It is one of the most beautiful objects on earth: a deep-blue diamond of forty-five and a half carats, now sitting behind armoured glass in the Smithsonian, admired by millions. And it is said to be cursed. The Hope Diamond is famous the world over as the jewel of doom, the stone that brings death, madness and ruin to everyone who dares to own it. The roll call of its victims is genuinely chilling. But the curse is not old, and it is not Indian, and it did not come out of a temple. It was assembled in newspaper offices in the early years of the twentieth century, and then it was sharpened into a sales tool by a jeweller who needed to shift the most expensive object in his shop. The Smithsonian, which has owned the stone since 1958, puts its own position on its museum website in three words: asked whether the Hope Diamond is cursed, it answers “Of course not!”
First, let us hear the curse as it is told, because it is a marvellous piece of horror. The legend says the diamond began its life of evil as a great blue stone set in the eye of a sacred Hindu idol in India. In the 1600s, the story goes, a French jewel trader named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier prised the diamond from the idol and stole it, and for this sacrilege the outraged priests laid a terrible curse upon the stone and upon all who would ever possess it. Tavernier, the story continues, was later torn to pieces and eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs. And so the trail of death began.
The Horror
The catalogue of the diamond’s supposed victims reads like a list of nightmares. The stone passed to the kings of France. Louis the Fourteenth, who owned it, died of gangrene, and most of his legitimate children did not live to old age. Then, the legend says, it came to Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, Marie Antoinette, and we all know what happened to them: both were taken to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette’s dearest friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who is said in the legend to have worn the diamond, met an even worse end, torn apart by a mob in the September massacres of 1792. A Dutch jeweller who is supposed to have recut the stone was murdered by his own son, who then killed himself. A Greek merchant who owned it is said to have driven off a cliff with his family. And on the curse rolled, through bankruptcies, divorces, madness and violent death, wherever the blue stone travelled.
Almost none of that survives contact with the record. Only a handful of the names in the curse can be traced in history at all, and the ones who can be traced tend not to have died the way the legend requires. The idol’s eye is the clearest giveaway. There is no Indian tradition behind it. The motif reads as a Victorian Western invention, and it runs closely parallel to Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone, published in 1868, in which a stolen Indian gem destroys everyone who handles it. The story was in circulation in the English-language press well before any jeweller needed it: a New Zealand newspaper was printing the idol’s-eye version in 1888, and on 19 January 1908 the Washington Post ran the thing almost fully formed under the headline “Remarkable Jewel a Hoodoo — Hope Diamond Has Brought Trouble to All Who Have Owned It”, walking readers through the unlucky histories of former owners. That was two years before Pierre Cartier acquired the stone.
This is where the article’s own title needs correcting, and it is worth correcting honestly, because the tidy version of the debunking is itself a little too tidy. Cartier did not invent the curse. What he did was recognise a ready-made story and use it. He bought the diamond in 1910, and he had a problem: it was staggeringly expensive and there were very few people on earth who could afford it. He set his sights on a wealthy American heiress, Evalyn Walsh McLean, and when he showed her the stone she was unimpressed. So he changed his approach. He stopped selling its beauty and started selling its darkness. The Smithsonian’s account of him is blunt: Cartier knew that intriguing histories helped gem sales, and he “began to fabricate a fanciful story around the Hope Diamond that included a curse, which he would pitch to potential buyers.” He also had the stone reset, in the mounting of sixteen colourless diamonds it still wears, and left it with her to live with for a while. It worked. Accounts of the date differ — the Smithsonian’s museum history places the completed sale in 1912, while the recorded purchase is dated 28 January 1911 — but the McLeans paid something in the region of 180,000 dollars, and the story had made the sale. It is often said that McLean believed objects other people thought unlucky were lucky for her, which would make the curse the perfect bait rather than an obstacle; that is a good line and a widely repeated one, and it rests on her own later telling rather than on any independent record.
The Modern Relic
Cartier was also not the last or even the loudest amplifier. The Smithsonian points out that several of the people who spread the rumours stood to gain from them, and singles out the actress May Yohé, who had been married to a former owner, and who put out her own account of the curse in a book and a film in 1921. The film was a fifteen-chapter serial called The Hope Diamond Mystery, running from February to May of that year, with Yohé appearing as herself at the top and tail of each episode. Between the newspapers, the jeweller and the showgirl, the curse was fully built within about thirteen years, and none of it needed a temple.
Strip the curse away and what remains is still dark, and most of it is documented. A great blue diamond really was brought out of India by Tavernier, and in 1669 Louis the Fourteenth bought it from him, along with other stones, for a very large sum. Tavernier never set down in his published travels how he came by it, so the honest position is that nobody knows; there is no record of a theft from an idol, and no record of any priests. He was not eaten by dogs. He bought the barony of Aubonne in Switzerland in 1670, lost a great deal of money in later life, and died in Russia in February 1689 in his eighties, at Smolensk by the best account, aged about eighty-three. What actually killed him has not been established, which is worth saying plainly rather than replacing one confident ending with another.
The king had the stone recut into a heart-shaped blue of about sixty-nine carats, the French Blue, and it was kept as a wonder in his cabinet rather than worn. Louis the Fourteenth did die of gangrene, at Versailles on 1 September 1715, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday, which is exactly the sort of true detail a curse story feeds on. Marie Antoinette is the part of the legend that collapses most completely. The blue diamond was Crown property, set from around 1749 into an elaborate emblem of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the Smithsonian states flatly that it is highly unlikely that she, Louis the Sixteenth or anyone else in the royal family ever wore it; the emblem was reserved for the king’s use. She and her husband were beheaded, and the Princesse de Lamballe was indeed killed by a mob, but not one of those deaths has any traceable connection to the stone.
The theft is real. Over several days in September 1792 thieves stripped the Garde-Meuble, the royal storehouse, and the Order of the Golden Fleece went with them; the French Blue as such was never seen again. What surfaced in London twenty years later was smaller. The jeweller John Francillon sketched and weighed a “very curious superfine deep blue Diamond” on 19 September 1812, and the Smithsonian notes the date’s significance: it fell two days after the twenty-year limitation period for crimes of the revolutionary years had run out. That timing, and the fact that the stone had lost a third of its weight, is why it is so widely assumed the diamond was recut to disguise stolen French royal property. It is a strong inference and a genuine gemological puzzle, but it is an inference, not a documented act. By 1839 the stone appears in the gem catalogue of the banker Henry Philip Hope, listed at 45.5 carats and described as “a most magnificent and rare brilliant, of a deep sapphire blue”. How he acquired it is not recorded. His name stuck.
The real tragedies were real, too. Evalyn Walsh McLean’s son Vinson was struck by a car and killed in 1919, aged nine. Her husband Edward’s behaviour deteriorated, the family lost the Washington Post, he was declared legally insane in 1933 and died in 1941. Her daughter Evie was found dead in 1946, in her mid-twenties, of an overdose of sleeping pills that the coroner ruled accidental. McLean herself died of pneumonia on 26 April 1947, and in 1949 her jewels were sold under court order; Harry Winston bought the collection. It is a terrible run of luck. It is also, over three and a half centuries and dozens of owners, simply what happens. The trick of the curse is that it remembers every disaster and quietly forgets everyone who owned the stone and lived a contented life. It is a story built by cherry-picking sorrow, and Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian scholar who wrote the fullest history of the diamond, has argued that the curse is better read as a story people tell about great wealth than as anything to do with the stone itself.
The journey ended in 1958. Winston decided to give the diamond to the Smithsonian, and on 8 November an employee posted it from the main New York post office, wrapped in brown paper. It went as registered mail insured for a million dollars: 145 dollars and 29 cents in total, of which the postage itself was two dollars and forty-four cents. The letter carrier who delivered it in Washington, James G. Todd, handed it over at a public ceremony out of his mail satchel, and the legend promptly claimed him too. Within a year he had a crushed leg and a head injury from two separate car accidents, his wife died of a heart attack, his dog was strangled on its leash and part of his house burned. Asked about the curse, Todd said: “I don’t believe any of that stuff,” and pointed out that his children had been safely outside during the fire. The Smithsonian’s own dry observation is that since the stone arrived the curse has brought the institution nothing but a world-class gem collection and rising attendance. The real curse, if there ever was one, was never supernatural. It was theft, revolution, a press that liked a hoodoo story, and a salesman who understood that the darkest version is always the easiest one to sell. The Hope Diamond never needed a curse to be dark. Its true history had blood enough already.
