Episode 1: The Cartiers: The Untold Story

About This Talk

She went to the cellar to fetch a bottle of champagne for her grandfather's 90th birthday. She couldn't find it. But in the corner, under yellowing newspapers, was an old leather case with the initials J.C. embossed on it — the initials of her great-grandfather, Jacques Cartier. Inside were hundreds of letters stretching back over a hundred years. She had been looking for champagne. She had found the story of her family.

A solo talk in which Francesca introduces her book and the family it is about. Beginning with the discovery of a letter trunk in her grandfather's cellar on his 90th birthday, she traces the story from Louis-François Cartier — born to a washerwoman mother in 1819 — to three extraordinary grandsons who divided the world between them. The talk explores each brother in turn. Louis Cartier, the rebel whose head was in the clouds at school, went on to revolutionise jewellery with platinum and the garland style, invent the first men's wristwatch for a Brazilian aviator who tied his flying machine to lamp posts, and create both the Tank watch and the mystery clocks — pieces so mysterious that even Cartier's salesmen were kept in the dark about how they worked. Pierre Cartier, the networker, won America through force of personality: acquiring the Fifth Avenue headquarters by swapping a million-dollar pearl necklace for a Manhattan townhouse, and making Cartier famous by selling the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond to a client he first convinced to borrow it for the night. Jacques Cartier, the youngest, almost became a Catholic priest. Instead, he ran the London branch, dressed the British royal family, sent a salesman to Baghdad who returned with an emerald as large as a bird's egg — a stone later cut in two, one half sold to King Edward VIII for the ring that changed history — and followed the Indian trade routes that gave Cartier its tutti frutti style. The talk closes with a reading from the book, standing at the Cartier family crypt in Versailles, and the three values that underpinned a century of work: be very kind; never copy, only create; and an unshakeable belief that the best is good enough.