Paul Muffat was a Cartier salesman whose career at the firm spanned five decades, from his arrival in 1903 to his retirement in 1953. He came to Cartier from the House of Worth, the Paris couturier whose proprietor Jean-Philippe Worth was Louis Cartier's father-in-law, and was one of the salesmen Worth offered Louis to help build the new firm. Muffat began in Paris and London, moved to Cartier New York in 1910, and by 1937 was a vice president of Cartier Inc. alongside Jules Glaenzer and Louis Lecomte.
Patiala, 1925
The single best-known episode of Muffat's career took place in summer 1925, when as head salesman of Cartier Paris he was summoned to the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées to meet the Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. The meeting led to one of the largest commissions in the firm's history: the resetting of the Maharaja's vast personal collection of gemstones into what would become the Patiala Necklace. The story of that meeting, and of what Muffat found inside the box the Maharaja showed him, is in The Cartiers, ch. 8.
Muffat survived a bullet to the neck fighting in the First World War and was one of the senior figures who kept Cartier Paris running through the German occupation a generation later. His letters to his wife Maria during the summer of 1944, describing food shortages and the night the city was bombed in the days before Liberation, are quoted at length in The Cartiers, ch. 9. He retired in 1953 at the age of seventy after fifty years at the firm, leaving the Paris sales floor in the hands of André Denet, the salesman he himself had trained.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), pp. 68, 70–71, 119, 143, 303, 304, 318–319, footnote p. 564n119, footnote p. 565n138
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007)
- Roopinder Singh, "Cartiers & Patiala necklace: On trail of a lost marvel", The Tribune (India)
