published it in a catalog of his holdings, but no record survives of where or when he acquired it. When he died, his three sons fought over his estate, and one — Henry Thomas Hope — got this diamond plus seven others. It then passed to his grandson, Francis Hope, who blew everything on an extravagant lifestyle. It passed into the hands of brokers and finally to diamond merchant Simon Frankel who brought it to New York just as the diamond market tanked in 1907. Men such as Charles Schwab and J.P. Morgan considered it, but nobody bought. It then changed hands to other diamond merchants: first to Sergeant Habib on behalf of the Sultan of Turkey, then to Simon Rosenau, and finally to the day's rock stars of jewelry, the Cartier brothers. No private customer seemed to want it, but the Cartiers thought that if anyone could sell it, they could.
And they did. It took a while, but the stone was finally purchased in 1912 by the millionaire McLeans, Edward ("Ned") of the Washington Post fortune and Evalyn, daughter of Thomas Walsh, a gold miner who had struck it very, very rich in 1869 and built the most expensive mansion in Washington, DC. When she died in 1947, it passed through a trustee sale to jeweler Harry Winston, who finally donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958, where it has remained ever since. Winston's donation is best remembered for having been simply shipped through the US Mail from New York.
But what about prior to 1812? A stone like the Hope didn't just appear by magic, and it's no coincidence that about the time it did appear, another huge blue diamond just happened to disappear. It was called the French Blue. This was a 67-carat blue diamond owned by King Louis XIV, which he created in 1678 by having it cut from an even larger stone. That one was a whopping 112- or 115-carat (accounts vary) diamond that had been brought from India by the French diamond merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, during one of several trips to India he made in the mid 1600s. Exactly how he acquired a diamond that would have 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