The gun was built for Claude Cartier and completed in December 1956. Claude Cartier was the son of Louis Cartier, eldest of the three Cartier brothers, and Countess Jacqueline Almassy of Hungary. Heir to the Cartier empire, he was educated in Switzerland and at the age of 20 enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Impetuous, athletic, and with a fondness for beautiful women, it soon became apparent that he would not fit into the refined and traditional world of his father in Paris and by the late 1940s he took over the running of Cartier's New York branch from his uncle, Pierre. In 1956 he married Rita-Kate Sulmona, daughter of a rich American industrialist, the same year in which this gun was made