mond
merchant for five thousand dollars, squandered the money in
dissipation, and went and hanged himself. The diamond was sold by the
merchant to Sir Thomas Pitt, Governor of Fort St. George at Madras, for
one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. When the latter reached
England he found numerous stories afloat to the effect that he had
obtained the gem by foul means. These reports caused him great
distress, both because of their imputation of dishonesty and because of
making widely known his possession of such a treasure. He developed a
morbid fear that he would lose or be robbed of the gem, and while he
possessed it is said never to have slept two nights under the same
roof, and to have gone about much in disguise. During the stay of the
stone in London it was cut into the form of a brilliant, the cutting
reducing its weight from 410 to 136-3/4 carats. In 1717 it was sold to
the Regent of France, Duke of Orleans, for about six hundred and
seventy-five thousand dollars, which, together with what was received
for the dust obtained in the cutting, made a profit to Pitt of at least
five hundred thousand dollars. The diamond remained among the French
crown jewels till 1792, when it was stolen, in company with many other
precious stones, from the Garde Meuble. Shortly after a note was
received, evidently from the robbers, saying that the diamond would be
found in the Allee des Veuves. In this way the diamond was recovered,
and it has remained in the French treasury since. It was at one time
pledged by Napoleon to the Dutch government as a means of securing a
loan of two and a half millions of dollars; but aside from this, its
later history seems to have been uneventful. It is exhibited at present
in the Galerie Apollon in the Louvre in Paris. It is one of the purest
and finest of large diamonds. Its present dimensions are: Length, one
and one-sixth inches; breadth, one inch; and thickness, three quarters
of an inch.
The
Orloff diamond is to the Russian crown what the Kohinoor is to the
British. Our first knowledge of this stone is of its forming one of the
eyes of a Hindoo idol. How long it had glittered there is not known;
but its existence came to the ears of a French grenadier some time in
the eighteenth century. This individual resolved to gain possession of
the diamond by pretending to become a worshiper of the idol, and so
gained the confidence of the Hindoo devotees that they appointed him
special guardian of the god. He shortly improved the opportunity on a
dark and stormy night to tear out the adamantine eye and escape with
it to Madras. There he sold it to an English sea captain for ten
thousand dollars and the latter to a Jew for sixty thousand dollars.
The Jew merchant some time after brought
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