Hope Diamond:
The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem

By Richard Kurin (Collins 2006, $24.95)

In 1653 while in India, French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased a huge, rough-cut blue diamond that he later sold to the King of France.

Some 250 years after his purchase, a legend was fabricated claiming Tavernier had stolen the stone from the eye of a Hindu idol, and soon afterward, he was torn apart and eaten by a pack of wild dogs.

Tavernier had been cursed by the diamond, the legend contends, and misfortune would fall upon the head of anyone who dared own it.

Today, the infamous Hope diamond is regarded as one of the most important treasures in the Smithsonian’s collections. Some 6 million visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History admire it each year. But when this priceless gem was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1958, many Americans urged the Institution not to accept it for fear the United States would suffer from its curse.

In his new book, Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem, Cultural Anthropologist Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, transports readers from the 17th-century diamond mines of India to 20th-century jewelry stores and museums. The author follows the rich history of the Hope diamond, which is steeped in revolution, revenge, sexual impropriety and violence.

With elaborate detail gleaned from a decade of research, Kurin reveals the fascinating story of how this 45.52-carat, walnut-sized treasure - valued today at $200 million - became the world’s most infamous gemstone.

"What adds tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to the gem’s worth? Simply, its story," Kurin writes.

The Hope once was stolen from the French Crown during a revolutionary upheaval. Much later, it was pawned to secure a $100,000 cash ransom during the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. in 1932. The jewel has been worn by royalty and traveled the world. It even made the big screen in the days of silent film in a 15-part series "Hope Diamond Mystery."

As part of his research, Kurin traveled to Paris, where jeweler Pierre Cartier had told the legend of the diamond’s curse to the rich Americans Evalyn Walsh McLean and her husband, Edward - whose family owned the Washington Post newspaper - at the Hotel Bristol in September 1910. Cartier’s story was an elaborate sales pitch, Kurin writes, designed to pique the couple’s interest in the gem. It worked. The McLeans bought the jewel for $180,000 (a sum equal to approximately $3.9 million in today’s dollars).

With the help of an eager media, the curse legend grew. It gained popular currency in 1919 when the McLeans’ 9-year-old son, Vinson, was struck and killed by an automobile. Deaths, misfortunes, accidents and many other troubles of the Hope’s long line of owners have been attributed to the curse.

Yet, Kurin writes, "there is no indication that Tavernier stole the…diamond or any other diamond from the eye of a Hindu idol as Cartier suggested to the McLeans." Tavernier, in fact, was a merchant who was much respected by Indian and Persian
rulers. Tavernier’s own travelogues, however, and the mysterious culture where the Hope originated tend to bolster the diamond’s intrigue.

Indian classical texts and gem merchants in Tavernier’s time attributed certain meanings and powers to a gem’s color and shape. Sanskrit text on the medicinal qualities of gems says "blue diamonds are to be avoided."

Kurin also details how this legendary object eventually found a home at the Smithsonian. His 311-page book is filled with photographs and illustrations, many depicting famous and glamorous figures associated with the gem: Marie Antoinette; three French kings; Caroline of Brunswick, who became the wife of George IV; a showgirl named May Yohe, who married Henry Francis Hope, the Sixth Duke of Newcastle, who inherited the diamond from his uncle Henry Philip Hope; Evalyn Walsh McLean; and former First Lady Jackie Kennedy.

Today, at the Smithsonian, inside a high-tech transparent vault, this fabulous gemstone still casts its spell. As Evalyn McLean recalls - in her autobiography - of a weekend that Pierre Cartier left the diamond in her care: "For hours that jewel stared at me….At some time during that night, I began to want the thing."