The
" Hope" is a sapphire blue diamond weighing 44 3/8 carats, without
flaws and cut to a slightly irregular cushion shape. It has been known
since 1830, when it was in the hands of Daniel Eliason and without a
history. It was bought at that time by the London banker Henry Thomas
Hope for Pounds: 18,000, and passed by the hands of his successor, Lord
Hope, to a New York firm who sold it in 1908 to Monsieur Habib. It was
advertised for sale at public auction with other large stones under
the name " Collection Habib," in Paris, June 24, 1909, and sold for
$80,060. Streeter thinks this to be the large part of the
irregular-shaped blue diamond bought in India by Tavernier in 1642, and
sold to Louis XIV of France in 1668. It weighed 112-1/4 carats in the
rough when that monarch bought it, and was probably cut at once, for it
is recorded that the King wore a large blue diamond suspended from a
ribbon round the neck, when he decked himself with jewels estimated at
£12,000,000, to receive the Persian Ambassador at his court in
February, 1715. After cutting, it probably weighed 67-1/8 carats,
for a blue stone of that weight was among the Crown jewels stolen from
the Garde-Meuble in 1792. No similar blue diamond was seen again until
that now known as the Hope appeared in the hands of Eliason in 1830.
At the disposal of his jewels at Genoa in 1874, after the death of the
Duke of Brunswick, a similar blue stone was found in his collection. It
was drop-shaped, rose cut, and weighed 13-3/4 carats. Later, another of
the same color weighing one carat was bought by Streeter in London, and
he believes, the three stones being of similar color, their weights,
shapes, and cleavages corresponding to the
