100 LARGE RUBIES book ii
Figures
of twenty Diamonds which the Author sold to the King on his return from
his last Voyage to India. The figures before the Reader show the
weight, the extent, and thickness of each Stone.1 [PI. III.]
Here
[in PI. IV] are the figures of the most beautiful rubies in the world,
and of the topaz of the Great Mogul, in the order in which they are
arranged here by numbers.
No.
1. Figure of a ruby which belongs to the King of Persia. It is of the
thickness and shape of an egg, is bored through and of very high
colour, beautiful and clean, with the exception of a small flaw at the
side. The custodians refuse to say what it cost, as is also the case
with the pearl belonging to the same King, which is represented further
on; they are likewise unwilling that any one should know the weight of
either. Those who keep the registers of the King of Persia's jewels
merely say that this ruby has been in the possession of the King for
many years.
No.
2 represents a large stone believed to be a ruby, and sold as such to
Ja'far Khan, the Great Mogul's uncle, who bought it for the sum of
95,000 rupees, which amount to 1,425,000 livres.2 He presented it to the Great Mogul, with
1
The violet-blue diamond A, and the two rose-coloured diamonds B and C,
which are here figured, are referred to in ' A Note about some unusual
Diamonds', published in the Phil. Trans, for 27th April 1674,
No. 102, p. 26, as being in a representation of a considerable number
of diamonds, which were sold by Tavernier to the King of France. Louis
XIV paid 220,000 livres for it. Hence it would seem that this plate
reached the Royal Society in London before the publication of the
travels in 1676. The adamantine hardness of the stones, in spite of
their unusual colours, caused them to be admitted to be diamonds. The
history of the blue diamond is well told in Mr. Streeter's work on The Great Diamonds. The
blue diamond which belonged to Mr. Hope, weighing 44 1/4 carats, is
believed to be a fragment of this stone, which was stolen from the
Garde Meuble in 1792.
2
There is here a mistake on one side or the other ; a cipher should
either be added to the rupees or subtracted from the livres. See vol.
i, p. 310, where the total value of a present made by Ja'far Khan is
put at 1,050,000 livres, hence perhaps it may be concluded that the
figure here should be 142,500 livres, but it is not certain that the
occasions referred to were identical. Bernier (p. 271) says that it was
valued at 40,000 crowns, but ' Chah-Jehan, who understood better than
any man the
