How a stolen royal gemstone, a clever jewelry salesman, and some spectacularly bad luck created one of the world's most famous diamond curses.
Some gemstones are famous for their size. Others for their beauty, rarity, or the extraordinary prices people are willing to pay for them. The Hope Diamond has all of those things going for it, but what really made it famous was something considerably more entertaining.
According to legend, the enormous blue diamond carries a curse that brings terrible misfortune to anyone unfortunate enough to own it. Its supposed victims include French royalty, wealthy aristocrats, jewel merchants, and an American heiress whose life was marked by genuine tragedy.
It's a wonderful story, provided you don't mind that much of it was exaggerated, rearranged, or simply invented.
The truth is that the Hope Diamond's famous curse appears to have developed largely through sensational newspaper reporting and the efforts of people who discovered that a mysterious gemstone was much more interesting when accompanied by a few gruesome deaths.
And at least one very clever jeweler realized that a curse might actually help him sell it.
A Diamond Fit for a King
The story begins in the seventeenth century with Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French merchant and traveler who acquired an extraordinary blue diamond in India.
The stone weighed approximately 115 modern metric carats and was unlike anything most Europeans had ever seen. Tavernier eventually sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668, along with a collection of other gemstones.
Louis XIV, who was not exactly known for his modest approach to personal decoration, had the diamond recut into a smaller stone that became known as the French Blue. It joined the French crown jewels, where it remained for generations.
Then came the French Revolution.
In September 1792, thieves raided the French royal treasury and stole numerous jewels, including the French Blue. The diamond disappeared, and for the next twenty years its whereabouts were unknown.
When a remarkable blue diamond appeared in London in 1812, it had been cut into a different shape and reduced considerably in size. Strong historical and scientific evidence now connects that stone to the missing French Blue.
The new diamond eventually became part of the collection of Henry Philip Hope, a wealthy British banker and gemstone enthusiast. His name stuck, and the stone became known as the Hope Diamond.
At this point, we have a fascinating gemstone history involving royalty, revolution, theft, and international jewel dealing. Apparently, that still wasn't quite exciting enough.
The Curse Arrives Fashionably Late
You might expect an ancient curse to have an equally ancient history. Perhaps a mysterious inscription, a warning carved into a temple wall, or at least a particularly dramatic account from someone who lived centuries ago.
The Hope Diamond doesn't really have that.
Its notorious curse became popular in the early twentieth century, long after the stone had passed through the hands of French royalty and British collectors.
One of the earliest substantial newspaper accounts appeared in The Washington Post in January 1908. The article presented the diamond as a sinister object responsible for misfortunes suffered by its former owners.
And there certainly were misfortunes to choose from.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed during the French Revolution. Members of the Hope family experienced financial difficulties. Various jewel merchants struggled with debts or unsuccessful business ventures.
The trouble with this kind of evidence is that people experience tragedies whether or not they happen to own an expensive blue diamond.
Once you start looking backward through several centuries of wealthy families, political upheaval, inheritance disputes, and ordinary human suffering, finding a few disasters isn't especially difficult.
The real trick is convincing everyone that the diamond caused them.
Cartier Discovers the Value of a Good Curse
Enter Pierre Cartier, a member of the famous jewelry family and a man who understood that wealthy customers weren't necessarily purchasing gemstones for their chemical composition.
They were purchasing beauty, prestige, history, and sometimes the pleasure of owning something nobody else could have.
Cartier acquired the Hope Diamond in 1910 and set about finding a buyer. One particularly promising customer was Evalyn Walsh McLean, a wealthy American socialite whose father had made a fortune in Colorado gold mining.
Cartier presented the diamond to Evalyn and her husband, Edward Beale McLean, along with an embellished account of its remarkable history and supposed curse.
Importantly, Cartier didn't invent the entire legend from nothing. Newspaper stories about the diamond's misfortunes were already circulating. What he did was recognize the commercial potential of the story and help make it even more compelling.
Evalyn was fascinated, although not in quite the way you might expect.
Rather than being frightened by the curse, she reportedly believed that something unlucky for other people might prove lucky for her.
Her initial objection was considerably more practical. She didn't particularly like the diamond's setting.
So Cartier had it reset.
After further negotiations, the McLeans purchased the stone in 1911 for approximately $180,000, an astonishing sum at the time.
It was a spectacular sale, made even more memorable by the extraordinary story attached to the merchandise.
The Woman Who Wore a Curse to Parties
Evalyn Walsh McLean was not the sort of woman who purchased an enormously valuable diamond and immediately locked it away.
She wore it frequently, showed it to guests, and treated it with a degree of casual confidence that must have been alarming to anyone responsible for insuring it.
Stories about her entertaining habits include allowing guests to handle the diamond and, according to later family recollections, even tossing it into a swimming pool as a party amusement. Her Great Dane reportedly wore it on his collar.
For a gemstone supposedly capable of destroying its owners, the Hope Diamond was having a remarkably active social life.
Unfortunately, Evalyn's life did include terrible losses.
Her young son Vinson died after being struck by a car in 1919. Her marriage deteriorated, and her husband struggled with alcoholism and serious mental illness. Her daughter died in 1946 at the age of twenty-five.
These were real tragedies, not entertaining details in a supernatural adventure.
But newspapers and popular storytellers increasingly connected the family's misfortunes to the diamond. Every new tragedy became another piece of supposed evidence that the curse was genuine.
The problem is that there is no credible reason to believe the stone caused any of them.
A family's suffering became part of a legend because the legend was already famous.
The Curse Finds a New Home
Evalyn died in 1947. Her jewelry collection was eventually purchased by New York jeweler Harry Winston, who exhibited the Hope Diamond at events around the world.
Then, in 1958, Winston donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The diamond arrived by registered mail.
Yes, really.
One of the world's most famous gemstones, supposedly cursed and worth an extraordinary amount of money, was sent through the United States postal system in a package.
The diamond has since become one of the Smithsonian's most celebrated attractions. Millions of visitors have admired it, and researchers have studied its remarkable physical properties.
The Hope Diamond weighs 45.52 carats and owes its famous blue color to trace amounts of boron within its crystal structure. Under ultraviolet light, it can also display a striking red phosphorescence.
These are genuinely extraordinary characteristics, and unlike the curse, they can be investigated scientifically.
A Much Better Story Than the Truth
So is the Hope Diamond cursed?
There's no credible evidence that it is.
What it does have is a remarkable history involving French kings, revolutionary theft, wealthy collectors, extravagant parties, and some extraordinarily effective storytelling.
The curse didn't create the diamond's beauty or rarity. It gave people a reason to talk about it.
And that's what makes the whole thing so fascinating to me. The Hope Diamond is already an incredible object, formed deep within the Earth long before humans existed. Yet somehow, we decided that what it really needed was a supernatural reputation and a list of unfortunate former owners.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the story isn't that people believed the diamond was cursed.
It's that people kept wanting to own it anyway.
References & Further Reading
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. History of the Hope Diamond. Detailed historical research on the diamond's ownership, the origins of the curse, Cartier, and Evalyn Walsh McLean.
- Smithsonian Institution. History of the Hope Diamond. Chronology of the gemstone from Tavernier through its donation to the museum.
- Smithsonian Institution, Sidedoor. The Curse of the Hope Diamond. Historical discussion featuring Smithsonian researcher Richard Kurin.
- Richard Kurin. Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. Smithsonian Books, 2006.
- Smithsonian Magazine. How a Smithsonian Curator Discovered the Hope Diamond's Many Secrets, September 26, 2023.
Hope Diamond photograph: dbking, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0. Photograph unmodified.
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