Alice Griffeuille (c.1853–1914) was the wife of Alfred Cartier and mother of the three brothers — Louis, Pierre, and Jacques — who would lead the firm into its international era.
She was the youngest daughter of the late Joseph Griffeuille, a metal dealer from the Auvergne who had left a considerable fortune to his family. The match was arranged by Louis-François Cartier, who saw in the Griffeuille family the capital the business needed to grow. Alice's only sibling, Marie, had married Théodule Bourdier — a connection that brought the two families into contact — and it was through these connections that the marriage was negotiated.
On 1 July 1874, Alfred and Alice said their vows at the Église Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement in Paris's 3rd arrondissement, the church in which the twenty-one-year-old Alice had been baptized. It stood just around the corner from the elegant Place des Vosges home where Alice had lived with her mother.
The dowry Alice brought to the marriage more than doubled Alfred's net worth and provided the funds that supported Cartier's nineteenth-century expansion. As The Cartiers observes, the women who quietly supported the Cartier men would remain largely in the shadows: Alice provided the funds for the firm's growth in her generation, just as Louis's future wife Andrée-Caroline Worth would later enable Louis to leapfrog into the big leagues through her family's couture success.
Alice and Alfred had four children: Louis (born 1875), Suzanne, Pierre (born 1878), and Jacques (born 1884). She died in the autumn of 1914, during the First World War, which prevented Louis and Jacques from attending her funeral; Pierre managed to be there.
Alice Griffeuille is the great-great-grandmother of the author of The Cartiers.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 1 ("Father and Son"), pp. 28–29.
