l man who did die in the shipwreck, but there was no relation to the Sultan's jeweler Sergeant Habib — his given name was Selim, but he went by the Anglicized version Sergeant.
Whew. Confused yet?
So this was the environment in which Pierre Cartier took up the job of gilding the Hope Diamond with an even more dramatic provenance in his efforts to sell it to Evalyn McLean. Inventing stories for gems was a fundamental of the trade; one New York jeweler even published monthly booklets telling stories about the various gems they sold. Pierre knew the McLeans were his best shot; on their honeymoon, he'd already sold them a 95-carat diamond (more than twice the size of the Hope) called the Star of the East. He had little work to do; the London Times had done most of it for him. Upon leaving it with them over a weekend, Evalyn decided that she wanted it. Pierre had added virtually nothing to the common-knowledge (and almost entirely bogus) version of the Hope's history, other than calling it a "curse"; which, so far as researchers have found, was the first time that term was used.
There was a footnote to Cartier's sale of the Hope to the McLeans that proved fortuitous for the legend. The sale was tied up in court for a time over some disputes regarding payment and some customs issues, but the newspapers gleefully reported that the McLeans tried to back out of the deal upon learning of the curse. One headline even read:
M'LEANS TO KEEP THE HOPE DIAMOND,
That Evalyn remained a loyal, lifetime customer of the Cartiers, and that Pierre and his wife became frequent guests at the McLeans' extravagant parties for more than 20 years, shows that whatever animosity existed was confined to the newspaper version of the evil diamond that killed or doomed everyone who came into contact with it. But this should come as no surprise to regular Skeptoid listeners, who know that when you hear any tale of a "curse", you have very good reason to be skeptical.
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