The Heart of the Matter

One of the great joys of a library—among the multitudes of great joys every library offers—is the pleasure of selecting a book at random and opening it up to read a chapter.  You would be surprised at how often this leads to finding a hidden treasure.

Similarly, whenever you are searching for a particular book in the library, after you find it in the stacks, turn around and select a random book from the shelf behind you.  There is buried treasure hidden all over a library, and no one charges you to dig randomly.

I will admit to having a certain bias in favor of books.  I’ve always thought the most challenging ‘escape room’ setting would be a well stocked bookstore with clearly marked exits.  Eight hours later, I'd only be halfway to the exit.  Despite my bias towards books, such random research does have serendipitous benefits, such as today’s topic. 

When James Cameron wrote the story that eventually became the film “Titanic”, he did what most good writers do; he wove together tidbits of facts and imagination to create a great story that was made into a great movie.  One of those combinations of real and fantasy was the 56-carat blue diamond, Le Coeur de la Mer (The Heart of the Sea).

Cameron probably used as a basis for his story, the real-life story of Kate Florence Phillips and Henry Samuel Morley.  Nineteen-year-old Kate worked for Morley, and despite a twenty-year age difference, Morley abandoned his wife and daughter to run away with Kate, intending to resettle in San Francisco.  Traveling under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, they booked a second-class stateroom on the Titanic where Marshall gifted Kate with a large necklace consisting of a blue sapphire surrounded by smaller diamonds, nicknamed “The Love of the Ocean”.  

On the night of April 12-13, 1912, Kate boarded lifeboat 11, wearing only her nightgown and the necklace, and clutching her purse and the keys to her trunk.  Morley, who could not swim, went down with the ship—as did Kate’s trunk.  Neither his body nor the trunk was ever found, but the necklace is currently in the possession of a private collector in Florida.  You may have seen it when Celine Dion wore it at the 1998 Oscars, while she performed the movie’s theme song, My Heart Will Go On.

This is a good story, and the movie changed only a few things.  In Cameron’s version, Hockley, the film’s protagonist bought the magnificent gem as a wedding present for Rose, his fiancée .  As he puts the necklace around her neck for the first time, he explains that the 56-carat diamond had once belonged to the French King, Louis XVI and is incredibly valuable.  For the rest of the film, Hockley chases Rose and her new-found love, Jack, both of whom are unaware that they are in possession of the fabulously valuable jewel.  The movie is not so much about the sinking of the ship, but a quest to recover the expensive jewel.

Cameron once again took real events and slightly modified them.  The gem pictured is not real, it was cubic zirconia, but it was based on an actual jewel.  Louis XVI had actually inherited a magnificent blue diamond, Le Bleu, or the French Blue.  And at the time the movie was made, the fate of the fabulous jewel was still unknown.

What became the French Blue was discovered in India at the same mine that produced the Koh-i-noor diamond that is part of the British Crown Jewels.  Discovered in approximately 1610, it was cut in the fashion popular in India, a style that emphasized the size of the jewel more than luster or symmetry, essentially turning this massive stone into nothing more than a polished river rock.  While most diamonds are prized for their total lack of color, this diamond was notable for its steel blue color.

It was purchased by a French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier and brought back to Paris.  Originally known as the Tavernier Diamond, it soon caught the eye of the only person rich enough to buy the gem.  Louis XIV bought the gem and had it cut down from an original 115 carats to 69 carats—a process that intensified the unique blue color and made the gem appear more symmetrical.  The beautiful gem remained the property of the French monarchy until the French Revolution.

During the French Revolution, after the King and Queen were put under house arrest, the crown jewels were confiscated and locked up in the French Royal Treasury.  In September 1792, a mob of peasants stormed the building, slashed the throats of the guards and ransacked the treasury for five days.  The crown jewels, include the French Blue, vanished.

For several decades, the exact location of the blue diamond was uncertain, though there are a number of interesting possibilities.  One rumor says that Marie Antoinette had hidden the jewel before she was arrested and had entrusted it to her hairdresser to smuggle back to Austria.  A more likely version says that it was smuggled to England and sold to King George IV, who bought it—and every other shiny object he could find—despite the monarch already being hopelessly in debt.  

In 1812, just a few days after the last possible date to prosecute someone for crimes committed during the French Revolution, a large blue gem was recut by a London jeweler, reducing the size of and rounding the shape of the diamond.  While historians had surmised for years that this might be the French Blue, the recent discovery of working drawings of the stone and how it was to be cut firmly establish that this was the former royal diamond.  Using those drawings, a computer was able to produce an image of what the French Blue probably looked like before it was recut.

It’s most likely that the jewel remained the possession of King George IV until his death in 1830, when it was probably privately sold to pay off some of the immense debts he had amassed during his reign.  Buying the diamond only to sell it—either to pay off debts immediately or after the death of the owner—set a pattern that would be repeated for the next century.

In 1839, the diamond resurfaced as part of the gem collection of William Phillip Hope, whose name has been attached to it ever since.  After Hope died, the stone was bought by and subsequently sold by a series of wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic until it was finally sold to Pierre Cartier, the famous jeweler.

Cartier had a potential buyer in mind, Evalyn Walsh McLean, of Washington D.C.  Mrs. McLean was…well…today we would call her, “eccentric”.  Cartier, a crafty salesman, loaned her the diamond for the weekend.  The tactic worked:  by the beginning of the next week, the flamboyant Mrs. McLean had purchased the gem and had commissioned Cartier to refashion it as the centerpiece on a necklace containing 45 diamonds.

Until her death in 1947, Mrs. McLean wore the necklace frequently to fashionable Washington and New York affairs… and on at least one occasion, allowed the family dog to wear the diamond.  After her death, her entire collection of jewelry was purchased by the New York jewelry firm, Henry Winston.  In 1958, the gem was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains to this day, as the museum’s most popular attraction.

Well, that’s about it, except for two last points.  First, when the Smithsonian had the diamond removed from the necklace for cleaning recently, the loose stone was weighed and it was discovered that the diamond was now 45.52 carats.  Second, when the movie Titanic was made, Cameron didn’t know that the French Blue was actually the famous Hope Diamond because the working drawings proving the diamond’s true provenance had not yet been discovered.