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When the Orloff was sold to Russia in 1791, it brought a million
Dutch guldens, or $400,000. The beautiful Hope diamond, of a perfect
sapphire blue color, one of the rarest of gems, when sold at auction
in Paris, 1909, brought only $85,000, almost exactly what it cost
Henry Thomas Hope, a London banker, in 1830. This seems incredibly
low for so remarkable a stone, weighing 44^ karats, and of an
incomparable hue. One of this color was brought by Tavernier from
India in the sixties of the seventeenth century for Louis XIV. of
France. After cutting, it weighed 67 l
/% karats. This, with others,
was stolen from the French crown jewels amidst the horrors of the
Revolution and never found. Still, a drop-shaped stone of the same
color from the Duke of Brunswick's collection was sold at Geneva in
1874 for $3,400, while Edwin W. Streeter, the jeweler of London,
independently bought a karat of precisely the same shade for $1,500.
Allowing for the loss of weight in recutting, it seems almost certain
that these three stones represent the larger one purchased by the
Grand Monarch more than two centuries ago.
The banker Hope, when it came into his hands, apparently with-
out history, through a London dealer in 1830, paid
for the stone
which bears his name $87,000. He gave it to his daughter, when she
married the Duke of Newcastle, and she in turn presented it to her
second son, Lord Francis Hope, who, after a wild career, became
involved with May Yohe and married her in 1894. After the divorce
in 1901 Lord Francis, to satisfy creditors, sold the diamond for
$168,000, it was said, to Simon Frankel, who tried to dispose of it in
into financial difficul-
1907, when the firm of Frankel Sons & Co. got
ties. It was bought by Selim Habib, who said the price was $400,000,
but he too became embarrassed and offered it for sale at auction in
Paris, June, 1908, subsequently withdrawing it and selling it at last
to a jeweler named Rosenau, of 9 Rue Chauchat, in whose possession
it was in November, 1909, though reported as lost with Selim
Habib on the French mail steamship off Singapore.
On a grand occasion, February 19, 1715, six months before his
death, Louis XIV., while giving audience to the Persian Ambassador,
appeared in a black suit embroidered in gold and ornamented by a
kingdom's worth of brilliants, with a dark blue diamond suspended
from a light blue ribbon about his neck. It was a fixed belief with
Edwin W. Streeter, the well-known English jeweler, that this and the
blue stone stolen in 1792 with the rest of the French regalia from the
Garde Meuble were the same. In his book on "Precious Stones"
(published exactly one century after the theft) he devotes four pages
and a colored illustration to a convincing argument that this royal
jewel lives again in the Hope, the Brunswick, and a one-karat stone
owned by himself that these are the Louis ;
XIV. blue diamond split
into three parts, so that the thief, perhaps one of high Revolutionary
degree, could not be traced. That the color and weight, allowing for
the loss of recutting, are almost identical, renders this hypothesis
not improbable. At this moment the unique and hapless Hope
peacefully reposes on the fair shoulders of an American connoisseur
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