The Case Of The Nun’s Ruby

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:

Actually this was an episode of mystery in the vein of Le Queux or Edgar Wallace. I have grievously misled you, although the story contains a nun and also a ruby, both of high degree.

While I was still busy measuring up the copper roofs of the religious house near Cracow, I used to meet some times the Abbess of the nunnery, a most stately lady of gentle grace. I had learned that she came of a very noble Polish family, but of course into the religious life and no one was allowed to refer in her presence to her rank.

This lady took quite an interest in my doings about the place, and she used to ask me many questions about my own people. Where did they live? What did they do? Was I happy? Did I see sometimes a puzzled flicker in her eyes as she surveyed me, scion of a race so strangely different, surely, in its life and aspirations from her own? However, when I told her that my mother traded in pearls and precious stones she remembered a ruby of her own to which she attributed considerable value. She had long thought of selling it so that she might apply the proceeds to some charitable cause. And now here was I, a messenger, if an odd one, who might further her charitable aims.

I offered at once to send the gem to Vienna for valuation and for an offer to be made. On the following day she gave it into my hands without apparent hesitation—although she can have known nothing of me—and I dispatched it to my mother. An offer came back. She accepted it. And generous to a fault, she paid me a commission altogether disproportionate to my services. Such was my first vacation—a busman’s holiday; my first effort also as a gem broker.

When I returned to Vienna my head was filled with the idea of the money to be earned by gem broking and as a merchant. ‘If I can pick up a ruby from a nun,’ I said to my mother, ‘and make more money on it than I earn in two months at my job, I ought to be in your line of business.’

But she would hear nothing of it, not because she did not think that her profession was not as good as any other, but because she was afraid I might make money too easily; she thought that making money too easily was the worst thing that could happen to a young man. But what with her paternal care and, later on, many other reasons, I never, whether as young man or adult, underwent the supreme misfortune of gaining easy money—the nun’s ruby along being excepted, naturally.

Look back, the ruby of the Abbess Anastasia seems now to have been a veritable pόint de départ in the story of my life. It also serves another purpose. It is as good an excuse as any other to embark upon the subject of rubies in general.

It was presumably the Oriental ruby which King Solomon had in mind when he appraised its worth as being less than that of a good woman; few who have expert knowledge of both would be prepared to challenge his statement—which is, however, clear proof that his generation, no less than all succeeding ones, considered the red transparent variety of crystallized corundum as the gem of gems.

The world ‘ruby’ is derived quite straightforwardly from the Latin rubens; that is, ‘red’. When you talk of an Oriental ruby you mean a particular kind of ruby which is found in Upper Burma, not just any sort of ruby that might be ‘picked up’ east of Suez! This Burmese ruby ranks next in the scale of hardness to the sapphire. There is, as a matter of fact, little to choose between the Oriental ruby and the sapphire in respect of hardness, that of the former being 8.5 and that of the latter 9.

There are other rubies. The spinel ruby, another red transparent stone, is closely allied also to corundum, but is of lesser density and inferior hardness, and for these reasons it is not held in the same esteem as the Oriental ruby.

Oriental rubies vary in color from pale rose to deep crimson. Frequently the stone has a tinge of purple. Particularly valued by the connoisseur is the ‘pigeon’s blood ruby,’ whose very name conveys even to the layman the idea of a high-grade gem. There is a place called Mogok, about ninety miles N.N.E of Mandalay, which is the home of the Burma ruby, where it is found embedded in limestone formations. From this region come all the great rubies. And many great rubies there have been in history.

There was the noble stone, for instance, by which a great sought to write his name imperishable upon human memory. He knew better than Shelly’s Ozymandias, ‘King of Kings’:

‘I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.......Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies......
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

The Mogul Emperor Jehangir had his name carved on a noble ruby, secure in the belief that thereby he would be remembered by posterity for a longer period than through monuments of stone or the records of historians. For the ruby may be small. It may be easily lost in times of disturbance. But somehow, somewhere, it will survive destruction and appear again. The Mogul ruby passed in time into the hands of Shah Jehan, who gave it to his lovely wife, the same lady for whom as a sorrowing widower he built the Taj Mahal, jewel of jewels among buildings. And royal gem as it was, it came at last into the hands of Queen Victoria, a few years before the great diamond, Kohinoor.

Another ruby, one of extraordinary size—for it was nearly as large as a pigeon’s egg as well as being the color of pigeon’s blood—also graced royalty and was set in the diadem made for the coronation of Catherine the Great of Russia. But there are more tragic rubies. Such were the rubies composing a fine parure which belonged to the Princess Charlotte of Belgium, she who married the Archduke Maximilian of Austria and as his wife became Empress of Mexico. They have seemed to bring no luck to their possessors. Consider the fate of those who have owned them.

Few more unhappy heads have worn crowns than Maximilian’s. It was Napoleon III who induced Maximilian to accept the Mexican throne. When Charlotte accompanied him to the Americas she took with her her fine set of rubies. But within a short time the new ruler of Mexico found trouble. He was arraigned as a usurper. Charlotte precipitately fled her palace at Chapultepec, not leaving her husband to his fate, but to seek support, armed support, from Napoleon III. But Napoleon callously refused the help she begged. The Emperor Maximilian, younger brother of the Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria-Hungary (for so near is that dark exotic tale to our time) was tried by a revolutionary tribunal and shot. Many years after, the Princess Charlotte also ended her days, in a mental home. But her rubies, which she had left behind at Chapultepec, fell into the hands of the great family of De Madero.

The Case Of The Nun’s Ruby (continued)