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Ch. 4: Celebrated Diamonds

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THE DIAMOND
Another diamond which has long been celebrated, and to which has been gathered the legends and adventures of several others that have borne the same name, is the Sancy. It is described as pear-shaped and brilliant cut. Upon attempting to gather from records a true account of this stone, the historian is confronted by such a mass of contradictory statements that the task becomes at once hopeless. The writers have evidently gathered a statement here and another there, often oblivious of the fact, while piecing them together, that those state­ments, from the nature of them, must have referred to different stones. These patchwork histories have been copied by other writers, sometimes with the addition of a chance item picked up accidentally in some other quarter; sometimes they are shorn of striking inaccu­racies and rounded out with new suppositions to make the story readable or more probable. In either case reflection is forced upon the reader, that if the same has occurred in the records we have of men and events, our knowledge of the past is more in the nature of a composite photograph than a series of definite likenesses.
There are but two things about the Sancy upon which writers agree, viz.: that the first known owner was Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and that later it came into possession of Nicholas de Barly, Baron de Sancy, after whom it was named. This stone is said to have weighed 53-1/2 or 53-3/4 carats. According to some it was an heirloom in the family of Charles the Bold, and was brought from Constantinople by an ambassa­dor. Its history between Charles and the Baron De Sancy is uncertain. Some say it was lost with his other treasures at the battle of Granson in 1476. The Swiss
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