was
buried near Moscow. One of the many people who have written up the
histories of famous jewels tries to make out that he was a victim of
the notorious curse said to follow the Hope diamond, for the Hope is a
piece of a much bigger blue diamond, called the Blue Tavernier, which
the traveler brought back from India and sold to the King of
France. But surely it is stretching things rather far to say that it
would take a powerful curse to kill a man of eighty-four, even a tough
egg like Tavernier. Take it all in all, he could hardly be described as
the accursed type. He looks very hearty in the portrait that serves as
frontispiece to my copy of his works, a well-known edition by Professor
Valentine Ball. In this he wears a splendid robe encrusted with gold
embroidery under a fur cape, with a big turban, a costume given him by
a royal Indian client.
The
Koh-i-nur is one of those diamonds that have acquired personalities of
their own and are spoken of by people in the trade almost as if they
were flesh-and-blood personages in history. Rolling stones do gather
moss. The Sancy, the Koh-i-nur, the Regent, and the rest of them have
gathered a lot of it, sagas too long to be repeated here. Even longer
than the sagas are the footnotes. Historians lead strenuous lives in
their bookish way, and one of the hottest arguments that stirred their
scholarly desks in the past century was that of the Great Mogul and its
relation to the Koh-i-nur. Were they or were they not the same stone?
Streeter didn't think so. Professor Ball, who edited Tavernier, was
convinced that they were and that Streeter was wrong. With careful
arguments based on weights and possibilities he convinced a number of
people, including me. Even if Professor Ball and I are wrong, one thing
at least cannot be disputed: that the Great Mogul disappeared from the
record
