Five or six weeks ago a few of our regular clients and our staff spent a few hours, socially, with Maarten DeWitte, one of Hearts On Fire’s master diamond cutters.  In the course of the evening the conversation, somehow, turned to the Hope diamond and this led Maarten to comment on the diamond’s beauty.  It seems that he had visited the Smithsonian to see it and had been disappointed by its cut (in his words, “a real hack job”), so much so that he told the curator that he would be happy to recut it to “release” the potential beauty that lies within it.  Amazingly enough, the curator was horrified at the idea, even though the diamond has been re-cut at least twice.  Of course, he is not the authority on diamonds  that Maarten is; so his reaction was almost completely predictable.  When a “civilian” thinks about diamonds, it is most often the weight of the gem that concerns him rather than its beauty.  He more or less presumes that all diamonds are cut to the same standard; this engenders the cutter’s dilemma. He can cut a rough diamond to blazing beauty if he is willing to accept the loss of, perhaps, as much as two-thirds of the gem’s rough weight.  On the other hand, if he just opens up the angles of the diamond’s proportions a bit he can produce  an “O.K.” appearing diamond while still retaining much more of the weight of the rough diamond; and weight sells.  With that in mind, let’s go back to the Hope.  We know that Jean Baptiste Tavernier purchased the diamond we call the “Hope” in India during the early 1660s.  At the time he described it as cut gem, roughly triangular in shape, weighing a little more than 112 carats with “beautifully violet” color.  He did not quickly resell it; instead he held it as part of his retirement “fund”.  In 1668 he “cashed it in”, along with forty-four other large diamonds and 1,122 smaller ones.   The buyer was Louis IVX of France; and though the sum he paid for it was great enough to afford Tavernier a luxurious retirement, relatively speaking, he bought the lot for a song.  The “deal maker” was a patent of nobility that Louis conferred on Tavernier.  This gave him entry into the French upper crust and allowed him to purchase his own noble estate.  Then, diamond connoisseur that he was, Louis found himself in the cutter’s dilemma.  He thought the blue diamond he had purchased didn’t sparkle as it should; so in 1673 he had it recut by Sieur Pitau, the court jeweler.  The gem’s weight had been whittled down to a little more than 67 carats; and if the truth be known, Louis was less than totally happy with its new appearance. While it was brighter, recutting had affected its appearance of color; instead of looking violet, it looked to be an intense steely-blue.  Disappointed, but not enough to risk losing any more weight, Louis wore it suspended from a ribbon around his neck in a gold setting; and it entered history as the “French Blue.”  One hundred and nineteen years later, during the French Revolution, it was stolen and disappeared from view.  It reappeared in London, briefly in 1812, only a few weeks after the French Government’s statute of limitations on crimes committed during the Revolution made it legal to own.  It disappeared again, almost at once; but an 1822 portrait of Britain’s George IV represents him wearing a large blue diamond that could have been the French Blue.  If he did possess it, it was a possession so politically incorrect that the less said about it the better.  At any rate the King, a wastrel of renown, died  in 1830, so deeply in debt that most of his personal possessions were sold to settle them.  In 1839 the diamond reappeared in the gem collection of Henry Philip Hope, already recut to its present dimensions and weight, 45.52 carats.  The “hack” re-cutting of the gem had been done to disguise its origin (the thief’s dilemma?); and though its origin still seemed to be the French Blue, it could not be confirmed until 2005. Then contemporary technology firmly established the Hope’s origin as a re-cut of the French Blue.  The current argument against recutting it, of course, is based on its historic significance.

Historic significance!  What a weight to bear, yet it can be a matter of pride with your diamonds.  The diamonds you own today may become family heirlooms; and if they are breathtakingly beautiful, they’ll be family treasures as well.  So why not enjoy owning and wearing Hearts On Fire diamonds now?  They are the world’s most perfectly cut diamonds and that translates directly into incomparable breathtaking beauty.  They inhale light and exhale fire of such great magnitude and beauty that Hearts On Fire diamonds will sparkle in moonlight!  So check out our Hearts On Fire collection on line at hurstsberwynjewelers.com; then phone us at 708.788.0880 for an appointment to select the very best Hearts On Fire for you.  We’re Hursts’ Berwyn Jewelers and we’ll help you realize your dreams.