Weighing 45.52 carats, the Hope Diamond is the world’s largest blue diamond. It is the platonic ideal of a cursed object. It has an exotic origin and a history that spans centuries, yet it is small enough to fit in a pocket. To steal. To lose. To disappear. It is valuable enough to be bought and traded and stolen in the rarified atmosphere of throne rooms and private jets. Many have owned it, and the chain of provenance sometimes reads like an expensive game of hot potato. And, of course, tragedies have paralleled and entwined its entire timeline.
However, all of the commonly circulated claims mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter — except for the Titanic bit — are unverifiable. But that doesn’t matter. The real story of the Hope Diamond, including how it came to be considered cursed, is just as fascinating.
Its story starts a billion years ago some one hundred miles below the Earth’s crust. Primal forces crushed carbon into a hunk of crystal. It was a common process at the time. But something rare happened in this case. The element boron fused into the crystal’s structure, turning the gem a deep ocean blue. Eventually volcanic activity forced the rock close to the surface of what would one day be called India, where it was pulled from the ground hundreds of years ago by India’s legendary mining industry.
India was once thought to be the only source of diamonds on the planet. And that’s why a pioneering French merchant named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier made six epic journeys there in the mid-seventeenth century. On one of those journeys, he came into possession of a heart-shaped, 112-carat, rough-cut blue diamond that came out of the Kollur Mine. The stone would eventually be called the Tavernier Violet (violet was a synonym for blue at the time). Contrary to the legend, he attained it not by stealing it from the eye of a god (although he saw plenty of jewel-eyed gods in the temples of India), but through the usual channels of trade.
Tavernier sold the stone to King Louis XIV of France, along with more than one thousand other diamonds. But that large blue gem was obviously special. It accounted for about 25 percent of the price of the entire lot. Tavernier would go on not to be ripped apart by dogs, as some say, but to relax from his life of adventure near the shores of Lake Geneva. He would later come out of retirement, but still lived comfortably into his eighties.
Louis XIV also lived a long life. Under his watch, the future Hope Diamond was cut down and refined into a more glittery and fashionable 67 carats. By then it was called the French Blue and was considered an important part of the French crown jewels.
Those jewels were passed down without much drama until the reign of King Louis XVI, who held the throne during the French Revolution, an uprising that eventually left him and his wife, Marie Antoinette, without their heads. The Hope Diamond is blamed by some for Marie Antionette’s death, although she almost certainly never wore it. She loved diamonds, but the French Blue was reserved for her husband. It was set in an insignia for one of his orders and only removed once from its setting during that time, for scientific examination. The French monarchy dissolved after the revolution, and in 1792, the French Blue was stolen and lost to history…temporarily.
Some scholars believe that the French Blue was used to bribe Charles Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, Germany, not to invade France. Much of Europe was terrified that the revolution in France would spread to their countries and had armies at the ready to help stifle potential conflict. However it happened, the diamond surfaced again two decades later, this time in England, in the possession of a gem merchant named Daniel Eliason. It had been cut down again, this time to 44 carats (about the size of a walnut), possibly in an effort to disguise it from Napoleon, who would have wanted to reunite it with the French crown jewels.
From there it possibly came into the possession of King George IV of the United Kingdom for a time, but by 1839, it belonged to a wealthy London banking family named Hope. And that’s how it got a name that seems straight out of the Kay Jewelers marketing department.
Thomas Hope brought the Hope Diamond into the clan, where, after his death, it bounced down like a game of expensive pinball through heirs and contested wills and bankruptcies. From the Hope family it went to a jewelry firm, which sold it to a Sergeant Habib on behalf of the sultan of Turkey, who then ran into financial trouble and sold it to yet another jewelry firm. In 1920, Pierre Cartier got his manicured hands on it in Paris.
And we mostly have Cartier to thank for the curse.
By this time, massive diamond mines had been discovered in South Africa. Diamonds had become far more attainable, and not just for the super-rich. Within a few decades, everyone was expected to buy a diamond ring for their fiancée, a tradition that continues to this day — because, you know, diamonds are forever. Gems were becoming mainstream.
Cartier wanted to sell his blue diamond to a member of the emerging wealthy class of the United States, and he knew that to distinguish the diamond in the market and command a higher price, it needed a story. So he marked the diamond up both in cost and with a curse. It wasn’t hard. A few spurious newspaper articles had already gotten the ball rolling, and the idea of cursed gems was becoming more widespread due to popular novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four (1890). Cartier also gussied up its presentation, surrounding it with sixteen small white diamonds and creating the look of the Hope Diamond that we know today. Cartier’s story of this cursed gem caught the fancy of Evalyn Walsh McLean and her husband, Ned, of Washington, DC. The McLeans bought it for $180,000, or approximately $4.5 million in today’s dollars.
During her decades of ownership, Evalyn wore the diamond to countless parties. Sometimes she displayed it on her head in a tiara-like aigrette, sometimes around her neck, and sometimes she even let her dog wear it. She had it blessed by a priest, temporarily pawned it to gather ransom for the doomed Lindbergh baby, and talked freely and amusedly about its curse. When her nine-year-old was struck by a car and killed, the New York Times couldn’t help but mention the gem in their reporting on the tragedy. Eventually, Ned and Evalyn’s relationship ended in divorce, Ned wound up in a sanitarium, and another of their children killed himself. In other words, their lives ended exactly how you’d think the lives of people who brazenly owned a cursed gem would end.
Sometimes she displayed it on her head in a tiara-like aigrette, sometimes around her neck, and sometimes she even let her dog wear it.
After Evalyn’s death in 1947, the Hope Diamond was picked up by American jeweler Harry Winston, along with the rest of her jewels, for about a million dollars (roughly $11.5 million today). He toured the Hope Diamond around North America before finally donating it to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1958 for a big tax break and the dream of kick-starting a collection of American “crown” jewels. And that’s where it is today. From the mantle of the Earth to the capital of the United States.
The Hope Diamond is displayed in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals at the Smithsonian. It reigns by itself in the center of a room in a rotating case that allows visitors to stand mere inches away…if you can buzz-saw your way through all the other museum visitors clustered around the small display case. Many believe the diamond to be the most important and most popular object in the Smithsonian’s collection, making it more a lucky charm for the museum than a cursed object. Others think it has cursed the entire country by its prominent inclusion among the nation’s treasures.