A company that survives for more than a century, rarely does so without having a few stories to tell. Especially one, whose operations spanned continents and counted amongst its clientele, some of the richest and most powerful names of the day. Francesca Cartier Brickell had one such story to tell about the French jewellery major founded by her greatgreat grandfather Louis-François Cartier.During a two-day event hosted by auction house Saffrontart in Mumbai earl ier this month, Brickell, who is working on a book on the history of the brand, spoke about the association of her grandfather Jacques with India. During the talk, she shared an image with the audience of a two-string natural pearl necklace.This was the necklace that helped Jacques's brother Pierre close the deal in the mid-1910s for what is now famously known as the Cartier building, located on New York's Fifth Avenue."Pearls were very valuable in that day and age. Whenever a perfect pearl was discovered in the Persian Gulf, it would send financial markets all over the world into a state of chaos," Brickell said.According to Brickell, when Pierre moved to New York in 1909 to set up Cartier's headquarters, he couldn't afford to buy a building. "He rented a small space on the second floor in a building on Fifth Avenue. He didn't make his own jewels, but sold the ones made by his brothers in Paris. One day, in 1916, he put on display this double-strand pearl necklace in the window. It was the most expensive pearl necklace in the world, valued at over $1 million," she said.Francesca Cartier BrickellOne day a young girl, married to a 61-year-old businessman, walked by the display window and fell in love with the necklace. The girl was Maisie Plant. "Apparently, what Maisie wanted, Maisie got. But her husband Morton Plant, a railroad tycoon, did not have $1 million in cash. So, he offered to do a swap," Brickell said. Morton of fered to trade the necklace for his mansion on Fifth Avenue. This turned out to be a very shrewd investment for Cartier because a few years later cultured pearls made their way into the market and with that, the prices of natural pearls plummeted.When this necklace was sold in 1956 on Maisey's death, it fetched only $150,000. Today, the Cartier headquarters on Fifth Avenue is probably worth billions.The three grandsons of Cartier founder Louis-François had international ambitions for the company. They took charge of different branches — Louis, the oldest, headed the Paris branch, Jacques, the London one, and Pierre, the one in New York. But they would travel frequently in search of design inspiration and to expand their clientele. And on their travels, they would keep each other updated, sharing news about any new purchases in their letters. They developed a code, a Cartier secret of sorts, to share the prices of these new acquisitions. They would use letters that corresponded to certain numbers in the base word, Confi tures, which means jam in French. So, C=1, O=2, N=3 and so on, ending finally with S=0.