 a fact that they are the same diamond, as many had already believed.
But notice that we haven't said much about a curse yet, and that's because the curse wasn't really a thing for most of the diamond's history. Many modern sources credit the Cartiers, Pierre in particular, with inventing the story in order to make the diamond more attractive to Evalyn McLean. And he did indeed have a big role in this, but his ability to do so was only thanks to something else that happened a few years earlier.
It was when Frankel brought the diamond from London, where he couldn't sell it, to New York, where he hoped to sell but found his luck just as bad; and he'd taken on considerable debt to add it to his inventory. Everywhere the Hope Diamond went it attracted media attention because of its great value and provenance. Frankel's white elephant even drew some parody. The New York Times poked fun at the plight faced by Frankel and other jewelers in 1908:
The next year, Frankel sold it to Habib, and reminded the media of the story. The London Times was first, running a wildly satirical (and very anonymous) article headlined "Sale of the Hope Diamond". Diverging at once from reality, the Times sold the diamond instead to a fictional Russian prince who gave it to a famous actress before shooting her on stage, and was then stabbed to death himself. The broker went insane and killed himself; a Greek owner and his family fell off a precipice to their deaths. Eventually the story curved closer to reality with a mention of the Sultan of Turkey, but added some revolutionaries who dramatically broke into the palace and assassinated a beautiful young woman wearing the jewel. And so on, and so on.
And a new fashion had been born. The next year, the New York Times reported that Habib and the diamond had been lost at sea when a French steamship sunk near Singapore, which actually prompted real-world salvage operations resulting in the recovery of the ship's (disappointingly empty) safe. It turns out that Selim Habib had been the name of a real 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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