hallmark. She is
also kind to her subjects, a quality as bene-
ficial in storytelling as Louis-François
found it to be in business. 7Family businessesDiamond geezers
The Cartiers. By Francesca Cartier Brickell.
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an at the City University of New York, The
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bal affairs but an actor in them. It “shaped
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“Liberalism at Large: The World According
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ments and updates Ruth Dudley Edwards’s
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of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993”.
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Mr Zevin is more oblique. He aims to pre-
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tory of liberalism”. The paper, he argues,
has been guided by “the universal virtues
of capital and...necessities of empire”.
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vice about the Irish famine of the 1840s was
“on par with the better-known holocausts
of the twentieth century”. A decade later,
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Mr Zevin does not actually say the post-war
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ist lickspittle of Western intelligence agen-
cies, but that is the politely expressed drift.
If The Economisthas ever got anything
right, readers don’t hear much about it. Nor
is there much acknowledgment that mar-Auto-historyA severe contest
Liberalism at Large: The World According
to the Economist.By Alexander Zevin.
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