The Curse A Jeweller Invented To Sell A Diamond

It is one of the most beautiful objects on earth: a magnificent, deep-blue diamond, forty-five carats of impossible sparkle, now sitting behind bulletproof glass in the Smithsonian, admired by millions. And it is said to be cursed. The Hope Diamond is famous the world over as the jewel of doom, the stone that brings death, madness, and ruin to everyone who dares to own it. The list of its victims is genuinely chilling. But here is the twist that makes this story so fascinating: the curse is a lie. It was, in large part, invented by a jeweller barely a century ago, to help him sell the diamond. And yet the real history beneath the fake curse is, in its own way, just as dark.

First, let’s hear the curse as it’s told, because it’s a magnificent piece of horror. The legend says the diamond began its life of evil as a great blue stone set in the eye of a sacred Hindu idol in India. In the 1600s, a French jewel trader named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier is said to have pried the diamond from the idol and stolen it, and for this act of sacrilege, the outraged priests laid a terrible curse upon the stone and all who would ever possess it. Tavernier, the story goes, was later torn to pieces and eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs. And so the trail of death began.

The Horror

The roll call of the diamond’s supposed victims reads like a catalogue of nightmares. The stone passed to the kings of France. King Louis the Fourteenth, who owned it, is said to have died of a rotting, gangrenous infection, and nearly all his legitimate children died young. Then it came to King Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, Marie Antoinette, and we all know what happened to them: both were dragged to the guillotine during the French Revolution and had their heads struck off. Marie Antoinette’s dearest friend and confidante, the Princesse de Lamballe, who was said to have worn the diamond, met an even more horrific end, torn limb from limb by a revolutionary mob. A Dutch jeweller who later recut the stone was, according to the legend, murdered by his own son, who then killed himself in despair. A Greek merchant who owned it drove his car off a cliff, killing himself and his family. And on and on the curse rolled, through bankruptcies, divorces, madness, and violent death, wherever the beautiful blue stone travelled. It is a truly terrifying legend.

And it is, for the most part, fiction. Because the modern Hope Diamond curse, as we know it, was largely the invention of one clever man with something to sell. His name was Pierre Cartier, the famous Parisian jeweller, and the year was 1910. Cartier had acquired the diamond, but he had a problem: it was staggeringly expensive, and there were very few people on earth who could afford it. He set his sights on one particular buyer, a wealthy and eccentric American heiress named Evalyn Walsh McLean. But when Cartier first showed McLean the diamond, she was unimpressed. So Cartier, a brilliant salesman, completely changed his approach. He stopped trying to sell her the diamond’s beauty, and instead began to sell her its mystique, its darkness, its danger. He spun her an elaborate, dramatic, spine-tingling tale of a cursed jewel, of vengeful Indian idols, of jewellers driven mad, of queens who had lost their heads. And here is the delicious irony: Evalyn Walsh McLean had a peculiar belief that objects other people thought were unlucky were actually lucky for her. So the curse, far from putting her off, was the perfect bait. Cartier had found exactly the right story for exactly the right buyer, and she bought the diamond. The curse had done its job. It had made the sale.

The Modern Relic

The Smithsonian, which now owns the diamond, has researched this thoroughly, and their conclusion is clear: the curse story is a made-up modern folktale, largely elaborated by Pierre Cartier. He didn’t invent every piece of it from thin air. Rather, he was a master weaver, taking scattered threads and braiding them into a single terrifying rope. He took genuine historical tragedies, he took sensationalist stories that newspapers had already been printing, and he even borrowed from popular fiction, drawing on a famous Victorian novel called The Moonstone, about a cursed Indian gem that brings disaster to its owners. He stitched all of this together into a thrilling supernatural history for his diamond, and the newspapers of the day, delighted, amplified it into legend.

But here is what makes the Hope Diamond so genuinely fascinating: strip away the fake curse, and the real history that remains is still remarkably dark, and it’s all true. A large blue diamond really was brought from India by Tavernier in the 1600s, though he bought it rather than stealing it from an idol, and far from being eaten by dogs, he lived to the ripe old age of around eighty-four. The diamond really did belong to Louis the Fourteenth, and really did pass to Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, and they really were both beheaded, not by any curse, but by the very real fury of the French Revolution. During that Revolution, the diamond was genuinely stolen, looted from the royal treasury during five chaotic nights of plunder in 1792, after which it vanished from history entirely. Years later, it mysteriously reappeared in London, secretly recut into a new shape specifically to disguise its identity and hide the fact that it was stolen French royal property, a genuine gemological mystery. It was eventually bought by a wealthy banker named Henry Philip Hope, which is how it finally got its famous name.

And the real tragedies were real, too. Evalyn Walsh McLean, the woman Cartier sold it to, went on to live a genuinely sad life: her young son was killed in a car accident, her daughter died of a drug overdose, her marriage fell apart, and her husband was declared insane and died in an institution, while she herself died in debt. It’s heartbreaking. But it is also, when you think about it, simply life. Over three and a half centuries, a priceless diamond passes through the hands of dozens of owners, and some of them, inevitably, suffer misfortune, tragedy, and death, as all human beings eventually do. The trick of the curse is that it carefully remembers every disaster and quietly forgets everyone who owned the stone and lived a perfectly happy life. It is a story built by cherry-picking sorrow.

The diamond’s journey ended in 1958, when the jeweller Harry Winston, who had bought it, decided to donate it to the Smithsonian. And in a final, almost comic detail, he sent this priceless, supposedly cursed jewel through the ordinary post, wrapped in brown paper, for just two dollars and forty-four cents in postage. Even then, the legend refused to die: the mailman who delivered it reportedly went on to have his leg crushed in a truck accident and his house burn down, more delicious fuel for the myth. And so the Hope Diamond sits in its museum today, still whispered about as the cursed stone of doom. But the real curse, if there ever was one, was never supernatural. It was the very human curse of greed, of theft, of revolution, and of a brilliant salesman who understood that the darkest story is always the easiest one to sell. The Hope Diamond never needed a curse to be dark. Its true history had blood enough already.

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