A Gem Trader’s Tale

RAPAPORT…

A love of history and a fascination with gemstones made writing the novelized story of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier a natural fit for gemologist Richard W. Wise, president of R.W. Wise Goldsmiths, Inc. The book, titled The French Blue, covers 40 years and six voyages, culminating in Tavernier’s deal of a lifetime, the acquisition of the 116-carat diamond, the French Blue, which ultimately became known as the Hope Diamond.

Wise says he first became interested in Tavernier while he was researching his first book, Secrets Of The Gem Trade, The Connoisseur’s Guide To Precious Gemstones. “I found lots of material on the lore, geology, history and mining of gems but almost nothing on the subject of quality evaluation and connoisseurship. Tavernier was fairly closemouthed, but he did drop a few very important hints, which are incorporated in the novel. So, in a sense, he was my mentor.” 

Moreover, Wise adds, Tavernier’s real-life adventures “are the stuff of ten adventure novels peopled with fictional heroes, and most of what I write about are his real adventures in novelized form.” Pointing to Tavernier’s accomplishments, Wise says, “he was a sociologist, he was an historian, he was an anthropologist, he was a philosopher of religion in a way. He was really one of the most fascinating men of that century. He traveled 180,000 miles, which is more than Magellan, more than Columbus. And he was the world’s most accomplished gem dealer.” In the end,

Wise notes, Tavernier sold Louis XIV a thousand diamonds, including the French Blue. Like Tavernier, Wise says he’s “traveled the world buying gems,” so he found he was able to “get inside the head of another gem trader.”

Finding the Facts

Devoting five years to the project, Wise meticulously researched not only Tavernier’s life but the social customs and political intrigues of the seventeenth century, filling in the blanks of Tavernier’s life with historically accurate characters and backdrops. In Tavernier’s own book that, says Wise, was written “at the behest of Louis XIV as a guide to the French East India Company,” Tavernier didn’t talk much about himself, “so all of the dialogue in my book is made up. In some cases, I found contemporary accounts of the same event in the works of other writers, so I was able to flesh it out. But when you read a date, the date is correct. Whenever you read about a place in the book, Tavernier almost invariably was in that place at the date I create an adventure for it.”

Wise has incorporated in the book a number of Tavernier’s own expressions, “integrated into the narrative to give the flavor of his language. His book was first translated in 1678, but if you read the first edition of his book, you’d find that the language is surprisingly modern. He doesn’t talk like Shakespeare.”

Trade Secrets

There were a number of expressions relating to diamonds that Wise says are not used anymore. One such term is “water.” “I found that terminology in his actual writings — he uses it all the time. You’d have first water, second water, etc. and the worst quality was called bye-water.

“If you look at Robert Shipley’s Dictionary of Gems and Gemology, he defines water as an archaic term used to describe the combination of color and transparency…. When Tavernier talks about a gem of the finest water, he’s talking about how important transparency is in the grading of a gemstone,” explains Wise.

Other “trade secrets” in the book that Wise says come directly from Tavernier include grading a pearl by virtue “not of its perfect roundness or its color but by virtue of the fact that you can see through it — in other words, it has water.”

“Tavernier also talked about how you grade a diamond,” relates Wise. “He says, ‘If you walk under a tree, you will see the blue in the stone.’ And in fact, type IIa diamonds — colorless, D flawless, no fluorescence — in certain lights, under certain conditions, will glow blue. I sold a diamond for $1.4 million  when I showed a client that.”

Tavernier’s father was a cartographer, as were his uncle and cousin. And, Wise points out, Tavernier “had a draftsman’s eye. In fact, he was so accurate that in the recent reconstructions of the French Blue and the Tavernier Blue diamonds, they used his drawings, straight out of the French edition of his book, and found that they seemed to be quite accurate. They were able to fit the French Blue inside it. And it fit very tightly.” And, Wise continues, once the lead model of the French Blue diamond was found in the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, scholars were able to determine that the Hope diamond had indeed been cut from the French Blue.

A Diamond like no other

Perhaps Tavernier’s greatest claim to fame for the modern reader is his connection to the Hope Diamond. “We don’t really know where he found the French Blue,” says Wise, “or how much he paid for it or when he got it. He doesn’t really tell us. In the last part of the book, I create a scenario where he buys the stone and gets chased all over India by fanatics, but I think he acquired it pretty much the way a gem dealer would acquire a stone — if he had stolen it from the eye of an idol, which is part of the legend, we would have known about it.”

 “Cartier made up the legend of the curse and he was a pretty smart marketer. So that and the fact that it was owned by a couple of socialites,” says Wise, have given the Hope Diamond its mystique that continues to fascinate visitors to the Smithsonian, where the diamond is on display.

It has been 50 years since the Hope was donated by Harry Winston to the National Museum of Natural History. To mark the occasion, this spring, the diamond will be temporarily given a new setting, Embracing Hope, by Winston designer Maurice Galli, which was chosen by an online poll. In another historic first, until the new setting is complete, the Hope is being exhibited unmounted. Adding interest for diamond aficionados, the Hope is joined by the Wittelsbach-Graff diamond on loan to the Smithsonian through August 1, 2010. Another dazzling blue of Indian origin, the Wittelsbach-Graff has not been publicly exhibited for more than 50 years.

“If you follow the story of the Hope, it’s had a pretty colorful history,” says Wise. “There are lots of legends and theories — particularly in the period after 1792, when the French Blue is stolen — as to how it got to be the Hope, if it’s the Hope, who had it, what they did with it. I think it’s our fascination with celebrity and the fact that it is one of the most, probably ounce for ounce, expensive single things on earth.”

“The history of the Hope begins with Tavernier,” sums up Wise. “He acquired the diamond — we don’t know from exactly where or exactly how, but we do have some idea. I present my own theory in the novel. Primarily, it’s a work of fiction to be enjoyed and, if you learn something along the way, that’s good.”