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Gem Trader
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rang me up for any information I could give. I mention this to show that sizable gems of quality are of perennial news value.
One
can have too much even of the best. The recital of rare diamonds is no
exception, but I cannot bring this chapter to a close without
mentioning the two rarest diamonds in the world: one blue and the
other green.
It
was in the year 1642 that Ta vernier bought in India a rough diamond
weighing 112-1/4 carats, of a violet-blue so extremely rare that no
other stone of such tint of any appreciable size has been known before
or since. When later he sold the stone to Louis XIV in 1668 as a
faceted stone, its weight had been reduced to sixty-seven and
one-eighth carats.
Louis, who is spoken of as le roi soleil—the
Sun King-owed this flattering epithet less to his mental gifts than to
his love of display. On appropriate occasions he could deck himself out
in such manner that his person put in the shade the lesser luminaries.
"The King," says a contemporary writer, "on the occasion of the
reception of the Persian Ambassador, was dressed in a black suit
ornamented with gold and embroidered with diamonds at a cost of twelve
million, five hundred thousand livres. Suspended from a light-blue
ribbon round his neck he wore a dark-blue diamond as a pendant."
At
the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1792 the French regalia was
seized and stored at the Garde Meubles, but whatever else may have
remained intact, the blue diamond had disappeared.
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