The Hope Diamond: A History of Loss, Death, and Doubt

Evalyn Walsh McLean was, by all reliable accounts, perfectly aware that the Hope Diamond was supposed to be cursed. When she bought it from Pierre Cartier in 1911, the gem trader had spent two years specifically cultivating the curse as a sales technique. He fed stories to American journalists about previous owners who had been beheaded, ruined, or driven mad by the stone. Cartier had calculated, correctly, that this would make the diamond more attractive rather than less to the right kind of buyer. McLean was the right kind of buyer. She paid $180,000, wore the stone constantly for the next thirty-six years, and lost almost everything she had.

Her nine-year-old son was killed by a car outside the family home in 1919. Her daughter died of a drug overdose at twenty-five. Her marriage collapsed under her husband's alcoholism and serial infidelity, after which her husband was committed to a sanatorium and later died there. Her family newspaper, The Washington Post, was sold off to pay creditors. By the end of her life, she had pawned and redeemed the Hope Diamond more than thirty times. She kept it on her dog's collar at parties. She wore it to a costume ball as a peasant. She was, by every account, devoted to it.

What I find most interesting about the Hope Diamond, and about cursed objects in general, is that they tend to be loved most by the people they are supposedly cursing. The misfortunes that befell Evalyn McLean were genuine misfortunes. They were also, by the standards of any wealthy woman in early twentieth-century America, statistically unremarkable. Cars killed children. Drug overdoses killed daughters. Bad marriages collapsed. The diamond did not need to do any of this; the world did it anyway.

What the diamond did was watch.

This is the long story of what it watched, going back roughly four hundred years.

Kollur, again

The Hope Diamond was almost certainly mined at Kollur, in the Golconda fields of southern India, the same set of riverbed mines that produced the Koh-i-Noor and most other historically significant pre-modern diamonds. The Hope is a Type IIb diamond, which means it contains trace amounts of boron in its crystalline structure. Boron is what makes it blue. It is also what makes it phosphoresce red under ultraviolet light for several seconds after the light is removed, which is to say, the Hope Diamond, in the right conditions, glows red in the dark. This is a real physical property, not a piece of folklore. Whoever first noticed it in the seventeenth century is unlikely to have taken it well.

The stone left India in the 1660s, in the possession of the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. Tavernier had spent forty years travelling between Europe and Asia, buying stones at Indian courts and selling them at European ones. The Hope Diamond, at this point, was uncut, weighed approximately 115 metric carats, and was known as the Tavernier Blue. It was, by some margin, the largest blue diamond that had ever been documented in Europe.

In 1668, Tavernier sold it, along with around a thousand other stones, to Louis XIV of France. The price has been variously reported. The point is that Tavernier became extremely rich, the Sun King acquired the most spectacular blue diamond in Europe, and the stone began the second phase of its life in a setting much grander than anywhere it had previously been.

The French Blue

Louis XIV had the diamond recut, twice, between 1671 and 1673, producing a 67-carat triangular stone that became known as the Bleu de France, or French Blue. The recutting eliminated half the original mass, in the way that the recutting of the Koh-i-Noor would later eliminate forty per cent of its mass, and for the same essential reasons. The original Indian cut prioritised retention; the French taste prioritised brilliance.

The French Blue passed to Louis XV at his great-grandfather's death in 1715. Louis XV had it set into the Order of the Golden Fleece, a baroque ceremonial pendant that he wore at official functions. The pendant, with the Blue at its centre, was photographed (or rather, painted) into the royal portraiture of the next two reigns. Louis XVI inherited it from his grandfather in 1774. Marie Antoinette wore it. It was, by the end of the eighteenth century, one of the most recognisable single objects in European royal jewellery.

In August 1792, three years into the French Revolution, Louis XVI was deposed and his family was imprisoned. The Royal Storehouse, the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, was looted in a five-night burglary in September of that year. The French Blue was among the items stolen. It would not be seen, with any certainty, for the next twenty years.

London, 1812

In September 1812, a London jeweller named Daniel Eliason was discovered to be in possession of an exceptionally large blue diamond. The stone, by this point, had been recut yet again, into a 45.52-carat cushion shape. It was no longer the French Blue. The recutting had been deliberate, almost certainly carried out to disguise the diamond from authorities still hunting the missing French royal jewellery, and it succeeded. The new stone was not formally identified as the French Blue for another two centuries (a 2008 lead cast model of the French Blue, discovered in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, allowed a definitive match with the modern Hope).

How the stone got from Paris to London is not documented. The window of twenty years almost exactly matches the standard French statute of limitations for theft at the time. Whoever recut the diamond, and whoever moved it across the Channel, had calculated correctly.

The stone passed through several owners in the years that followed. Henry Philip Hope, a wealthy member of the Hope banking family, acquired it in 1839. The diamond took his family's name and has kept it ever since.

The Hope years and after

The Hope family kept the diamond for sixty years, through three generations. By the late 1890s, it had passed to Lord Francis Hope, whose substantial debts forced him to sell it. The early twentieth century saw the diamond move through a sequence of owners in fairly rapid succession: a London dealer, a Turkish broker, briefly Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire (who lost it in the collapse of the Ottoman court), and a Parisian gem merchant named Selim Habib. In 1909, Pierre Cartier of the Cartier jewellery house acquired it.

It was Cartier who professionalised the curse.

Earlier owners had vaguely complained about misfortunes following the diamond, but Cartier sat down in his Paris offices in 1910 and constructed a coherent narrative for the American market. He compiled a list of every previous owner who had met a bad end, embellished where the historical record was thin, and invented entirely where the record was missing. By the time he sold the stone to Evalyn Walsh McLean in 1911, the curse had a body count of fourteen, several of which were genuine and several of which were not.

McLean asked, before signing, for the diamond to be blessed by her parish priest. Cartier arranged it. The priest reportedly performed the rite during a thunderstorm, which McLean took as a good sign. Cartier, in his correspondence afterwards, took it as confirmation that the sale had gone exactly to plan.

Evalyn

Evalyn Walsh McLean wore the Hope Diamond, more or less, every day from 1911 until her death in 1947. Her parties at her Washington DC mansion, Friendship, were attended by every president from Taft to Eisenhower. She would put the diamond on her Great Dane's collar at the start of the evening and let guests find it as a parlour trick. She wore it to political receptions, charity benefits, and (the famous photograph) one Halloween costume ball at which she dressed as a Russian peasant and pinned the Hope to a piece of rough wool at her throat.

Her misfortunes were real. Her son Vinson was killed in 1919, struck by a car in front of the family house when he was nine. Her daughter Emily, also called Evie, died in 1946 of an overdose of sleeping pills at twenty-five; the family said it was an accident, the press said otherwise. Her husband Edward, who had inherited The Washington Post from his father, was an alcoholic who lost the newspaper to creditors in 1933 and died in a mental institution in 1941. By the time Evalyn herself died of pneumonia in 1947, the family fortune was largely gone.

I think what makes the McLean story affecting, separately from the diamond, is that she was, by every contemporary account, a genuinely happy person until very near the end. She loved Friendship, she loved her parties, she loved the diamond. She did not appear to believe in the curse in any operative way, and she did not appear to attribute her tragedies to it. She had a sense of humour about it. The diamond, in her hands, was a piece of theatre, and she was a brilliant performer.

The misfortunes, in her telling, were just what happens.

The Smithsonian

After McLean's death, her jewellery collection was held by her estate until 1949, when Harry Winston, the New York jeweller, acquired it from the family. Winston exhibited the Hope Diamond as part of the Court of Jewels travelling collection through the 1950s. In November 1958, he donated it to the Smithsonian Institution.

The donation has become the most famous detail of the diamond's modern history. Winston, characteristically, sent the diamond from New York to Washington via registered mail. He used the standard US Postal Service. He paid $2.44 in postage and an additional $142 for $1 million in insurance. The diamond, in a small brown paper parcel, was carried by an ordinary postal carrier to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The parcel was signed for at the receiving desk. The whole journey took approximately three days.

The package, including its postage stamps and the registered-mail receipt, is preserved in the museum's archives. It is, possibly, the single most photographed piece of brown paper in twentieth-century American history.

The curse, examined

The curse of the Hope Diamond was, in its current form, a sales technique. Pierre Cartier invented or substantially elaborated the chain of doomed owners between 1909 and 1911 specifically to make the diamond more attractive to a buyer like Evalyn McLean. Most of the names on his original list were either misidentified, misattributed, or in some cases simply made up.

Tavernier, in Cartier's version, was torn apart by dogs in Russia. He was not. He died of natural causes at eighty-four in Moscow.

Louis XIV's various misfortunes, in Cartier's version, were attributed to the diamond. They were not. Louis XIV died at seventy-seven, of gangrene of the leg, after a sixty-year reign that was among the longest in European history.

Marie Antoinette, in Cartier's version, was guillotined because of the diamond. She was not. She was guillotined because of the French Revolution.

That said, Marie Antoinette did wear the diamond, and she was guillotined. The Hope family did go bankrupt, and they did own the diamond. The McLean tragedies were real. Whether the diamond caused any of these is a question that cannot be falsified, and so cannot be answered. The Smithsonian curators, when asked, point out that they have personally handled the stone for nearly seventy years without incident, which is the most that can be reasonably said about it.

What I find most useful about the Hope Diamond curse, as a piece of cultural object lesson, is that it reveals how stories about objects work. The diamond is approximately four hundred years old. It has moved through approximately twenty owners. Some of those owners died young, some lived long, some prospered, some failed. This is, statistically, what happens to any group of twenty wealthy people across four hundred years. The curse is a pattern read backwards into a sample that was always going to contain misfortune, because human lives generally contain misfortune. The diamond is not innocent. The diamond is just not particularly guilty either.

It is, mostly, a slightly grey-blue lump of crystallised carbon, with the unusual property that it glows red under ultraviolet light.

Today

The Hope Diamond is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals. It is set in its original Cartier pendant, surrounded by a halo of white diamonds, on a chain of additional white diamonds. The pendant rotates slowly on a turntable. The case is bulletproof. Approximately seven million people see it each year, making it (the Smithsonian claims) the most-visited single museum object in the world after the Mona Lisa.

The diamond has been removed from its display case for examination on three documented occasions since 1958. In 1988, gemmologists confirmed its identification as a Type IIb. In 2005, a digital model of the original French Blue was developed, allowing the modern Hope to be confirmed as the recut survivor of the Paris theft. In 2010, for a Smithsonian centenary, the diamond was temporarily reset in a new modernist setting commissioned from Harry Winston, then returned to the Cartier pendant.

It has not, as far as is publicly known, been worn by anyone since Evalyn McLean's death in 1947. Whether anyone will ever wear it again is, presumably, a question for the Smithsonian. The current answer appears to be no.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Hope Diamond cursed?

The curse of the Hope Diamond was substantially constructed by the jeweller Pierre Cartier around 1909 to 1911, specifically to make the stone more attractive for sale to American buyers. Some previous owners did experience misfortune, but most of the curse stories Cartier compiled were either embellished or invented. The diamond has been handled by Smithsonian curators since 1958 without incident.

Where is the Hope Diamond now?

The Hope Diamond is on permanent public display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals. It has been there continuously since November 1958.

How big is the Hope Diamond?

The Hope Diamond is 45.52 carats in its current cushion-cut form. It was substantially larger before its eighteenth-century recutting as the French Blue (approximately 67 carats), and larger again before that as the Tavernier Blue (approximately 115 carats in the rough).

Why does the Hope Diamond glow red?

The Hope Diamond is a Type IIb diamond, containing trace amounts of boron in its crystal structure. Under ultraviolet light, the boron causes the diamond to phosphoresce in a red-orange colour that persists for several seconds after the UV source is removed. This is a real physical property of Type IIb diamonds rather than anything supernatural.

Who owned the Hope Diamond before the Smithsonian?

The Hope Diamond passed through many owners between its mining at Kollur in India in the seventeenth century and its 1958 donation to the Smithsonian. Major owners include the French gem trader Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1660s), Louis XIV of France and his successors (1668 to 1792), the Hope banking family of London (1839 to 1890s), the Cartier jewellery house (1909 to 1911), the American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean (1911 to 1947), and the jeweller Harry Winston (1949 to 1958).

Who was Evalyn Walsh McLean?

Evalyn Walsh McLean (1886 to 1947) was a Washington DC heiress and social hostess, daughter of the Irish-American mining magnate Thomas Walsh, and wife of Edward McLean, owner of The Washington Post. She bought the Hope Diamond from Pierre Cartier in 1911 for $180,000 and wore it constantly for thirty-six years. Her life included substantial personal tragedy, much of which became part of the popular Hope Diamond curse mythology.

How did the Hope Diamond get to the Smithsonian?

The jeweller Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in November 1958. He shipped it from New York to Washington DC via United States Postal Service registered mail, in a plain brown paper parcel, with $1 million in insurance. The postal package and registered-mail receipt are preserved in the Smithsonian's archives.