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Episode 8: The Cartiers and the Maharajas - Part I
About This Talk
At the 1906 royal wedding in Madrid, a bomb detonated during the procession and the newlyweds fled their carriage covered in blood. A maharaja in the crowd — sheltering in a nearby café — glanced across the room and fell in love with the Spanish dancer performing on the small stage. She would become his maharani.
Maharaja Jagadjit Singh of Kapurthala was, as Francesca describes him, ‘something of a mythic figure.’ He circumnavigated the globe twice, hosted over two thousand guests at his Paris garden parties, received the Grand Croix de la Légion d’honneur, and numbered among his friends five successive British monarchs, the queens of Romania, Belgium, and Spain — and the Cartier brothers, who rode horses with him in the Bois de Boulogne. In this first of two lectures, Francesca is joined by the Maharaja’s grandson, who shares personal memories and stories drawn from unpublished diaries. Together they explore his Mughal heritage, his extraordinary friendship with Queen Victoria that began with a jewelled gift at a royal wedding, his decades of loyalty to Cartier on Rue de la Paix, and the dramatic story of how an assassination attempt at a Madrid royal wedding led him to the Spanish dancer who became his maharani. The jewels that resulted — from Mellerio’s peacock turban ornament to Cartier’s Eclipse watch — are shown alongside the private diaries that bring them to life.
Key Moments
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