The Beautiful Blonde Liked Emeralds

Louis Kornitzer's book, Gem Trader, is partly autobiographical and partly woven round the lore of pearls. It's educational + explains the distribution chain of gems, as they pass from hand to hand, from miner to cutter, from merchant to millionaire, from courtesan to receiver of stolen goods, shaping human lives as they go + the unique characters in the industry.

(via Gem Trader) Louis Kornitzer writes:

I soon discovered that my employer had not been guided by altruism. For this office contained a safe, and the safe often contained gems worth many millions of francs. Such a fortune could not be left unattended for many hours at a time and so he had been constrained to stay at home in the evenings to look after it. This did not suit his natural habits. As my bed was placed flush with the thin partition separating me from the safe, once I was installed I became automatically the guardian of all his treasures, and my boss no doubt assumed that any attempt at tampering with the safe would awaken me and at once bring me rushing to its defence.

He was soon undeceived. One night he came home rather sick because of some exotic food he had eaten, and wanting either sympathy or help from me, he tried to wake me up. He found that short of breaking down my door he could not disturb my sweet slumbers. So another night he determined to give me a scare. He came home on tiptoe, went straight to the office and fumbled noisily with the combination of the safe. It woke me up and I called him by name. No answer. I called again. A raucous voice answered this time and told me to keep quiet if I valued my life. I did value my life.

Next morning my principal reproached me bitterly for not reacting to his trick. I retorted that his joke was in bad taste, and that if he wanted me to work by day and be on sentry go at night, he might at least provide me with an alarm bell and a pistol. He might even raise my salary, too. He merely sneered and invited me to feel his biceps.

A few weeks later he found fault with me again on another account. I woke up and heard him come in in the small of hours of the morning—with a lady. Instead of retiring quietly like respectable people, he and his companion carried on a lively conversation in the drawing room, and presently I heard the popping of champagne corks. Then I heard footsteps outside my door, followed by a loud insistent knock. I got out of bed and opened to him. There he stood, holding out a brimming glass of wine.
‘Drink that to my health,’ said he. ‘It’s my birthday. And get into your dressing gown and join us in the drawing room.’

Orders is orders. When I had splashed the sleep out of my eyes and put on a dressing gown, I went into the drawing room and found that my boss’s friend was Margot, of the Casino de Paris. She was a tactful girl in the ordinary way, and if she had not dined and wined a little too lavishly she would instinctively have sized up the situation and not let it be known that we had already met. Certainly she would not have followed her impulse. She would not have drawn me up tenderly to her and kissed me with a fervor which roused the anger of my boss.

But I will draw a veil over the scene that followed. There resulted one of those piquant little affairs, now that Margot knew where I lived, in which woman is all the huntress and man the hunted. She was not content to leave me alone. Somehow, because I was simply not interested in her, she became more and more determined. She wrote me little billets-doux and bribed the concierge to act as go-between. But it wasn’t any use, and to this day I marvel that such a charming creature should have bothered over a poor awkward cold youth like myself.

Yet, though I never became her customer, she was to be mine in the end. Some years after my Paris days, when all memory of her had faded from my mind, I met her again. No, not in rags in the gutter, but as radiantly beautiful as ever and ‘settle down’—that is, she was being kept by a wealthy and generous Argentinian and had quite make up her mind to be true to him, because she was tired of the gay life. She was after more emeralds and had heard that I had exceedingly fine Colombian emerald for sale. I sold it to her, and as we parted, I with a bow, she put on a hand and laid it on my arm. ‘You know, mon ami, that my grand passion was and is for one who scorned me. I should hate you for it. But no, I remain your friend. I will even pray for you when I come to my second childhood and take no religion.’

But if I had been Margot’s grand passion, I at least shared her heart with emeralds. When I think of that strange unruly woman I think of the green stones, and whether for this or another reason they are by far my favorites among gems. From the point of view of hardness it is inferior to the ruby (8.5) and the sapphire (9), being only 7.5. It is therefore much softer than either of the other two precious stones, but I do not consider that this in itself is sufficient to assign the emerald to third place. And if you consider beauty and rarity, it is second to none.

The emerald is a variety of beryl. All beryls have the approximate hardness of 8, but they vary somewhat, some being much softer than others. Both the aquamarine and the euclase belong to this family of stones. But whereas the aquamarine, as its name reveals, is sea-green and the euclase varies from yellow to something like sea-green, due to the presence of small quantities of oxide of iron, the color of the emerald is a bright lustrous green, derived from its chromium content.

Speaking historically, emeralds were already being mined in Upper Egypt in 1650 B.C and the Greeks, in the days of Alexander the Great, were still tapping the same source of supply. Cleopatra, extravagant queen and lover of the exquisite, reveled in the emeralds of Egypt, and some of her famous gems were dug from Egyptian soil.

The name for emerald in many languages is a mispronunciation of the Arab ‘Zummurud’. Spanish ‘Esmeralda,’ French ‘Emeraude’, German ‘Smargd’, English ‘Emerald,’ are all lovely variations on a name that is pure music. Emeralds have been loved and prized throughout medieval and modern times as much as in the ancient days, but it was only in 1817 that a Frenchman named Caillioud rediscovered the remains of the extensive emerald workings of Egypt in Northern Etbai. Cleopatra’s mines are located in Jebel Sikait and Jebel Zabra, near the Red Sea coast east of Aswan, and the emerald crystals found there were embedded in mica and talc schists. In nine cases out of ten all the beryls, emerald, aquamarine and euclase, are to be found in schists of this character.

The Beautiful Blonde Liked Emeralds (continued)