Diamonds Of Fate

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:

One of the most recent famous gems is the ‘Jonker,’ said to be amongst the four largest diamonds ever to come to light. It was dug from a muddy hole not far from Pretoria by a colored man in the service of an Afrikander names Jacobus Jonker. Sir Ernest Oppenheimer paid £60000 for it. Like most of these extraordinarily large stones in the rough, the Jonker,too showed defects which made is advisable to split it into several pieces. One of the minor pieces when cut weighed about twenty carats and was sold for a large sum to a London businessman in April, 1938. Although I only heard of the deal going through as I was leaving my office in the evening, one of the leading London papers had already got wind of it and rang me up for any information I could give. I mention this to show that sizable gems of quality are of perennial news value.

One can have too much even of the best. The recital of rare diamonds is no exception, but I cannot bring this chapter to a close without mentioning the two rarest diamonds in the world: one blue and the other green.

It was in the year 1642 that Tavernier bought in India a rough diamond weighing 112¼ carats, of a violet-blue so extremely rare that no other stone of such tint of any appreciable size has been known before or since. When later he sold the stone to Louis XIV in 1668 as a faceted stone, its weight had been reduced to sixty seven and one-eights carats.

Louis, who is spoken of as le roi soleil—the Sun King—owed this flattering epithet less to his mental gifts than to his love of display. On appropriate occasions he could deck himself out i such manner that his person put in the shade the lesser luminaries. ‘The King,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘on occasion of the reception of the Persian Ambassador, was dressed in a black suit ornamented with gold and embroidered with diamonds at a cost of twelve million, five hundred thousand livres. Suspended from a light blue ribbon round his neck he wore a dark-blue diamond as a pendant.’

At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1792 the French regalia was seized and stored at the Garde Meubles, but whatever else may have remained intact, the blue diamond had disappeared.

Now, when thirty two years had elapsed there appeared in the hands of a dealer, one Daniel Eliason, a blue diamond of a tint identical with that worn by Louis XIV, but it only weighed forty four and a quarter carats, or twenty three and one-eighth carats less than the King’s gem. Was this a new stone that had no connection with the royal jewel? The possibility must be admitted, but in the light of what transpired subsequently we are justified in arriving at a different conclusion.

But before we go in search of clues to the unravelling of the mystery, let us see what Mr Daniel Eliason did with his forty four and a half carat blue diamond. Being a trader, he did not wear it suspended round his neck, but seeking a customer for it, found him in the person of a Mr Henry Thomas Hope, and from the time the gentleman parted with £18000 to get possession of the lovely gem of a beautiful sapphire blue, it became known as the ‘Hope’ diamond. Of this stone E W Streeter, as great a connoisseur of gems as any of his contemporaries, says ‘that because of its extreme brilliancy, faultless texture, exquisite form (7/8-inch in breadth, 1 1/8 inches in length, and of unusual thickness), it is unique’. He estimated its value at £30000. It was his opinion that Louis XIV’s blue diamond had been cloven into two parts: one the size of the Hope diamond (being none other), and another, after allowing for the unavoidable waste in recutting, of ten to eleven carats.

Now for the denouement of the riddle. In the year 1874 there actually came into the market, at a sale of the Duke of Brunswick’s jewels at Geneva, a triangular blue diamond weighing between twelve and thirteen carats; and subsequently elsewhere a very much smaller piece again of the same color and quality. Since all these stones were of the same rare blue tint which has never been encountered in any other diamond known in the world, and since their total weight—allowing for cleavage and cutting—is a rough equivalent of the royal French jewel, no doubt can exist in the mind of any logical person that the thief, whoever it was, had the original stone cut into three pieces as conditioned by its natural cleavage lines.

Diamonds Of Fate (continued)