16.23.a - Permission Not Required
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This week “16.23.a - Permission Not Required
Feature: the woman who Put a Caged Bird in a Jeweller’s Window
This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.
You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.23 - France with Zombies - here during the weekend.
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Judy - 13.6.2026
1. The Woman Who Put a Caged Bird in a Jeweller’s Window
How Jeanne Toussaint spent fifty years making jewels for women who refused to ask permission
I came to this story sideways; yes, I know it’s the way I come to most of the ones that end up mattering to me, and you would have noticed that I’m sure.
It was a Saturday morning, and I was reading the weekend papers, the kind of slow reading you do when you’re not really looking for anything, and there was a photograph of a woman laughing. Not smiling for a camera. Actually laughing, head thrown back, pearls catching the light, absolutely unselfconscious. The caption said she was Jeanne Toussaint, photographed by Cecil Beaton in 1962. She was in her mid-seventies. She looked like someone who had never once in her life waited for permission to feel joy.
I put the paper down and thought: “Who is she?” Would you have known?
She was, it turns out, the woman behind nearly everything you think of when you think of Cartier.
Not Louis Cartier. Not the three brothers whose family legend has been so brilliantly excavated by Francesca Cartier Brickell in The Cartiers, the book that finally told the untold story. Not the maharajas or the Hollywood stars or the Duchess of Windsor dripping in jewels on every available occasion.
Jeanne Toussaint.
Belgian-born, Paris-made, officially titled Director of Fine Jewellery at Cartier Paris from 1933.
Unofficially titled something far better: La Panthère.
Louis Cartier gave her the nickname. He said she had what he could never have: the eye of a woman. He was her lover for years, could not marry her because her background was considered unsuitable by his family, and ended the affair in 1918.
She stayed at Cartier anyway.
She stayed for fifty years.
Think about that for just a minute longer.
The man she loved married someone else. She remained, and she shaped the house into something the world had never seen, and she never signed a single thing she made.
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Here it is: https://www.myfrenchlife.org/p/jeanne-toussaint-cartier-artistic-director-panther
