ve been so far out of his means to purchase is not recorded. But selling it to Louis XIV along with a very large (but also unknown) number of others made him an extremely wealthy man, and this diamond became known as the Tavernier Blue. Contemporary drawings were made of both the Tavernier Blue and its smaller offspring the French Blue.
But the French Revolution happened; the King was imprisoned, the royal jewels were plundered. The French Blue disappeared and dropped out of all knowledge. Various historians have theorized where it went and who acquired it; but whoever did it successfully managed to hide their tracks very well.
Where the stories of the French Blue and the Hope Diamond finally intersected for certain was a discovery made in 2009. Jewelers would often cast lead replicas of particularly large or valuable stones, so they could work with the replicas to craft things like mountings. François Farges is a professor of mineralogy at the National Natural History museum in Paris. One day while rummaging through a generic collection of lead replicas, he found a particularly large one that proved to be the French Blue. It was somewhat larger than the Hope, and cut into an odd, irregular shape.
With the replica in hand, Farges was able to make a digital 3D model of it which could be compared to that of the Hope. And, as many experts had suspected, it turned out that the 3D model of the Hope fit very nicely inside the 3D model of the French Blue. Beyond a reasonable doubt, we now had solid backup for the theory that the French Blue had been cut down to create the Hope Diamond. Further bolstering this theory is that 1812, the Hope's official debut in the hands of the London diamond merchant, was twenty years after the French Blue was stolen during the French Revolution. Twenty years was the statute of limitations for theft; thus only in 1812 did it become legally safe to offer it for sale. Stones of this size, with the exact same color, don't exactly disappear and reappear every day, so we can safely assume it's 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 rea