And so, on to Paris with some apprehension. I had known from the beginning that my pursuit of starfish would take me there. In addition to all the other good reasons to go, it’s where Françoise Cailles, the woman who is thought to know the most about Boivin, lives and works. She is the undisputed authenticator of all Boivin jewelry pieces that come up for sale at auction and in jewelry houses, and she has written the only book, René Boivin: Jeweller (Quartet, 1994), about the history of the salon. Part of it is a catalogue of Boivin jewelry. The English edition sells for close to $5,000 from Amazon. Fortunately, Colleen Caslin, the chief financial officer at Verdura, loaned me her copy. I turned its pages carefully, protected its thick spine, and kept it close at hand on my desk.
Françoise Cailles had the reputation of being nearly impossible to make a date with and unresponsive to queries, a distinction that she lived up to when I contacted her. I wrote to her in French and English, by e-mail and post, at addresses provided by jewelry dealers in New York. Though I had been told that she spoke good English, I hired a Frenchwoman to translate my letter of introduction to her. In it I explained about the book I was writing and that I would come to France to meet with her at her convenience. She did not reply. It did not help that everyone who knew her said I should not take her silence personally, that this was how she operated. First I fretted, and then as months wore on I despaired. Her input was essential. I needed to speak with experts about Boivin and the French jewelry business in Paris and in London. Her failure to respond loomed large and dampened my confidence. It became an outsized anxiety. I telephoned Cailles’s home and left a message in my poor French with a woman, a housekeeper I imagined, who answered. Then I bought a plane ticket and consulted with an American friend who spoke perfect French. He agreed to telephone Madame Cailles on my behalf. He telephoned me back within the same hour. She was charming, quite lovely, over the phone, he bubbled. She told him that of course, she was meeting with me. Mais oui. Had I not gotten her e-mail about having lunch? I had not. When I e-mailed her later the same day she replied with a time and place for our appointment. I was too relieved to wonder what had happened to that e-mail.
I arrived in Paris happy to be getting close, at last, to the early story of the starfish and to the people who could tell me more about Boivin. I also felt some trepidation about conversing in my unsatisfactory French. Sure, I could speak with the hotel concierge and tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go, but the gentle nuance that makes a story come to life or the quick follow-up question that probes memory were out of my reach in the French language. These limitations were on my mind during the cab ride to the home and studio of the Baroness Marie-Caroline de Brosses in Porte de Saint-Cloud, just outside the Paris city limits. I had stumbled upon the existence of Baroness de Brosses in conversation with a jewelry researcher early in my quest. The baroness was reputed to have an encyclopedic memory of many Boivin designs and the distinction of being the last designer in Paris who had worked with the Boivin team before the salon shuttered its doors after being sold to the venerable British jewelry firm Asprey in 1991. For whatever reason, she is hardly mentioned in Françoise Cailles’s book on Boivin. I was delighted when she responded to my letter to her and agreed to speak with me. There were few people left to talk to about the Boivin story.
I took a deep breath standing outside the painted blue door to her apartment at the back of a courtyard before ringing the bell. Wearing tight blue flowered jeans and heels, she opened the door. “Bonjour,” she said with the customary hi-lo chime the French give to it and then “you are here” in English that assured me we would be able to converse in English. I breathed a sigh of relief. Her small but nicely appointed living room was decorated with white ceramic elephant lamps under pink shades and upholstered blue velvet furniture. She ushered me to a seat on the blue couches with tassled fringe skirts. A Boivin silver and gold diamond cat pendant the size of a silver dollar hung on her chest. She later told me she was wearing it on my behalf. After a polite pause for pleasantries, Perrier and strawberries, de Brosses told me the story of going to work for Boivin in 1970. I felt her decompress as she talked about being a young designer in her twenties. Perhaps the reason she is largely missing from accounts of the House of Boivin is explained in part because she missed the company’s heyday, yet she clearly enjoys telling the story of going to the salon on the Avenue de l’Opéra for the first time. In her account it was a dusty place with shutters, past its prime. The comedy in the scene she created made her laugh. She loved the manager, “the wonderful Monsieur Girard, very old,” who cranked open the shutters, making dust motes in the air visible in the dim light. She recalled the old woman called the “angel” in jewelry shop parlance who sat at the front door and did the accounts. The angel was also the secretary, and strung pearls from her high stool perch, once a regular fixture in Parisian jewelry houses. “So cute, old ladies with curly white hair and hunched over their work,” de Brosses remembered. The Boivin daughters, “filles” as they were called, though they were mature women by then, came every day to the salon for tea.
And then her story took a little curve and she picked her words carefully. She was delighted, she explained, to be offered the job designing for Boivin and she was charmed by Monsieur Girard, “but I still had Juliette.” She sighed. “Of course, she was threatened by me.” It was apparent to de Brosses that the aging Moutard resented her presence, and though they worked together on three or four different designs to show to a client, “when they were presented, Juliette wouldn’t credit me.” She resented that the older woman did not teach her more. She can see her still, wearing “a smock like a chem lab coat.” There was no love lost between them. During the eight months they worked side by side at Boivin, de Brosses, who was transitioning from a study of architecture, began to draw what she liked. Her work, she said, was considered to be new, on the cusp of change. After a rough first year, her tenure at Boivin stretched to twenty years.
The days of Moutard’s brilliant successes with the starfish and other maritime motifs were over, but as a student of the salon’s past and her design predecessors, de Brosses arrived at some conclusions about the two women’s work. “Suzanne Belperron had muscle. She may well have had the starfish idea first. Juliette was soft. She came from working on small clocks, that was her world.” But whatever ingredients were part of the alchemy for jewelry design greatness, de Brosses is the only one who can recount the creative atmosphere at Boivin. “They were very eccentric!” she says, speaking of all the women, including Madame Boivin and her daughter Germaine, who “collected bones in the forest and shells and glued them together.” In her recollection, the salon and workplace were a sort of magic shop, or an enchanted forest of women making jewelry. They pushed the edges of naturalistic whimsy. Their license to tinker, to muse and create, would change in the 1980s when work began to be priced by the hour. In her estimation a starfish would have required eighty hours of work, design through fabrication. “Like the advent of brands, this was a big change,” she explained.
There were little things that distinguished the rarefied life at the house. “Lapidary in the old days was done by color or provenance.” Rubies from Burma, though a lovely hue of red, were of poor quality. “But we cared more about color.” It was how a piece looked from an artistic standpoint that counted at Boivin. Monsieur Girard had a thumb-sized emerald that seemed to have herbs visible in its gem formation. The imperfection would have disqualified it for setting in the estimation of some more conservative jewelers. “We didn’t care,” de Brosses told me, exhibiting the swashbuckling confidence of designers who ranked style above sheer quality. What struck me was how this small jewelry house became eminent for quality and design, getting it right enough times to hold a place in both worlds without sacrificing one at the expense of the other.
There was also the plain old fun and risqué gossip of a French jewelry salon. When I asked her to tell me about the mood and atmosphere of the Boivin salon that she had experienced, she told me a story that captured a different era in French history. A client who worked for a big bank in Paris came to the salon to see the manager, Monsieur Girard. The man was impeccably groomed in a suit and neat tie, the uniform of a rich French banker. He shopped with swagger and bought a necklace of rubies and diamonds that he asked to have wrapped as a gift. To the surprise of the Boivin staff he returned to the salon after lunch a total mess. His fly was unzipped, his tie was akimbo, de Brosses remembers. The client told Monsieur Girard, “She did not want it.” Yet by the looks of him, it had not dulled her ardor. De Brosses started laughing before she got the last few words out of her mouth and we giggled over such ludicrousness together. Those were apparently the days of French high-flying and there were many such occurrences at Boivin. She took me back to the Belperron days at Boivin in the early thirties and told that story of the legendary designer showing stones to her clients in a long upturned fingernail. I was uncertain whether this was merely eccentric or creepy.
De Brosses knew a little about the progression of design that led to the starfish. It was her understanding that Suzanne Belperron made some designs that included starfish and that during this period Madame Boivin asked for shell designs from her. After Belperron left it was Juliette who continued and excelled with the maritime motif, especially the Boivin starfish. De Brosses had always had the impression that five were made in the thirties and forties, perhaps not all of them ruby and amethyst.
De Brosses provided some insight into the source of Cailles’s expertise on the House of Boivin. Cailles’s husband, Michel Perinet, was a brilliant antiques merchant with a renowned eye for almost anything of age. De Brosses recalled that he bought a painting in a Boivin sale that sold for ten times his purchase price five years later. Lee Siegelson had mentioned to me that he had first seen a starfish in 1992, I thought at Perinet. Perinet and his wife Françoise’s history and expertise with Boivin are intertwined with the Boivin starfish’s story.
De Brosses was absolute about the difference between Belperron and Boivin starfish. She found them easy to differentiate. I had not seen a Belperron starfish, except in drawings. With her expert eye, she could tell that Belperron’s stones were set in a more modern fashion, and her starfish designs, older than Juliette Moutard’s, “had little points and smaller flips at the end.” In the drawings I have seen they are more uniform and geometric, whereas Moutard’s seem like live creatures.
De Brosses was still actively designing jewelry. During my visit to her an assistant and student arrived to head upstairs to her workshop. I was relieved to have started my reporting in Paris with her. She buoyed my confidence. The next day was my lunch date with Cailles.
* * *
I had heard from everyone in the jewelry business whom I asked about the Boivin starfish that I must meet with Cailles and that she was most likely to have the answers I was looking for, but I was also told that some of her assertions and authentications were open to challenge. Sam Loxton at Lucas Rarities had told me that Cailles had “volumes and volumes of daybooks and ledgers. They were bought from Asprey.” Asprey was the last owner of Boivin before it closed its doors. It seemed to be the classic story of a large conglomerate wanting the brand Boivin and the status the name conferred, but once it owned it, the parent company could not maintain the quality or accept the profit margins of a small operation.
It is undisputed that the archives—and the rights to replicate jewelry from them—are owned by Nathalie Hocq, but Cailles seems to have sufficient access to or perhaps copies that enable her to fulfill her duties of authentication. She steadfastly refuses to show what she has, or as she explains most things, they are a secret.
* * *
To put it a bit inelegantly, Françoise Cailles is the troll at the bridge of the market in Boivin jewelry. Only she can authenticate pieces created by Boivin, and her certification is needed for a sale. This service is offered for a fee. The library Loxton referred to is evidently the one that is used to authenticate the pieces Cailles is called upon to vouch for, but she does not show it to others. This lack of visible documentation and drawings frustrates dealers who have pieces for sale and have one owner or one source to prove their provenance. Some of her decisions, I am told, have been shown to be incorrect or reversed later, especially when they have been made based on photographs instead of seeing a piece. Of the hundreds of pieces of Boivin jewelry she has ruled on, it seems forgivable to have made a few mistakes, but the lack of public documentation or alternate evidence of authentication beyond her nod aggravates jewelers. And there is an additional complication: while there are whispers of a few errors, no one wants to be on record pointing them out publicly, because to challenge Cailles’s supremacy as an authenticator could bring down the hierarchy on which past sales and current prices were valued. In the world of fine jewelry all pretenses and postures are preserved, even if proved incorrect, when it’s a matter of money. And it always is.
* * *
Adding to the difficulty of knowing about the history and origins of French jewelry is the habit that fine pieces have of disappearing for long periods of time, either because they reside innocently in the collection of a long-forgotten owner, or because they are acquired and kept in deep secrecy. Millicent Rogers’s starfish stayed in her family for seventy-five years. The “third” Boivin starfish seems to have been held in the dark by its creators and owners for decades. Sometimes jewelry as fine as Boivin’s pieces was kept within a family for several generations. When I spoke with French jewelers and owners, they would have liked for me to accept that this was the fate of all fine jewelry in France. The instinct to avoid having one’s wealth known publicly and to evade estate and inheritance taxes makes the French go to great lengths to keep their jewelry secret. “You don’t want to ever talk to a French woman about her jewelry,” an American dealer of vintage French pieces warned me, when I shared my intentions with her.
This tendency, compulsion really, was explained to me by Jean Pierre Brun, the man whose family for years had a leading jewelry workshop in Paris that produced roughly a quarter of Boivin’s designs. He is connected with Profillet, the name of the workshop that made the original starfish. Brun is of an age and type of Parisian man who still kisses a lady’s hand when they meet and sounds like Maurice Chevalier when he talks. He is full of lore about the old days in French jewelry making. He explained to me that I must take into account the true nature of French people for my story. “They are different,” he said of the French owners of jewelry like the starfish. “They don’t show off. If you have a nice big car here, you hide it.” Such instinct was perhaps more practical than cultural since the French “wealth tax” that assesses French citizens’ wealth annually and taxes them accordingly is a mighty incentive for secrecy.
Brun and I were talking in the lobby of my hotel on Rue Madame in Paris, coincidentally the same street where he has lived his entire life. I was reminded that jewelry artisans occupied a social position well above tradesmen in twentieth-century France. Their status was more like that of fashion designers in the United States today. Brun told me that he spoke almost every day to Nathalie Hocq Choay, the woman who now owns the Boivin brand. She bought it when Asprey, then owned by the billionaire playboy Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of the Sultan of Brunei, sold it in something of a fire sale, to cover his debts, making her the owner of the archives and adding the remaining inventory to her jewelry store Poiray on the Rue de la Paix in Paris, according to Brun. Poiray was dedicated to making fine jewelry for a younger clientele at a lower price point than the old flagship brands, something Hocq had championed at Cartier. She was of keen interest to me because owning the brand meant she had whatever archives remained from Boivin. These would include sales records and design orders. I had written and phoned her, but without results. Brun promised to ask her to speak with me. He had first been suggested to me by Ralph Esmerian, the previous owner of Fred Leighton jewelry in New York, who was then serving a prison term for fraud. He kept in touch with Ralph.
Who else would he suggest I speak to? I asked. I ended every interview by asking that. “Have you talked to Murray?” he asked. Ah yes, Murray Mondschein again.
I met Françoise Cailles for our appointed lunch date at the restaurant of her choosing, Ladurée, on the Left Bank. “Very French,” she had described it in her e-mail of confirmation to me. I wondered if she knew it had sprouted a chain of popular macaron stores in New York City. One of three Ladurée restaurants in Paris, the tearoom on Rue Bonaparte is a bustling full-scale restaurant, not just the patisserie it is known for in the United States. The muraled walls, full of monkeys and palm trees, circle the downstairs dining room, but the maître d’ led me upstairs to a quieter, buffeted room. The woman who rose to meet me in trousers and a copper-colored blazer did not look like the dragon lady I had begun to imagine. Her chestnut hair was stylishly coiffed and she looked younger than an online photo I had seen of her with a group of French jewelry advisers. She wore minimal jewelry, small gold earrings and a chain. I took my seat on a deep blue velvet banquette with a tasseled hem. Curtains pulled aside with a matching swag framed windows that looked onto the street below. Yes, very French, I thought, more like American fantasies of restaurants for assignations. The clatter of glassware and silver below was at a distance and I was grateful that the room where we sat was reasonably quiet.
Cailles nearly whispered when she talked of the history of Boivin. I was straining to make out her mix of English and French, but I recorded our conversation. Everything she said was cryptic. Ah, when I asked about the sales ledgers for Boivin, “The record is not complete,” she said. I had already heard that she never produces anything to peruse for anyone who is researching Boivin pieces. Everything depends on her memory, unseen notes, and her assertion.
As for learning the names of the owners of the starfish, at least the third one whose original buyer was unknown to me, she explained, “You can only be told the name of the person in France when it was published.” I take this to mean that after someone else has published it first, or perhaps when the owner dies. “Boivin and its society were private,” she said flatly, and as our lunch was served she continued with something of a lecture on the culture of this privacy. “Bijoux are always something very personal, very expensive. It is high society,” she said, believing that she had made her point. I wondered, watching her carefully, if she really thought that I had come five thousand miles to hear this.
When I inquired if she had known someone who had a starfish whom I could speak to, her expression was of controlled horror. Her eyes darted at our fellow diners. It was as if I had asked something extremely personal and unsavory, coarse even. This whole business of asking direct questions, I could see, was not getting me very far. I watched her absorb and reckon with the idea of a book such as this about jewelry and people. It was a foreign concept to her. “This could never happen in France,” she told me, unblinking, as though that was enough said. I tried another tack and asked if it is less sensitive to speak of the prices or the pieces of jewelry instead of owners. Weren’t ledgers kept? Oui. “Ah yes, they were,” she said, “but of course, they were in code.” Code? Just about everything I had found out so far had begun to feel like code to me.
* * *
Cailles claimed she didn’t know the price that Boivin’s pieces sold for because the record books were coded and she doesn’t know the code. This is hard for me to grasp or to accept, but our conversation moved on. She continued her whispered incantations on the meaning of jewelry in France. Jewels are the pride of the family … They stay in the family until death.
Cailles continued to talk generalities. She invited me to come to Paris again for longer. She was amazed that I declined the glass of champagne that the waiter offered, yet she did the same. When I said no to dessert she insisted I have a macaron. I began to feel that I was being treated like an ingénue tourist, someone that would be swayed from her mission by a little bubbly and a French pastry, just happy to be there. I asked whom she would advise me to talk with in New York about the starfish. She knew that I had already seen Ward Landrigan at Verdura and Lee Siegelson since they had referred me to her. “Murray Mondschein, I think, knows about them,” she said. Always Murray.
She went on to say that during my next visit I must come to her house, a hôtel particulier or mansion, that I had already heard much about. Perinet, her husband, had been one of the leading antique furniture and jewelry dealers in Paris, and their home, dark and richly furnished, had made an impression on anyone who had seen it. I had also been told that it was Perinet who suggested to his wife to write the book about Boivin when he learned that the last owner of Boivin, Jacques Bernard, who presided over it after he sold to Asprey, wanted a book written. Thus she had become the expert on Boivin. I began to think grudgingly that this encounter would be the first of several, just the icebreaker to introduce us. She asked if I would agree to practice English with her on my next, longer trip. This sounded good and felt unlikely. She had not been especially forthcoming, and I could see that the whole concept of a book about the owners and movement of jewelry through people’s lives was an alien notion to her. She had already told me that she could not imagine it. “Never in France,” she said adamantly, bringing a forkful of salad to her mouth. We parted on the street outside the restaurant, her arms filled with books like a schoolgirl. She was going to Tajan, one of the best French auction houses, where she works in the vintage jewelry department. It had been a lovely lunch, on the level of lunches. But I had hoped she would help me enter the world where the mysteries of the starfish are kept. On that level, the score was clearly Françoise 1, Cherie 0. The charming troll was victorious, the bridge still uncrossed.