84                    THE DIAMOND
	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