Episode 37: The Hope Diamond

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Marilyn Monroe and Madonna told me so! That is… unless those diamonds are cursed! This episode is a deep-dive into the Hope Diamond, a 45.52 carat blue diamond in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Come for an almost too-thorough history, stay for stories about a blingy great dane named Mike.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango.

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Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, Lindsay I am, hello, and I have my PhD in art history, which I use here on the interwebs to tell you stuff about things. That is what I do, and I hope that's why you're here. I am currently in a podcasting studio, which is why the sound quality is hopefully a bit better than it typically is, and I feel very fancy, despite the fact that I'm wearing communal headphones, which is kind of weird slash gross. Thank you for joining me for episode 37. This episode started out as a mini sode, and then it just got out of hand. There were just too many good stories to tell. And y'all know that I love a good story. There's also an alleged curse involved, and you just can't fit that into a measly 30 minutes. You just can't. So now you get a full-length episode. You're welcome, andor I'm sorry, depending on whether or not you like longer or shorter episodes. The original idea was to make this a mini-sewed companion to episode 36, which covered the Amber Room, which is another masterpiece of the gemstone world. Even if it is missing andor likely destroyed. This episode deals with another object of the gemstone variety, though, unlike the amber room, we know exactly where this object is. And it's likely not going anywhere anytime soon. I forged this rather tenuous connection between the amber room and the gemstone I'll be talking about today while on a plane to Washington, D.C., on which I was diligently using my time to research the amber room. I started to wonder if the Museum of Natural History in DC had any cool pieces of amber on display that I could photograph. I had been there a few times before, but back then I didn't really give a fig about amber. I did, however, remember one item in the collection. With that in mind, the next morning, I was on the steps of the Museum of Natural History 15 minutes before it opened, caffeinated and ready to throw some elbows if any of the gaggles of children in matching neon shirts tried to get in my way. As soon as those doors opened, I made Beeline for the second floor. Because while I love a good dinosaur, love them, the dinos could wait, because I had a date with a different millions-year-old object. Something as mysterious as it is sparkly. Something that I thought might make an excellent future podcast topic. That's what brings us here, to the part where I tell you stuff about a stone, its story, and how it became an American treasure, curse and all. The Hope Diamond and its multifaceted history. On September 17th, 1792, the guards at Paris' Royal Warehouse were having a no-good, very bad day, probably the worst day of their lives. Paris was in chaos. The French Revolution was in full swing, and just two weeks before, the streets of the city had run red with blood after hundreds of people were murdered in the so-called September massacres. The king and queen were in prison, their property was confiscated, and the guillotines were being sharpened, though the imprisoned king and queen wouldn't lose their heads for some time. But in mid-September 1792, the guards of the royal warehouse had lost something. In fact, they had lost a lot of somethings. As of August of that same year, the crown jewels of France had been locked up in a sealed room on the second floor of the warehouse. As of September 16th, the man charged with safekeeping the crown jewels had been in his job for a grand total of 14 days, his predecessor having been assassinated in the aforementioned massacres just two weeks earlier. I guess that's one way to get a job. The current conservator, a man named Restoux, had written the National Guard to beg for more security. He had just 12 guards, and none of them were very good at their job. Unfortunately, his requests fell on deaf ears. On the night of September 16th, a National Guardsman walking the streets noticed something funny. There were men on the warehouse's second floor colonnade who were taking things out of a window, putting them in a basket, and lowering those baskets to accomplices below. There was even a ladder on the scene. The guardsmen alerted the person on duty who in turn woke Rostout. Restou and the warehouse guards climbed the stairs to the room where the crown jewels were being kept. At first, there was a sense of relief because the seals that they had put on the doors were intact, meaning that no one had opened that door since they'd sealed it two weeks before. Phew. Except not. Because hey, doesn't the room have a window? One without bars? Oh merde. In case you didn't figure out what merde means, merde is French for sh. And while I try to keep swearing to a minimum, the situation warrants it. When Restou opened the doors to this room, he was greeted by a sight so horrifying it's hard to conceive. The room and its cabinets, the ones containing the crown jewels, or rather, once containing the crown jewels, had been ransacked. To make matters even more humiliating, this thievery had taken place over the course of five nights, plenty of time to make off with hundreds and hundreds of jewels. Among the stolen jewels was a rare blue diamond. So rare and beloved that it had its own name. Did you think I was going to say the Hope Diamond? Tricked you. While many of the jewels stolen in this heist were recovered, thank goodness, the French blue was not. It had disappeared, never to be seen again. At least, not all 67 carats of it. We'll get back to that story a little later in the episode. But for now, let's talk Hope. The Hope Diamond is a blue cushion cut diamond that weighs in at 45.52 carats. For a little perspective, your average diamond engagement ring these days is about 1.2 carats. So in that regard, the Hope Diamond is freaking massive. That said, the Hope Diamond tends to suffer from what I'll call the Mona Lisa complex, in that people often expect it to be this massive diamond the size of like a softball or a coconut. But it's not. It's more like half a walnut. Still very impressive. For the past 110 years, the Hope Diamond has been part of a larger ensemble, specifically a necklace, for which it serves as a pendant, one surrounded by a halo of 16 white diamonds. If that's not enough diamonds for you, and is it ever, there are a further 45 diamonds on the necklace's chain. That's a lot of diamonds. But for all its fanciness, the Hope Diamond is really just a mineral. A very, very expensive mineral. That begs the question, what is so special about diamonds and why are humans so obsessed with them? Apart from the fact, you know, that they sparkle, which speaks to the inner raccoon inside of us all. Let's start with some basics about diamonds. While diamonds are, quote unquote, just minerals, minerals are very important, every single natural diamond is also something of a geological miracle. A miracle several billion years in the making. Yes, that's billions with a B. It is estimated that the Hope Diamond took approximately three billion years to form, which just doesn't even feel possible because I'm 33, and while I'm having an okay time, three billion years just feels like too long. Diamonds form deep within the earth. And when I say deep, I mean it. We are talking a hundred miles deep. To put that into perspective, the deepest hole ever made by people has a depth of 7.5 miles. Just thinking about that terrifies me. Much less a hundred miles down. I mean, oh my god, that's the stuff of a horror movie. Diamonds start their journey all the way down there as hunks of carbon. The diamonds form when that carbon is simultaneously so squished and so heated for so long that its atoms crystallize, which is a process that takes, again, millions, if not billions, of years. Now we obviously can't dig that deep. What are we? Mole people? No. But that does beg the question. If diamonds are formed that far down, how come diamond engagement rings are being given out like candy in front of Monet paintings at art museums around the world? That might seem random, but I have seen no fewer than four people get engaged in front of one Monet painting. There is a very science-y explanation for how diamonds make their way up to the surface. I'm going to sum it up thusly. Tectonic plates shift, molten lava forms, and exerts a massive amount of pressure deep within the earth. That lava needs somewhere to go, and it takes the path of least resistance by pushing its way to the surface of the earth, taking diamonds with it as it goes. That lava eventually bursts through the earth's surface, where it cools and hardens, becoming volcanic rock. That rock, though, isn't just on the surface. It extends down into the earth from whence it came, creating a quote-unquote pipe, that's literally what it's called, a pipe, that is excavated and or mined for diamonds in the future. It is partially because we for so long had absolutely no idea where they came from that diamonds have fascinated people for millennia. In the first century of the Common Era, Pliny the Elder wrote, quote, The substance that possesses the greatest value, not only among precious stones, but all human possession is Adamos. End quote. The direct translation of Adamos in Greek is indestructible or unconquerable. That makes Adamos a fitting word for diamonds, which are the hardest known mineral on the planet. Pliny knew what he was talking about. The diamonds pulled freshly from volcanic rock are known as raw or rough diamonds, which means humans have not yet intervened in nature's work. When a diamond is cut, however, it produces a facet or a flat surface that acts as a window that light can enter and shine through the stone. Despite the word cutting, diamonds are typically shaped using a wheel coated in diamond powder. If any actual cutting is involved, which it sometimes is, it is called cleaving, which would split a diamond into multiples. The more facets a diamond has, the more it will sparkle. That happens because each facet lets light in at a different angle. When that light bounces back through the diamond, it too is released at a bunch of different angles, producing sparkle. You may have noticed that when that happens, when the diamond sparkles, even clear diamonds can produce colored sparkles. That is because diamonds have what's called a high refractive index. When light enters the diamond, it bends, splitting the white light into a spectrum of colors the same way that a prism would. That colored light then gets bounced back up into our eyeballs. Speaking of colors, not all diamonds are whites or clear. Diamonds come in all kinds of colors. Colored diamonds are known as fancy diamonds. That is the actual classification used to describe them. Those colors are produced when tiny, tiny, tiny bits of other minerals get mixed up in the carbon when it's being smushed and heated a hundred miles down into Helltown. Blue diamonds, like the Hope Diamond, are one of the rarest types of fancy diamonds. Only a few are found each year, if that. These diamonds owe their blue color to a smidge of boron that got into all of that carbon, somehow resulting in it being blue. Because they are so rare, blue diamonds are sold for absolutely insane amounts of money. There have been blue diamonds that have sold for $4 million a carat, which is the unit of weight used to measure a diamond. By that math, the Hope Diamond, just in and of itself, that half a walnut, blue diamond, would be worth something like $180 million. Just for the stone itself, not any of the other surrounding diamonds, just the stone itself. That is wack-adoodle. Because at the end of the day, a diamond is a rock. It is a crystallized hunk of carbon that only has value because we say it does. Even so, diamonds have become something like near universal currency. They are also incorruptible. Notwithstanding some weird Armageddon that is unfortunately looking increasingly likely, diamonds will survive us all. And that is something that we, as mortal humans, tend to gravitate towards. But it's not just the material makeup and mortality thing that drives the price of these diamonds. We also invest gems with worth over their stories. Those stories don't usually revolve around the gems themselves, but rather the people who owned them and the events that these gems have quote unquote witnessed. And boy oh boy, does the Hope Diamond have quite the story. One rife with intrigue, thievery, royalty, socialites, money, debt, a shipwreck, kind of, and even the occasional spots of alcoholism. There also may or may not be a curse. This is that story. The first secure mention of the 45.52 karat stone that we know and love today as the Hope Diamond comes in 1812, when it entered the collection of a diamond merchant in London. The jewel did not come with a provenance or a history of ownership, which is a little bit weird, but no one seems to have asked any questions. Because of this, we don't know the Hope Diamond's history before 1812, but we can make some pretty good guesses. If our very well-founded hunch is correct, the Hope Diamond story starts not in the 1800s, but rather the mid-1660s, when a Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier returned to France from a long voyage to India and the Near East. The trip had been a huge success, as evidenced by the dozens, if not hundreds, of jewels that Tavernier brought home with him, including a large blue diamond. We don't know the specifics of where Tavernier got this diamond, but it must have been from India, which is the only known place in the world at the time that diamonds were being mined. The best guess that scholars have is that the diamond was mined from the Kulur mine on India's west coast, which was well known for producing diamonds that were not only big but colorful, though even there only a few of those were found each year. The diamond that Tavernier brought back to France was both big and colorful, weighing in at a whopping 112 carats. While the diamond's color is usually referred to as violet, in the olden days that word described not purple proper, but rather a deep rich blue. We know what this diamond looked like thanks to DeVernier's published memoirs, which included illustrations of his collection, including multiple angles of this blue diamond. While not technically in the rough, the diamond came with minimal facets or faces. It had probably been cut down just enough to get rid of flaws, leaving a blank slate of sorts to become whatever its future owner desired it to be. But Tauvergnier was just a middleman, though one with pretty good connections. Case in point, in 1668, Tauvernier sold the blue diamond to none other than King Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King of France. And that makes a lot of sense because who else has the money and the volition to buy a gargantuan blue diamond? Not many people. This will become something of a pattern in the Hope Diamond's history. For several years, the king kept the diamond in his cabinet of curiosities, just on display as a kind of wonder of the natural world. He then decided to do something blingy with it, and ordered the court jeweler to recut and reshape the diamond, reducing this 112-carat stone to just over half of its size. As for what happened to the 50 plus carrots that were lost in this process, we don't know. They might have been sacrificed in the name of beauty, but there's also evidence that the jeweler may have created other smaller diamonds from the stone, in which case he would have cleaved it into a few different pieces. The jeweler cut this diamond in a very unique way, with many more facets on the bottom of the diamond than the top. Remember, it's the facets, the cuts, that make a diamond sparkle, because light is coming in at different angles and bouncing off different stuff. Sparkle, sparkle, sparkle. Because of that, facets are typically concentrated on the top of a diamond, but not in this situation. Instead, the jeweler cut Tavernier's diamond in such a way that when the diamond was set into gold, the light would pass through the flat top of the diamond, go through it, and it would bounce back up when it hit the gold. The jeweler had arranged those bottom facets in such a way that when this happened, it created a golden sunburst at the center of the diamond. In addition to being crazy clever on behalf of the jeweler, the creation of this golden starburst was also very on brand for the Sun King of France, who wore the diamond in various ways, including wielding it on the end of a golden stick. From this point forward, the diamond would be known by a different name, the French Blue. Louis XIV's son, Louis XV, had slightly different tastes. In the 1740s, Louis XV was very, very proud of being named a Knight of the Golden Fleece, which was basically a pan-European frat group of rich guys, all of whom wore the same highly recognizable symbol or insignia of the titular Golden Fleece. It basically looks like a dead sheep. Technically, it's the fleece of a dead sheep, specifically a ram. But still, it looks like a dead sheep. And these guys were just all about it and found all kinds of crazy ways to display their involvement in this order. In 1749, Louis XV had his jeweler create this insane ensemble brooch ribbon thing on which to hang his fleece pendant. The French blue was arguably the star of the show, though it did have some competition with a massive red spinel, a type of gemstone, that was carved like a dragon. Subtle. Throw in a few more big diamonds and hundreds, literally hundreds, of smaller diamonds, and you have the tackiest, most expensive costume jewelry in the world. Someone created a replica of this whole thing in 2010, and it's absolutely awful. The French blue remained in this setting for decades, including when it passed to King Louis XVI in 1774. This Louis Louis was also a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, so he just kept this thing as is. Contrary to what some have suggested, Louis XVI's wife, Marie Antoinette, never actually wore the French Blue. She did, however, have a thing for diamonds, which played something of a part in revolutionizing the anti-royal sentiments that were already brewing during this period. But that's a story for a different day. Maybe. The French Blue was therefore parts of the crown jewels, which were confiscated in 1791 when the king and queen were arrested and imprisoned. No longer the property of the royal family, these jewels were now the property of France. While the king and queen went to prison, the crown jewels were taken to the royal warehouse in Paris, where a conservator and a dozen guards were tasked with keeping them safe. At first, this was all good, and the jewels even went on display to the public once a week. But in September of 1792, things went from murdery to murderier with the September massacres. Because of this unrest, the jewels were locked away in a second-story room, the door of which was bolted and sealed from the outside. It was basically thief-proof, except not, because unfortunately, thieves know how to use ladders. As covered at the top of the episode, the room holding the crown jewels was ransacked over the course of several nights by a gang of thieves in early September 1792. This fiasco was, of course, well, I guess a fiasco, a total disaster, though a lot of the jewels were recovered in time. That included the, I'm gonna try it, Côte du Bretagne, something like that, which was the large red spinel in the form of a dragon that appeared alongside the French blue and the golden fleece insignia. A former French cadet was acting a fool and tried to sell the spinel in London just a few years after the heist. He was thrown in prison while the spinel returned to France. The French blue, however, was still missing. Some believe that this cadet had stolen the entire insignia, like the whole brooch thing, and had sold off the various diamonds one by one. But if he did, he either was not very good at it or was terrible with money, as he was eventually thrown into a debtor's prison. Criminal mastermind, not so much. Another, much more exciting theory, is that the French blue stayed in France and was involved in a revolutionary scheme to ward off the invading Prussians. Prussia had been threatening to invade France for a hot second. But when Prussia's mighty military general, the Duke of Brunswick, mobilized Prussian troops, his army suffered an absolutely humiliating defeat by a Ragamatag army of French soldiers. This victory was absolutely massive for the revolutionaries. One could argue that without it, the French Revolution would have failed, and the monarchy re-established. That eventually happens anyway, but you know, whatever. The fact that this all went down shortly after the heist of the French royal jewels has led some to believe that the jewels were somehow involved with the Duke of Brunswick deliberately throwing this battle. Some even go so far as to hypothesize that the theft of the jewels was organized specifically for the purpose of bribing the Duke, thereby ensuring a French win and to serve as a rallying point for revolutionary forces. Hey, Duke of Brunswick, is that the French blue in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? We do not have proof that any of this Brunswick stuff happened, though there are some interesting coincidences later that suggest it's at least a maybe. Something to note about the 1792 heist is that it wasn't shouted from the rooftops, because advertising a major jewel heist is not exactly the best PR move. I don't think the heist was secret secret, but even decades after, there were still jewelry publications that listed the French blue as being part of the royal collection. But it wasn't. It was gone. Gone, gone. Twenty years later, in 1812, something curious happens. A diamond merchant by the name of Daniel Eliason buys a 45 karat blue diamond, the very one that we now call the Hope Diamond. Eliason bought this diamond from Princess Caroline of Brunswick. In addition to being the wife of future King George IV, and by extension, the future Queen of England, Caroline was also the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick, who I mentioned just a couple of minutes ago. But for all her royal fancy schmanciness, in 1812, Caroline was just like the rest of us, a disgraced princess so desperate for cash that she had to sell some diamonds right under the nose of her husband, who she despised. And let me tell you, the feeling was mutual. Lindsay, isn't it suspicious that a large blue diamond pops up on the market just two decades after the most famous and only large blue diamond in all of Europe went missing? Yes, yes, it's suspicious as hell. Especially as Caroline's diamond didn't come with any provenance, no history of ownership. But as I just said, at the time the heist of the French jewels still wasn't well known, though it's clear that at least some people were like, mm, slightly suspicious. Eliasin eventually sells this diamond. We aren't aware of the particulars, but we do know that in a weird turn of events, King George IV, Caroline's husband, ends up with it, though it is unclear whether or not he knew it formerly belonged to his wife. King George IV absolutely loved diamonds and jewels. He loved them. He had a massive collection. It wasn't until 1823 that we get our first suspicious mention of George's diamond and the French Blue. In that year, mineralogist John Maw wrote about the King's Diamond in one of his many treaties about diamonds and gemstones. In the entry that he made on the French Blue, Ma goes out of his way to compare George's diamond to the French blue, not to remark about how similar they are, but to explicitly state that they are different. He declares that George's diamond is deep blue, while the French blue is light blue. And while he technically doesn't say this part, the ultimate conclusion is that if they're different colors, they cannot possibly be the same diamond. Even if we can absolutely prove that the Hope Diamond is a recut version of the French blue, the two diamonds would be slightly different colors. That's because the size and cut of the diamond affects how light passes through it, thereby creating changes to the perceived color. That said, nothing that we have indicates that the French blue was sky blue. It was always referred to as violet, aka dark blue. Why would John Ma bring up the French blue in the first place? Well, in the 1820s, King George was being inundated with bad press. And who boy did he deserve it? And the idea that the British crown was in possession of a stolen French jewel would have caused yet another sensation. It also would have caused major tension between George and the new French king Louis XVIII. Yes, France once again had a king and his name was Louis. Ma did not want to risk that, and so he declared George's diamond to be a different color than the French blue, despite the fact that Ma had never actually seen the French blue. All that considered, it seems like Ma had taken some artistic license in the name of not starting any wars over large chunks of minerals. I don't blame him. When King George dies in 1830, ownership over his diamond collection descends into absolute chaos. Turns out he had created quite the pickle for himself by having both a long-term mistress and a short-term mistress, both of whom he promised stuff. The most awkward thing, however, was that King George IV had been terrible with money, awful, and the executors of his estate were forced to make up some of that debt by selling the most valuable jewels in his collection. Enter stage left, Henry Philip Hope. Uh, to state the obvious, Henry Philip Hope had a ton of money. Blue Diamond buying money. And wouldn't you know it? The guy also had a taste for gems. He absolutely loved them, and over his life amassed a massive collection of gems and minerals that, if it were still intact to this day, would probably have been worth something like $15 million. Unlike the variety of schmucks who owned this diamond previously, Henry Philip Hope was a very humble, decent guy. And despite having this massive collection of gemstones, he wasn't flashy. He basically kept them in a room and he would just go and look at them because they were pretty. The Hope Diamond became the absolute star of the Hope Collection, which is saying something given just how many gemstones he owned. This is made clear in an 1839 inventory of his collection, in which our large blue diamond is named Jewel No. Not surprisingly, the entry mentions absolutely zilch about how Hope came to possess this diamond. Because you just don't write down that you bought a diamond from the estate of a debt-ridden debt king. There's also no mention of the French blue. In fact, the guy who wrote the entry, a gemologist by the name of Brahm Hertz, remarked, quote, In vain do we search for any record of a gem which can, in point of curiosity, beauty, and perfection, be compared with this blue brilliant. End quote. As Richard Curran notes in his book about the Hope Diamond, it is practically impossible that a gemologist like Hertz did not know of the French blue, which was the most famous blue diamond in all of Europe. And yet, in this entry, he acts like it never existed. Side note, my favorite part of the description is when Hertz refers to the Hope Diamond as quote unquote, not too thick. Sure. It is from Henry Philip Hope that the Hope Diamond gets its name, duh. But compared to literally almost every other person to own this diamond, Hope lived a fairly long, unscandalous, low-key life. Again, he wasn't flashy. He just liked diamonds because they're pretty and rare and because he could. Unfortunately, his nephews, who inherited his estate when he passed away, could not say the same thing. They basically spent the rest of their lives arguing over who got what. And surprise, surprise, all of them wanted the large blue diamond at the center of their uncle's collection. Because of course they did. And they end up absolutely hating each other. Which is actually quite sad. The diamond stays in the Hope family for the rest of the 19th century. The last Hope to own it was Frances Hope, who made a lot of bad decisions and didn't have the greatest taste in women. He ended up marrying an American showgirl, an actress, which in and of itself was scandalous for the 19th century, but whatever, who really cares? Except this actress who was named Mae Yo also made a lot of questionable decisions and had equally bad taste in men. Frances and May joined forces and slowly sank the family into crippling debt. Ah, a love story for the ages. At some point, the Hope Diamond gets made into a necklace, which May actually wears on many an occasion. After the catastrophic implosion of Francis and May's marriage, about eight years into things, Francis gets his family's permission to sell the Hope Diamond to pay off some of his debts. May also continues to ride the coattails of the Hope Diamond and goes on to star in the 1921 silent film series The Hope Diamond Mystery, which featured some kind of replica of the necklace. It is nevertheless Francis who gets the big bucks by selling the actual necklace for a lot of money. The new owner of the Hope Diamond is the New York jewelry firm Joseph Franklin Sons. It turns out, though, that selling a large blue diamond worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was a lot harder than this firm expected, because in the early 1900s there were diamond mines discovered in South Africa, which made diamonds slightly less of a rare commodity. Were South African mines spitting out large blue diamonds? I don't think so. But even then, selling something like this is tricky because not only does a person have to want it, they have to be able to afford it. And those two things were just not aligning. By January of 1908, Franklin Sons was absolutely desperate to sell this diamond. So desperate, in fact, that even the gossip columns caught whiff of their desperation. In that year, there was a gossip article published in the Washington Post that explicitly calls out the diamond as being responsible for the firm's bad fortunes. In many ways, this article was not wrong. The diamond had been a bad investment, one that the firm could not get rid of. But the tone of the article suggested more than just bad business choices. It implied that there was something about the diamond itself that had caused this downturn of fortune. As gossip does, this narrative quickly spiraled out of control. And a week or so later, the Washington Post published another article with the following title Remarkable Jewel, a hoodoo. Hope Diamond has brought trouble to all who have owned it. I'm going to read the parts of that article that Richard Curran published in his book on the Hope Diamond. Those excerpts read, Deep behind the double-locked doors hides the Hope Diamond. Snug and secure behind time lock and bolt, it rests in its cotton wool nest under many wrappings, in the great vaults of the great house of Frankel. Yet not all the locks and bolts and doors ever made by man can ward off its baleful power or screen from its venom those against whom its malign force may be directed. This 1908 article is one of the first indisputable mentions of the Hope Diamond carrying some kind of curse. But contrary to what one might expect, it took longer for the narrative to catch on. The article may have been good luck for the Frankel firm, who finally managed to sell the diamond to a man named Salim Habib. It is believed that Mr. Habib purchased the diamond for the Sultan of Turkey. No big deal, though it never seems to have actually made its way into the Sultan's hands, as Habib also experienced a downward turn of his literal fortunes shortly after buying the diamond. And people are like, see? Look it, the man is cursed. And it's like, yeah, because spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a blue diamond is probably not the best idea. By this point, all bets were off in Cursed Town, and articles started appearing that were even more sensational, with reporters delighting in the sordid and tragic lives of all the people who had owned, worn, or come into close contact with the diamond. Everyone except for Henry Philip Hope, over whom the diamond seemingly failed to exert its evilness, which is exactly what one London reporter wrote, almost with a sense of disappointment. So what's the deal with this curse? According to the legend of the curse, the curse was tripped when Tervernier, the first known owner of the French blue, first acquired the diamond. He did so not by buying it off of a diamond cellar, but rather ripping it from a Hindu idol. Some stories say it was the eye, some say it was in the crown, others the forehead, it doesn't matter. What matters is that in taking this diamond off a Hindu idol, Tavernier ensured that the diamond would carry a curse for the rest of its days. The lore of this curse would have you believe that everyone who has ever owned, worn, or come into close contact with the diamond suffered horrific fates, starting with Tavernier, who allegedly lost his entire fortune before being ripped apart by a pack of wild dogs in Russia, which, huh? Other accounts claim that Tervernier lived well into his 80s, which, I guess, could be a curse, depending on where and how you live. Its second owner, Louis XIV, died in agony of gangrene, for which the diamond has also been blamed. I mean, that stinks, literally, but it wasn't like it was super uncommon to die of such things in the 18th century. Louis XVI lost his head, true, though I would personally blame a combination of bad life choices and the French Revolution for that one, but who's to say that the Hope Diamond didn't cause that in the first place? Hmm. Surprisingly, the Hope Diamond has not yet been blamed for the French Revolution, but I think we should start that rumor just because we can. As tall tales tend to do, these stories grew increasingly wild, including one that alleged the Princess de Lamballe, a close friend of Marie Antoinette, was wearing the diamond when she was torn apart by the French mob. Uh, no. She was torn apart by a French mob. That part's true. But she was absolutely not wearing the diamond when this all happened. I'm not sure if this would have been better or worse if she had been wearing the diamond, because when it comes to getting torn apart by a French mob, there's really no winning. My favorite example of the alleged curse of the Hope Diamond is from November of 1909, when a ship off the coast of Singapore sank, after which a story appeared on the New York Times front page declaring, Hope Diamond's owner lost, famous Unlucky Stone, also said to have gone down with the Seine. The Seine was the ship that sank. This shipwreck off of Singapore claimed the life of Salim Habib, the most recent owner of the Hope Diamond. The New York Times article even alleged that Salim Habib had the diamond on his person when the ship went down. Turns out, though, that there were a couple of things wrong with this report. First, and perhaps most significantly, there were multiple men in the world named Salim Habib, and the one who tragically died on this ship was not the Salim Habib who once owned the diamond. Two, if Salim Habib had been on the ship, there is no way that he would have had the diamond on him, because he and the diamond had already parted ways. Once again, there was a sense of almost disappointment when people found out that the diamond couldn't be blamed for the deaths of over a hundred people. I made the mistake of looking up this shipwreck, and now I'm going to have nightmares for the rest of my life. Those who landed in the water basically got the same treatment as the Princess de Lomball, but the mob was a mob of sharks. Horrifying. But the diamond had nothing to do with it. Ultimately, I have yet to see compelling proof that the diamond does indeed bring misfortune. Instead, I see a long list of people who splashed out an exorbitant amount of money on a diamond only to fall into financial problems. That to me suggests one thing. People who buy massive blue diamonds may not be the best with money. That particular curse would continue. It was in 1910 that the curse of the Hope Diamond got redoubled. That mess all started with Pierre Cartier. Yes, Cartier, the famous French jeweler. Pierre Cartier appreciated a good story almost as much as he appreciated a good diamond. He also proved remarkably talented. At spinning stories for others. It was through one of those stories that he managed to sell the Hope Diamond, though it did take him a couple of tries. Cartier approached a socialite by the name of Evelyn Walsh McLean to pitch this diamond. Evelyn was married to Ned McLean, whose family owned the Washington Post newspaper. Ned and Evelyn were young, hot, super wealthy, definitely alcoholics, and clearly liked fancy stuff, including diamonds. Cartier had already sold them several, so they seemed like a pretty good bet as potential buyers for the Hope. The first time that Cartier tried to sell Evelyn the Hope Diamond, she refused, primarily because she didn't like its setting at the time and thought, hmm, no. But Cartier was not very good at taking no for an answer. His solution to this issue was to reset the diamond into a more modern setting, one that featured platinum metal and 16 clear diamonds surrounding the hope. It's the same setting that the diamond has today. At some point there was a necklace added, but the idea was that this ensemble of diamonds was adaptable. Case in point, the first time Evelyn Walsh McLean wore the diamond, she incorporated it into a headband of sorts, a bandeau, which was a European take on Indian fashion, and today would probably not fly. On his second try of selling the diamond, Cartier straight up left the diamond at the McLean's apartment for a weekend. The idea was that Evelyn would grow so attached to it that she'd buy it, which is exactly what happened. In her later autobiography, Evelyn claimed that her mother-in-law warned her off buying the diamond, on account of it being a quote-unquote cursed stone. Her mother-in-law also accused Evelyn of being reckless with money. And at least one of those things was true. Cartier, however, did not anticipate just how financially reckless the McLeans were. When Evelyn agreed to buy the diamond, he accepted a mixed payment that included a certain amount of cash down, a diamond necklace as a trade-in, and then the rest to be paid as instalments. All said the cost of the sale hovered somewhere around $180,000, which today would be about $5.5 million. Unfortunately, Cartier had to sue the McLeans for payment. The McLeans, in turn, alleged that Cartier had simply left the diamond with them and refused to take it back. In the end, the McLeans did end up coughing up the money. For what might be the first time since Henry Philip Hope, this turned out to be a good investment. Or at least the Hope Diamond became a treasured object. Evelyn Walsh McLean wore the diamond on and off for the next 37 years. It's actually really lovely because you can find photographs of her wearing the diamond at different points in her life. There's even a rumor that she loved this necklace so much that she tried to wear it during surgery. Evelyn Walsh McLean also had a habit of layering her diamonds. We're talking massive stones like the Hope Diamond, just layered one on top of another. When asked about this, she responded, quote, if I take out one or two pieces to put on when I dress up, I might as well put it all on, and then I know where it is. End quote. Fair enough. It's during this period of ownership over the course of the early to mid-1900s that the story of the curse starts to pick up even more. Part of this is due to the fact that Evelyn Walsh McLean wore the diamond to high society events, making it more public than ever. As for what Evelyn thought of the diamond and its curse, she took different perspectives throughout her life. In most cases, she just brushes it off, but in others, she claims that she wouldn't let her children or family hold the diamond just in case. Later, sorry, this is just really funny. So later, one of her children went to claim that this was not true, and that Evelyn even used the Hope Diamond as a teething toy for her babies. Yeah, a baby gumming up a 45 karat diamond that may or may not have once belonged to the kings of France. I don't know that I believe that story, because do any of us remember what we were teethed on? Probably not. But outrageous stories do tend to follow Evelyn Walsh MacLean like a heavy cloud of perfume. My favorite story about Evelyn is that she sometimes put her jewels on her dogs, including her great Dane named Mike, who on at least one occasion was running around the McLean's property wearing the Hope Diamond. Don't tell Gus, he'll get ideas. As author Suzanne Steinem Patch has written, Evelyn Walsh McLean was not above staging such scenes for the benefit of guests. She enjoyed being over the top and kooky. She was, to put it mildly, an absolutely fascinating woman who lived an equally fascinating life. In other words, she was exactly the kind of woman you'd expect to proudly own a cursed diamond. While the McLeans were told by several people that they should get rid of the stone, they were just fine, curse-wise. I mean, they did hate each other, basically, but uh they showed signs of toxicity of the liver and of the heart long before the Hope Diamond came into their lives. For the most part, though, they were curse-free until they weren't. The greatest tragedy that is often associated with the Hope Diamond's curse came in 1919, when the McLean's first son, Vincent, died after being struck by a car at the age of just nine years old. The next ten years didn't get much easier. In addition to the unimaginable grief of losing a child, the family was beset by other hardships, including money issues, divorce, and mental health struggles. Fun fact, Ned McLean served Evelyn divorce papers by wrapping them up as a Christmas gift, which he then gave to her. Not so fun fact, in the aftermath of said gift, Evelyn had Ned committed for psychosis, and he spent the final decade of his life at a sanitarium. While friends and gossip mongerers frequently blamed the Hope Diamond for the McLean's troubles, Evelyn had a different perspective, one that she wrote about in her memoir. In that book, she ultimately asserted that the diamond had actually been good luck, and that she shuddered to think of what tragedies might have befallen her had she not owned the Hope Diamond. In the end, she outright scoffed at the idea of a curse, and instead called out the true evil in people's lives, which she claimed was the quote-unquote natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands. Evelyn Walsh MacLean died of pneumonia in 1947 at just 60 years old. She bequeathed, yes, bequeathed, her fabulous collection of jewels to her grandchildren. Unfortunately, a la King George, the McLean estate was ridden with debts and necessitated the sale of all of Evelyn's beloved jewels. Her entire collection was purchased by just one person, Mr. Harry Winston. For those who may not recognize the name, Harry Winston was a massively successful luxury jeweler who would go on to earn the name the King of Diamonds. And Harry Winston was indeed the King of Diamonds. He was a vital reason that the diamond market bounced back following World War II, as he made great efforts to market diamonds to the public in a variety of ways. One of those ways was to have celebrities and socialites wear his jewels around town. Another was to put together a quote-unquote court of jewels that was essentially a traveling exhibition of his greatest gems, several of which he then sold as a result of these shows. Winston did not do this simply for his own gain, and he donated the profits of any tickets sold for his court of jewels exhibition to charity. He was helped in sort of hyping diamonds by the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which got everyone interested in the British crown jewels, which you should keep in mind, because we'll come back to it in a minute. From my reading about them both, I think Harry Winston and Henry Philip Hope would have made good friends, at least as far as diamonds were concerned. Both men were fabulously wealthy, but not showy. They were both also absolutely bonkers about diamonds and could spend hours looking at a single stone. Both men were also very charitable. Harry Winston had this preoccupation with the idea that the United States doesn't have a collection of crown jewels. That kind of comes with the territory of being a democratic nation. And while Winston's court of jewels was obviously a nod to those royal collections, he was also very serious about creating an actual collection of national jewels. The seeds of this idea had been planted decades before, as the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History did have a pretty decent collection of gems and jewels. But that collection lacked the big superstars that you need to draw people in. Moreover, Winston was highly committed to educating the public on diamonds and other gemstones, which isn't to say he wasn't personally invested, given that the man made his living by selling diamonds. That said, there was a very genuine desire to share and educate others about his preferred art form, diamonds. There was one stone in Harry Winston's collection that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History had its eye on. One guess which. The Hope Diamond. Of course. After an entire year of negotiations, Harry Winston agreed to donate the Hope Diamond to the museum. Initially, Winston wanted to get some kind of payment out of this deal. After all, he could go out and sell the diamond for hundreds of thousands of dollars to some rich oil tycoon or something. The idea, though, was that he would forego a massive chunk of that profit for a smaller sum and or a trade of smaller diamonds. So instead of getting, you know, $600,000 for the Hope Diamond, he would maybe get $100,000 or $200,000 and donate the rest. That didn't fly. The end deal was this. Each year, Harry Winston would give up one-tenth of his ownership of the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian museums. That meant that each year he could claim a massive tax break, thereby recouping some of the money that he didn't get from the deal. Smart man. On November 10th, 1958, the Hope Diamond arrived at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It did not arrive with a bang. In fact, it arrived late, in a small brown package carried by a postman. There was no police escort, no armored car, and the postman wasn't even carrying a weapon, just the package. This, however, was no normal package. Despite weighing only about four pounds and being mailed from nearby New York, the postage cost a whopping $145.29. But that was a bargain, given that the package itself was insured for $1 million. A ceremony to mark this grand occasion had been scheduled to begin at the museum at about 11.30. But 11.30 came and went, and the package was nowhere to be seen. I am sure everyone was freaking out, to put it mildly. Thankfully, the postman arrived 15 minutes later, package in hand. Once freed from the package, Miss Edna Winston and her teenage son Ronald presented the diamond to curator Leonard Carmichael. Harry Winston himself was not in attendance as his insurance policy required him to avoid photographers, lest he be kidnapped. But sure, you know, like send the wife and kid. It took another five to six weeks for the necklace to enter the collection officially. In the world of museums, this is called a sessioning. But eventually it was, and the Hope Diamond and its setting, including 62 smaller diamonds, entered the museum's collection as specimen 217868. Now that it was in a museum, the diamond could be taken out and tested. It was during those examinations that the museum realized the diamond was actually bigger than what it was originally assumed, clocking in at 45.52 carats rather than the listed 44.5 carats, which was based on old measurements. It was also discovered in the course of those tests that Harry Winston had made tiny changes to the jewel, the first, to our knowledge, since the diamond appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the early 1800s. Scientists were also able to examine the stone for more, you know, science-y reasons, in their efforts to learn more about how diamonds are formed geologically and their atomic structure. Surprise, surprise, I did not read into that. For the most part, the diamond has remained in its setting and on view. It was originally displayed on the wall behind a circular window covered in one-inch thick glass. That display case was also a safe, one that the museum closed each and every night. There is a rather extraordinary photograph of Nancy Reagan and the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, eating dinner in the gallery right in front of the diamond's display. This was wild for a number of reasons, given that lots of people thought the diamond was stolen from India. There is no proving that, but by the 1970s there was already a precedent for countries demanding the return of gemstones that had been acquired through dubious and or colonial means. For example, in 1976, Pakistan requested the return of the Koh I Nur Diamond, which is one of the crown jewels of England, one that was set into a crown worn by Queen Elizabeth II's mother. England, of course, said no. So setting this luncheon between the First Lady of the US and the Prime Minister of India in front of the Hope Diamond was a bit of a weird decision. Ultimately, though, it didn't end in any kind of demand for the diamond back. To my knowledge, no such request has ever been made. Though I don't know if the Smithsonian would ever publicly attest to that. Technically, if any country had a claim to the Hope Diamond, it would be France. Which brings me to an important question. Was the Hope Diamond cut from the French Blue? The answer is almost certainly yes. Though I suppose that would depend on who you ask and why you're asking. Prior to 2007, the relationship between the Hope Diamond and the French Blue was mostly a matter of logic and or suspicion. It's very weird that a large blue diamond appeared without any provenance in London just two decades after a large blue diamond went missing in France. And as we've seen, the connection between the two diamonds had been suspected ever since the 1820s. In 2007, we got as close to confirmation of these suspicions as possible. It was in that year that the Museum of Natural History in Paris was reinventorying their gems and minerals collection. While doing so, they discovered something amazing, a lead cast of the French Blue. Apparently, at some point in the 1700s, someone had made a cast of the King's Diamond. This discovery was a game changer, because before this information, the only thing that gemologists and mineralogists knew about the French blue came from prints, sketches, and recorded dimensions, which turned out to be of varying accuracy. Because some of those dimensions varied, there were questions about whether or not it would even be possible for the Hope Diamond to have been cut from the French blue. But not anymore, because this lead cast was a true 3D model of the lost diamond. And what it showed was not only could the Hope Diamond have been cut from the French blue, there are actual diagrams that show how the Hope Diamond and the French blue overlapped. Like you can see the Hope Diamond inside the French blue. And when you look at those, you can see the logic of the person who cut down the diamond. What he did to make the most out of both the size and the shape of the French blue. It is absolutely faceting. Yes, I've used that pun at least twice now. Even with that lead cast and its resulting models that all but confirm the French blue gave way to the Hope Diamond, there is no way to actually prove this. I question whether or not the Smithsonian would even be interested in doing so if it were possible, which it's not. Because if it were confirmed that the Hope Diamond came from the French Blue, France could technically make a claim for it, given that it had been stolen. Now I would say I don't think that France would do that, but ye never know. If the Hope Diamond is the French Blue, and it probably is, it made its way back to its once home in 1962. In that year, the Louvre in Paris held an exhibition dedicated to ten centuries of French jewelry. The museum requested that the Hope Diamond be part of that exhibition, and the Smithsonian said no. It took the intervention of none other than First Lady Jackie Kennedy to convince the Smithsonian to loan the necklace, which did appear in the exhibition. Also in the exhibition was the large red spinel that was cut like a dragon, which appeared alongside the French blue and the insignia of the golden fleece. While the Hope Diamond and that spinel were not displayed together, it was a significant moment, as it was the first time those jewels had been reunited since the 1792 heist. That is, if you believe the Hope Diamond and the French Blue are one and the same. The fact that the Hope Diamond appeared in this exhibition at all about French jewels is yet another sign that most people did indeed think this, even in 1962. The fact that the Hope Diamond was loaned in the first place was absolutely crazy. France, however, returned the favor a year later, when the Louvre sent the Mona Lisa across the Atlantic on a two-month loan, which was split between the National Gallery of Arts in D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York. Like that of the Mona Lisa, the loan of the Hope Diamond was extraordinary. Nowadays, the diamond would never be loaned out, given that it's one of the museum's biggest draws. The diamond has, however, traveled to New York a few times, where it continues to be serviced, I guess you could say, by the jewelers at Harry Winston, including things like cleaning and ensuring all of the links are tight. Worried about the diamond's safety in transit? Don't be. In 1996, it traveled to New York with a SWAT team of 40 people, all of whom were armed with Uzies. The necklace had traveled to New York for a cleaning. The gallery waiting for it back in DC had been completely redone, and the Hope Diamond had to get ready for its new home in a revolving glass box. This box was designed by a London firm named Absolute Action Limited, which uses fiber optic technology to make the Hope Diamond sparkle even more than it already does. And what's cool is that the display rotates, so anyone standing around it can appreciate the diamond and its necklace from all angles. And when it moves, it sparkles like nobody's business. The Hope Diamond has resided happily in this setting for the past 25 years. As for its own setting, the The Hope Diamond has been reset just once since 1910. That change came in 2010 when the diamond was reset into a new design to mark the diamond's 50th anniversary with the museum. This setting got the full 2000s treatment, as Harry Winston's chief designer created three designs on which people could vote online. The winning setting was known as Embracing Hope. The design featured a chain, it's more like a collar of sorts, of 340 baguette diamonds arranged in three registers. This three-layered diamond chain comes down to wrap around the diamond in what kind of sort of looks like a reverse flame. The president and CEO of Harry Winston described the arrangement as, quote, two hands of a child offering hope to the world. To which I say, sure, I guess. I liked the description curator Jeffrey Post used. He called this new setting a quote unquote party dress, one that the Hope Diamond would wear for just one year before returning to its classic Cartier design. No one asked, but personally I like the Cartier version way better. There's just something about a baguette diamond that I don't trust. Much less 300 plus of them. For me, the Cartier setting is classic. And as Evelyn Walsh McLean proved, it really does go with everything. Today the Hope Diamond is nothing short of an icon, one that has inspired big stories and even bigger blockbusters. Many people confuse it with the large blue diamond that appears at the heart of 1997's Titanic, a topic that I plan to cover in its own mini sode. Thankfully, the Hope Diamond remains very much above water on display for all to see. It does so in the Harry Winston Gallery at the Museum of Natural History in DC. After spending 300 years in the possession of private citizens, the diamond is now the property of an entire country, the closest thing to a crown jewel that the United States can claim. While it is undoubtedly a national treasure, the Hope Diamond still has an appeal as international as its history. Tens of millions of people have beheld the sparkle of this geological miracle, one that formed deep beneath the Earth's surface some billion years ago. Plucked from the depths of an Indian mine, it went on to adorn the bodies of kings, to weigh down the pockets of thieves, and to glitter around the necks of not just a socialite, but also her dog. To this day, the Hope Diamond continues to capture the hearts and minds with its sparkle and its story, making it something of a thief itself. That is all I have for you today on the Hope Diamond and its colorful history. You can find the sources that I used and the images related to the episode on the podcast's website, stuff about thingspodcast.com. Chief among them was Richard Curran's book, The Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. Curran has also written a couple of very good essays. I also used Suzanne Steinem Patch's The Blue Mystery, The Story of the Hope Diamond, as well as Nick Norman's The Extraordinary World of Diamonds. The Smithsonian website and magazine were also excellent sources of information, and I also read several interviews and articles by Jeffrey Post, who is the curator of gems and minerals at the Museum of Natural History. There was also an incredibly interesting essay I read about the relationship between the Hope Diamond and the French Blue, by Francois Farger, Scott Sucre, Herbert Horowitz, and Jean-Marc Fourcault. You can find other sources and images on the podcast's website, which is once again stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. Also keep an eye on your podcast feed, as there will be at least one mini sode related to this episode. I'm hoping for two, but I prefer to underpromise and overdeliver when it comes to those things. Keeps my stress levels in check. What also keeps my stress levels in check is the near daily Gus content that I get from my parents, which brings us to Gus Corner. For new listeners, this is when I talk about my dog Gus for like 30 seconds. Gus is great. He's not loving the hot weather, but he's still a very happy boy, living it up in Wisconsin with my parents, who I can admit are definitely Gus's favorite people. But as for me, I will be back soon with a mini sode. I am also already hard at work on the next full-length episode. It is a big topic in more ways than one. So that might take a hot second, but I am working on it. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you left it a rating or even a review. If you're feeling frisky, you can even email me directly at stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. It might take me a few weeks to reply, but I do always respond eventually. You can also get in touch with me through the contact me tab on the podcast website, which is one more time, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening, whether it's your first episode or your 37th plus. So I really do appreciate it. I also appreciate the people at hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for providing the royalty-free music that is featured at the beginning and the end of the podcast. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, while the second, jauntier tune is called Success Dreams. That is all from me. My voice is waning. I've been recording for three and a half hours, ugly, but I'm very much enjoying this fancy podcast studio. I might I might give this a go again. But before I leave you, I shall remind you once more, don't forget to look at something beautiful today.