Jewelry

ANTIBES, France — The story of the Cartier Crash watch is a good one: The timepiece, Dalí-esque in form, is said to have been inspired by a Cartier Maxi Oval that was all but destroyed in a 1960s car crash fireball involving a V.I.P. client — or a Cartier director, depending on who is talking.

But according to “The Cartiers,” scheduled by Random House for publication on Nov. 26, there is not a grain of truth in the tale.

The imposing 656-page book, written by Francesca Cartier Brickell, details the company’s history from its beginnings in 1847 to the departure of the last family member in 1974. The business now is owned by the Swiss luxury conglomerate Richemont, which was not involved in the book.

Ms. Cartier Brickell, 41, is a granddaughter of that final executive, Jean-Jacques Cartier, who ran Cartier London until the sale. And her book is based on letters she discovered a decade ago in an old trunk stored in the cellar of his home here in the South of France, as well as years of her research and interviews.

She now owns that home. The cupboards in her study are filled with box files and manila envelopes, each dated and stuffed with handwritten letters, sepia photographs and jewelry sketches, some of which she spread across her desk as she talked during a recent interview. And resting near the sofa was the letter-filled trunk, its leather straps worn by time. Under the lid is a note from her grandfather instructing that the trunk and its contents should be passed to “Cesca,” as he called her.

Along with such family details, the book expands on some of the jewelry house’s widely known stories.

The Hope Diamond

Even people with little or no interest in jewelry know about the Hope Diamond, the 45.52-carat stone displayed since 1958 at the Smithsonian’s natural history museum in Washington. Cartier owned the gem briefly, not long after Pierre Cartier opened the house’s New York office in 1909 — and, as the book describes, it turned out to play a significant role in Cartier’s success in the United States.

Pierre Cartier was a member of the business’s third generation; his older brother, Louis, ran the Paris business and his younger brother, Jacques, ran Cartier London.

“Soon after Cartier moved to New York, the brothers decided they had to buy large stones,” Ms. Cartier Brickell said. “They didn’t believe in advertising. They felt it would demean the brand. If they wanted to sell to royalty, they couldn’t be seen in a magazine.”

The diamond, first known to the West in the mid-1600s, had been bought and sold many times and, by 1909, Pierre Cartier owned it. The following year, he sold the gem for $180,000 (almost $5 million today) to Evalyn Walsh McLean, a mining heiress and socialite. She was late in paying, prompting a legal dispute that, the book said, eventually meant Cartier lost money on the deal. But New York’s fascination with the McLeans (her husband, Ned, owned the publishing empire that included The Washington Post) led to a lot of publicity for the fledgling American business.

Cartier Fifth Avenue

There also is the story of 653 Fifth Avenue, where Cartier still has its United States headquarters.

In 1916, Pierre Cartier had learned that the steel magnate Morton Plant wanted to sell the mansion, and that Maisie Plant, the magnate’s much younger — and spoiled — second wife, wanted a $1 million pearl necklace owned by the jewelry house. Cartier suggested a swap, which was accepted.

(In an amusing side note, Ms. Cartier Brickell said that a letter from a New York employee to Jacques Cartier in London described the flurry when the New York staff arrived with jewels and found out the builders still had the keys to the refurbished mansion. An office boy was dispatched while, Ms. Cartier Brickell said, “the head salesman told all the ladies with their big skirts to gather ‘round the jewels so no one would see.”)

By the time of Maisie Plant’s death in 1957, the popularity of cultured pearls meant the natural pearl necklace sold for just $151,000. In contrast, the building was declared a city landmark in 1970.

Cartier Crash

So what is the true story of the Crash?

Ms. Cartier Brickell said her grandfather never spoke to the news media about the origins of the asymmetrical design, introduced in 1967.

But before his death in 2010, he told her (in a conversation that she recorded and played back for this writer) that he and Rupert Emmerson, his longtime design partner, had concocted the watch’s amorphous form themselves — “just like that.”

“Imagine an oval,” he said in the recording, “and then pinch it into a point, and put a kink in the middle.”

He also said he remembered making about two dozen watches, one at a time (Painting the distorted dial, Ms. Cartier Brickell said, was tortuous).

Some watch experts have compared the Crash to Dalí’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory” — the well-known bleak landscape with what looks like melting clocks — but Ms. Cartier Brickell insisted that any influence would have been subliminal at most.

“Grandpa would spend every lunch hour not meeting clients, but wandering over the road to Sotheby’s or Christie’s to walk around beautiful pieces of art,” she said. “He wasn’t a salesman; he was an introverted artist. Sure, he would have been aware of Dalí and Surrealism, but it wasn’t like that was his inspiration.”

The design evidently meant a great deal to Mr. Cartier as he did not share it with the Paris and New York operations (the three businesses then operated independently; they merged in 1979). He was surprised when Paris produced a version of its own: “I don’t know how they got hold of it,” he said in the recording. “But they were on to it like a shot.”

Ms. Cartier Brickell said that, for her, “The Cartiers” was “a labor of love.” (On Nov. 26, she is scheduled to discuss it at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.)

“The book is a very personal story,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “I adored my grandfather and I wanted to write a family story. It’s what I promised Grandpa I’d do.”