Hope: Adventures of a Diamond [Hardcover]

Marian Fowler's engaging history Hope: Adventures of a Diamond traces one of the world's most famous gems on a 2,000-year journey back and forth across the globe. Actually, 2,000 years isn't accurate, because the blue stone that would become known as the Hope Diamond was born billions of years ago in India's Deccan plateau. But the subterranean part of its existence is not as interesting to Fowler as its time amongst the aristocrats and scoundrels of Europe. That period began in December 1668, when French diamond merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier sold the brilliant blue diamond, which was originally over 112 carats in weight, to Louis XIV for nearly $2 million in today's currency (it's now worth 200 times that). Pitau, the king's diamond cutter, was given the nerve-wracking task of cleaving and shaping the Hope for the first time. "It probably took him a day or more to recover from the tension of that one irrevocable mallet stroke," writes Fowler. In the court of the Sun King, the diamond came into its own as a symbol of wealth, power, and prestige. "With some help from advances in optics and gem cutting," Fowler writes, "Louis XIV pushed the diamond to centre stage and left it there to reign forever over all other precious stones as undisputed king." Fowler meticulously describes the fashion and jewellery trends of the era and details the outlandishly profligate habits and sexual peccadilloes of the French royals, who guaranteed inevitable bloody revolution--and the pilfering of the crown jewels. The diamond's life in England is equally tempestuous. Henry Philip Hope, the shy, sensitive man who gave the gem its name and perhaps loved it the best of all its owners, was cursed with a set of descendants so vain and foolish that it's little wonder the diamond became so notorious.

Replacing countless speculations with a well-marshalled army of facts and research, Fowler delights in demolishing the myths surrounding the Hope, including the "curse" that supposedly befell its owners. Rather than possessing any innate powers, the diamond was ultimately whatever the possessor wanted it to be--a testament to the superiority of royal blood, an entrée into high society, or a way out of gambling debts. If there's a moral to be deduced from Hope: Adventures of a Diamond , it's that great wealth causes more problems than it's worth. But that's not an idea in which anyone places much stock. --Jason Anderson

Billed as the biography of the Hope Diamond, this comprehensive but overwritten book traces the cherished jewel's history from its formation in India more than a billion years ago to its current status as museum treasure. In her painstaking saga of the diamond's "life," Canadian Fowler (Blenheim: Biography of a Palace; In a Gilded Cage: American Heiresses Who Married British Aristocrats; etc.) hypothesizes about the blue diamond's origins, then introduces readers to each of its owners. The first, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French merchant, sold the stone to King Louis XIV; the last, American jeweler Harry Winston, donated it to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where the 45-carat gem has drawn millions of visitors for the past 40 years. Fowler's chronicle traverses the diamond's passage from the pockets of thieves who stole the diamond during the French Revolution to England and its namesake owner, Henry Philip Hope, into the hands of a social-climbing actress; then across the ocean to America, where an alcoholic heiress donned it frequently for parties but the author's cliched and overdramatic prose mars the gripping tale. Writing of Philip Hope, she gushes that the diamond "had found the man who, of all its many owners, would love it most faithfully and intensely, love it for its own essence and grace...." Though Fowler honorably corrects false rumors about the diamond and offers a few engaging tangents, this volume does not do its worthy subject justice. Agent, Jay Mandel. (Apr.)Forecast: Diamonds may be timeless, but they're also particularly in vogue now, at least in books. In October, W.H. Freeman released Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic and in November, Walker published Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Forecasts, Oct.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The property of kings, rogues, socialites, chorus girls, and thieves, the Hope diamond, a rare 45.52-carat blue diamond that is probably the world's most famous gem, comes to life in this brilliant "gemography" by Canadian author Fowler (The Way She Looks Tonight). Beginning with the stone's formation over one billion years ago, Fowler traces its history from the mines of India to the hands of French gem trader Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1660, who later sold the diamond to Louis XIV. She follows the stone through its theft during revolutionary France, its reappearance in 1812 England, and its time in the hands of Henry Philip Hope. The diamond continued to change hands and gather stories until Harry Winston donated it to the Smithsonian, where it still enthralls millions. This exciting social history is at times overwrought, as the author lapses into unnecessary anthropomorphizing of the gem. Nevertheless, this marvelous update to Susanne Patch's brief Blue Mystery: The Story of the Hope Diamond (Abrams, 1999) brings to life the diverse array of people linked by their obsession with this famous jewel. Highly recommended for all libraries. Dale Farris, Groves, TX

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Until it was institutionalized in 1958 at the Smithsonian, one of this country's most reliable publicity generators was the Hope diamond. Angling for the market interested in the rather self-indulgent lives of those who have owned the Hope, Fowler amusingly flounces through its provenance, beginning with the Sun King's purchase and ending with Harry Winston's donation. She tosses in occasional lapidary detail, but she emphasizes its journey through high society, where the diamond appeared on bosoms, in hats, and, at times, loose and alone in somebody's hand. When it surfaced in London in 1812, having been stolen when the French monarchy was overthrown in 1792, a rich man named Hope bought it. Fowler recognizes him as one of the few appreciative owners who genuinely loved this blue diamond. Thereafter, in wills, in litigation, and in stories, mostly fabricated, about the ill fortune it brought to its owners, the Hope seemed to become a symbol of crassness rather than a bauble of beauty. Fowler's bemused tone and satirical digs make for an entertaining account. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

“Hope: Adventures of a Diamond is a copious, unstinting work of popular scholarship, and a rousing tale of the flawless sapphire blue stone that holds ‘the secret of Creation itself.’ Marian Fowler’s chronological approach to the material is well organized and richly detailed, and the book’s insights on changing values ascribed to the diamond -- on how so many paid so much for a mere lump of mineral -- are particularly strong.” -- Quill and Quire

“Fowler’s detailed, vivid description of the gem’s rough life in India is some of her best work. . . . . Fowler has done a fine job conveying what people have created in their minds from the reflection of this miraculous, but mute, stone.” -- The Globe and Mail

The Hope Diamond — the largest and most beautiful dark blue diamond ever found — has inspired legends and lies, fabulous superstition and fierce passion. For three centuries it passed from hand to hand, and from country to country. It may have served as all-powerful eye in a Hindu statue, was worn by three French kings amidst the splendours of Versailles and was stolen in a farcical jewel heist during the terrors of the French Revolution. Rescued and adored by a rich Dutch art connoisseur, the diamond later became the subject of a long and bitter London court battle, whose every sensational detail was splashed across the tabloid newspapers of the day. Cartier’s Paris atelier acquired it in 1909 and persuaded Washington society hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean to buy it. She wore the gem —when it wasn’t adorning her dog — almost every day of her Great Gatsby life, and even, once, in an operating room. It was only when diamond master Harry Winston donated this prize to the Smithsonian that the Hope was finally accessible to all who wanted to admire it.

A sweeping saga, Hope: Adventures of a Diamond is at once a page-turning thriller and a glittering social history. Dazzling and delicious, this is a book truly worthy of its flawless, priceless subject.

“Hope: Adventures of a Diamond is a copious, unstinting work of popular scholarship, and a rousing tale of the flawless sapphire blue stone that holds ‘the secret of Creation itself.’ Marian Fowler’s chronological approach to the material is well organized and richly detailed, and the book’s insights on changing values ascribed to the diamond -- on how so many paid so much for a mere lump of mineral -- are particularly strong.” -- Quill and Quire

“Fowler’s detailed, vivid description of the gem’s rough life in India is some of her best work. . . . . Fowler has done a fine job conveying what people have created in their minds from the reflection of this miraculous, but mute, stone.” -- The Globe and Mail

Marian Fowler holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto and was the recipient of the Canadian Biography Award. She has taught at York University and is the author of a number of books, including In a Gilded Cage, Below the Peacock Fan, The Embroidered Tent, Blenheim and The Way She Looks Tonight. She lives in Toronto.

NATURE Framed in the prodigality of nature. —William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, scene 2

Around the Diamond, as provocative as a woman’s perfume, as protective as a force field, there has always been mystery. It was present at the very beginning to hide the jewel’s conception and swaddle its birth.

After five hundred years of studying diamonds, geologists can make informed speculations but still can’t determine the exact details of their genesis. The one in this story has proved more intractable than most, for it contains none of the inclusions of other mineral crystals that would help to determine its age. Like a great many beauties, our protagonist guards the secret of how old it is—as well it might, since it is far older than those primitive forms of life that first crawled on the ocean’s floor. The amazing truth is that the Diamond, much more beautiful now than in its early years and still utterly desirable, is—don’t shout it from the rooftops but whisper it discreetly—between one and three billion years old. It was conceived when Earth itself was still a hot young planet, when time had no past tense.

If we can’t fix the date of its creation except vaguely, give or take a billion years, we do know the place. The Diamond formed in the southern, peninsular part of India, which is now bounded on both seacoasts by ranges of hills (the Western and Eastern Ghats) and is known as the Deccan plateau. Its four-billion-year-old spine makes it India’s oldest part. The gem originated about 120 miles below the Deccan plains, not in the Earth’s crust, which is only about 25 miles thick, but in the fiery caldron of the mantle beneath, which goes down 1,750 miles.

The upper mantle was incredibly hot and turbulent, where gases roared and reservoirs of molten rock rippled and heaved. Nothing in the Diamond’s future would be half so cataclysmic as its beginnings. Its creation required what geologists call “a special melting event” with a heat between 1300 and 4500 degrees Fahrenheit to liquefy the dark, heavy rock called peridotite, combined with a pressure somewhere between 0.5 and 1.3 million pounds per square inch.

There in that tremendous heat and pressure, in one of the great cosmic coincidences that, thus far in human history, has yielded man only forty tons of diamonds, crystallization began. Like every crystal, be it snowflake or gemstone, this one would be unique, its own self, as different from other diamonds as one human is from another.

The growing process was probably quite gradual, for the larger the crystal, the slower its forming must be. While the Diamond was getting bigger, the great pressure of the carbon dioxide gas below the layer of slowly cooling molten peridotite containing it had to remain equal to the pressure of the layers of rock above. Although it was the rarest prize in nature, it was made of the most ordinary matter, namely, carbon. This exists in our own bodies, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the fuels we burn: wood, coal, oil, gasoline. One might say that the Diamond then coming into being was both high class and low, aristocrat and commoner. The magic was in the making.

Eighteen atoms of carbon darted together into a minute cube, an isometric cell, a diamond’s basic building block. The cubes in turn multiplied into a regular latticework. The shape evolving basically conformed to the one diamonds prefer, an octahedron, which looks like two pyramids joined base to base. The Diamond’s cubic structure was probably taking on the contours to be seen in the first extant drawing we have of it, done in the seventeenth century. This shows a rough stone that, if held with its broader end as base, resembled a giant teardrop; if reversed, it looked like a heart; it could, therefore, depending on a viewer’s sensibility, accommodate itself to tragedy or romantic comedy.

While crystallization was still taking place, there were three distinct miracles. The first one involved color. While some diamonds are being created, an atom of another element may take the place of a carbon one. In this Diamond’s coalescing atoms, there was an atom of boron for every million of carbon. Once the gem had reached light and received its first polish—and that was a long way off—it was the boron that would make it blue. With the exception of red, blue is the rarest of all colors for a diamond. Depending on the nature of its alien atoms—for a fine stone, there must be no more than one foreign part for every hundred thousand of carbon—a diamond may also be green, yellow, pink, the highly valued hues, or brown, gray, or black. Most blues are light in color and less than 2 carats. The Diamond then forming in that hot, heaving womb would be the biggest dark blue ever found.

The second miracle concerned matter. If the pressures had been lower, carbon atoms might have stacked themselves in flat six-sided sheets, with the bonds between the layers so weak that they could easily slide over each other; the resulting dull mineral would have been graphite, from which pencils are made.

Hardness was the third miracle. It is the strength of a crystal’s bonds that determines this, and a diamond’s are the strongest in the world, giving it the highest point, 10, on Mohs’ scale of hardness now used in mineralogy, where graphite gets 1.5. Diamonds are eighty-five times harder than the next gems on the scale, rubies and sapphires, and can only be scratched by their own kind. However, the Diamond was not invulnerable, as we shall see later.

At last the stone’s long gestation came to an end, and its creation was complete. It weighed at least 110.5 metric carats, and was nature’s absolute kernel of energy and beauty, of her striving, driving, pounding life force, compressed to firmest, clearest compass. It was Creation’s brightest thought. However, until man came to its rescue and revealed its beauty, it would wear a disfiguring, slightly shiny, greasy gray caul.

Somewhere between one billion and five hundred million years ago, the stone’s passage from darkness to light, from womb to world, began. It would be a long and perilous journey, for the Diamond had to pass unharmed up through almost a hundred miles of mantle, then twenty-five miles of crust. While the first stages were probably gentle enough, with the gemstone moving upward an inch or two a year, eventually it accelerated to the speed of a rocket. During this wild, jolting ride, it was in great danger, for it could have shattered at any moment. This was no easy delivery. En route, the pressures of the molten rock around the gem cracked the surrounding rocks, so that bits of other minerals joined the thrust and push; most probably spinel and garnet, bloodred as the magma itself, were among them.

When the mother rock that had held the Diamond for so long hit the Earth’s surface, along with trapped gases, it exploded with the force of a volcano, the fizz and roar of a million champagne corks, and a dense shower of ash and rock fragments.

After the shock of this explosion, the Diamond was still imprisoned in its red-hot surrounding rock, which didn’t flow out and down like lava but instead, due to the pressure of ascending magma, merely bulged upward on the Earth’s surface, then collapsed at the center once the gases had escaped. This mother rock in which all diamonds originate wouldn’t acquire a name until 1870, when they were first found in abundance in South Africa near the town of Kimberley: the rock was named kimberlite. It is an altered and broken form of peridotite, blue-green in color due to its iron content, consisting mainly of the minerals pyroxene and olivine. In the crater resulting from the explosion, the kimberlite cooled and hardened into a deposit measuring from a few hundred yards to a mile wide, with the Diamond still somewhere inside it. Beneath the surface, the rock became a vertical “pipe” with kimberlite’s typical carrot shape, broad at the top, then narrowing as it goes deeper into the Earth.

Millions of years passed while the big, shiny gray stone waited to be released. The top of the kimberlite cone gradually grew more concave and began to crack and crumble, owing to the then prevailing violent extremes of heat and cold. The north polar ice sheet crept as far south as the Himalayan mountains several times; in these glacial periods, the Deccan area didn’t freeze but was flooded with torrential rains.

Being much stronger and harder than the kimberlite around it, the Diamond stood firm, while the mother rock grew pale, turning from blue-green to yellow, cracking and crumbling. Then came the day when the rock released the gemstone and the Diamond was freed into a rushing, muddy torrent of water, yellow rock fragments, and other pebbles.

It began its second journey, and this was not like its dangerous escape from the underworld but rather a vagabond adventure in which the gray rolling stone bumped and tumbled along in mudslides and rivers. Because of its great density, it traveled close to the bottom of streams, just as a big fish swims below the minnows, and rushed ahead unharmed. Diamonds not as lucky, flat ones that were poorly crystallized or contained impurities, broke along the way. It was a kind of natural selection, in which only superior, perfectly formed stones survived.

Then the Diamond rested for a few more million years as it became imprisoned again in a new rock conglomerate. When that in turn eroded after several million more, the gray stone traveled farther before it found itself imbedded and stationary yet again. And so it went from age to age, from the Paleozoic to the Mesozoic, when great dinosaurs swished and heaved their bulk about, to the Cenozoic, which covers the past seventy million years.

When did the first hand close around it, taking it forever from nature’s world to man’s? Was it around 40,000 b.c. whe...