Synopsis
The Hope Diamond — the largest and most beautiful blue diamond ever found — has inspired centuries of legends and lies, fabulous superstition, and fierce passion. French kings and ravishing Hollywood stars have worn it next to their hearts; reckless aristocrats have let it slip through their fingers. Flaunted, hidden, stolen, and cursed, the Hope Diamond still tantalizes and inspires all who lay eyes on it. Now in Hope: Adventures of a Diamond, Marian Fowler tells the riveting story of this mythical gem and the extraordinary men and women who have owned and lost it.
It is a tale that begins more than a billion years ago in the mountains of India where the gem was forged of basest materials. Unearthed sometime before the birth of Christ, it was more than twice its present size and wondrously shaped. For long slow centuries, the immense blue stone, revered as a divine gift, probably served as the unwinking eye in a statue of a Hindu god.
With the arrival of Europeans, the Diamond was snatched from the realm of the mystical and thrust into the world of commerce, materialism, and political symbolism. Marian Fowler brilliantly unfolds the complex story of how French merchant/adventurer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier acquired the sacred diamond in India and sold it to the one monarch who could — and would — pay for it, King Louis XIV of France. Cut and polished to half its original size, the diamond remained in the possession of the house of Bourbon, passed down from Louis to Louis, until a cabal of common thieves stole it during the French Revolution.
The pace quickens once the diamond comes into the possession of Philip Hope, the scion of a Dutch-based trading and banking empire who gave it the name it has carried ever since. But the heady days in the London townhouses and country estates of the Hope family were brief, and by the twentieth century, the Hope Diamond had become the object of unseemly marital wrangling and social climbing of American millionaires. It was only when diamond master Harry Winston donated this prize to the Smithsonian Institution that the Hope was finally safe and accessible to all who wanted to admire it.
A sweeping saga peopled with the world’s most beautiful women and most unprincipled men, Hope: Adventures of a Diamond is at once a page-turning thriller and a glittering social history of the astonishing few who craved — and could afford — such a gem. Dazzling and delicious, this is a book truly worthy of its flawless, priceless subject.
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À propos de l'auteur
Marian Fowler holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto and was the recipient of the Canadian Biography Award. She has taught at York University and is the author of a number of books, including In a Gilded Cage, Below the Peacock Fan, The Embroidered Tent, Blenheim and The Way She Looks Tonight. She lives in Toronto.
Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.
NATURE Framed in the prodigality of nature.
—William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, scene 2
Around the Diamond, as provocative as a woman’s perfume, as protective as a force field, there has always been mystery. It was present at the very beginning to hide the jewel’s conception and swaddle its birth.
After five hundred years of studying diamonds, geologists can make informed speculations but still can’t determine the exact de- tails of their genesis. The one in this story has proved more intract- able than most, for it contains none of the inclusions of other mineral crystals that would help to determine its age. Like a great many beauties, our protagonist guards the secret of how old it is — as well it might, since it is far older than those primitive forms of life that first crawled on the ocean’s floor. The amazing truth is that the Diamond, much more beautiful now than in its early years and still utterly desirable, is — don’t shout it from the rooftops but whisper it discreetly — between one and three billion years old. It was conceived when Earth itself was still a hot young planet, when time had no past tense.
If we can’t fix the date of its creation except vaguely, give or take a billion years, we do know the place. The Diamond formed in the southern, peninsular part of India, which is now bounded on both seacoasts by ranges of hills (the Western and Eastern Ghats) and is known as the Deccan plateau. Its four-billion-year-old spine makes it India’s oldest part. The gem originated about 120 miles below the Deccan plains, not in the Earth’s crust, which is only about 25 miles thick, but in the fiery caldron of the mantle beneath, which goes down 1,750 miles.
The upper mantle was incredibly hot and turbulent, where gases roared and reservoirs of molten rock rippled and heaved. Nothing in the Diamond’s future would be half so cataclysmic as its beginnings. Its creation required what geologists call “a special melting event” with a heat between 1300 and 4500 degrees Fahrenheit to liquefy the dark, heavy rock called peridotite, combined with a pressure somewhere between 0.5 and 1.3 million pounds per square inch.
There in that tremendous heat and pressure, in one of the great cosmic coincidences that, thus far in human history, has yielded man only forty tons of diamonds, crystallization began. Like every crystal, be it snowflake or gemstone, this one would be unique, its own self, as different from other diamonds as one human is from another.
The growing process was probably quite gradual, for the larger the crystal, the slower its forming must be. While the Diamond was getting bigger, the great pressure of the carbon dioxide gas below the layer of slowly cooling molten peridotite containing it had to remain equal to the pressure of the layers of rock above. Although it was the rarest prize in nature, it was made of the most ordinary matter, namely, carbon. This exists in our own bodies, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the fuels we burn: wood, coal, oil, gasoline. One might say that the Diamond then coming into being was both high class and low, aristocrat and commoner. The magic was in the making.
Eighteen atoms of carbon darted together into a minute cube, an isometric cell, a diamond’s basic building block. The cubes in turn multiplied into a regular latticework. The shape evolving basically conformed to the one diamonds prefer, an octahedron, which looks like two pyramids joined base to base. The Diamond’s cubic structure was probably taking on the contours to be seen in the first extant drawing we have of it, done in the seventeenth century. This shows a rough stone that, if held with its broader end as base, resembled a giant teardrop; if reversed, it looked like a heart; it could, therefore, depending on a viewer’s sensibility, accommodate itself to tragedy or romantic comedy.
While crystallization was still taking place, there were three distinct miracles. The first one involved color. While some diamonds are being created, an atom of another element may take the place of a carbon one. In this Diamond’s coalescing atoms, there was an atom of boron for every million of carbon. Once the gem had reached light and received its first polish — and that was a long way off — it was the boron that would make it blue. With the exception of red, blue is the rarest of all colors for a diamond. Depending on the nature of its alien atoms—for a fine stone, there must be no more than one foreign part for every hundred thousand of carbon — a diamond may also be green, yellow, pink, the highly valued hues, or brown, gray, or black. Most blues are light in color and less than 2 carats. The Diamond then forming in that hot, heaving womb would be the biggest dark blue ever found.
The second miracle concerned matter. If the pressures had been lower, carbon atoms might have stacked themselves in flat six-sided sheets, with the bonds between the layers so weak that they could easily slide over each other; the resulting dull mineral would have been graphite, from which pencils are made.
Hardness was the third miracle. It is the strength of a crystal’s bonds that determines this, and a diamond’s are the strongest in the world, giving it the highest point, 10, on Mohs’ scale of hardness now used in mineralogy, where graphite gets 1.5. Diamonds are eighty-five times harder than the next gems on the scale, rubies and sapphires, and can only be scratched by their own kind. However, the Diamond was not invulnerable, as we shall see later.
At last the stone’s long gestation came to an end, and its creation was complete. It weighed at least 110.5 metric carats, and was nature’s absolute kernel of energy and beauty, of her striving, driving, pounding life force, compressed to firmest, clearest compass. It was Creation’s brightest thought. However, until man came to its rescue and revealed its beauty, it would wear a disfiguring, slightly shiny, greasy gray caul.
Somewhere between one billion and five hundred million years ago, the stone’s passage from darkness to light, from womb to world, began. It would be a long and perilous journey, for the Diamond had to pass unharmed up through almost a hundred miles of mantle, then twenty-five miles of crust. While the first stages were probably gentle enough, with the gemstone moving upward an inch or two a year, eventually it accelerated to the speed of a rocket. During this wild, jolting ride, it was in great danger, for it could have shattered at any moment. This was no easy delivery. En route, the pressures of the molten rock around the gem cracked the surrounding rocks, so that bits of other minerals joined the thrust and push; most probably spinel and garnet, bloodred as the magma itself, were among them.
When the mother rock that had held the Diamond for so long hit the Earth’s surface, along with trapped gases, it exploded with the force of a volcano, the fizz and roar of a million champagne corks, and a dense shower of ash and rock fragments.
After the shock of this explosion, the Diamond was still imprisoned in its red-hot surrounding rock, which didn’t flow out and down like lava but instead, due to the pressure of ascending magma, merely bulged upward on the Earth’s surface, then collapsed at the center once the gases had escaped. This mother rock in which all diamonds originate wouldn’t acquire a name until 1870, when they were first found in abundance in South Africa near the town of Kimberley: the rock was named kimberlite. It is an altered and broken form of peridotite, blue-green in color due to its iron content, consisting mainly of the minerals pyroxene and olivine. In the crater resulting from the explosion, the kimberlite cooled and hardened into a deposit measuring from a few hundred yards to a mile wide, with the Diamond still somewhere inside it. Beneath the surface, the rock became a vertical “pipe” with kimberlite’s typical carrot shape, broad at the top, then narrowing as it goes deeper into the Earth.
Millions of years passed while the big, shiny gray stone waited to be released. The top of the kimberlite cone gradually grew more concave and began to crack and crumble, owing to the then prevailing violent extremes of heat and cold. The north polar ice sheet crept as far south as the Himalayan mountains several times; in these glacial periods, the Deccan area didn’t freeze but was flooded with torrential rains.
Being much stronger and harder than the kimberlite around it, the Diamond stood firm, while the mother rock grew pale, turning from blue-green to yellow, cracking and crumbling. Then came the day when the rock released the gemstone and the Diamond was freed into a rushing, muddy torrent of water, yellow rock fragments, and other pebbles.
It began its second journey, and this was not like its dangerous escape from the underworld but rather a vagabond adventure in which the gray rolling stone bumped and tumbled along in mudslides and rivers. Because of its great density, it traveled close to the bottom of streams, just as a big fish swims below the minnows, and rushed ahead unharmed. Diamonds not as lucky, flat ones that were poorly crystallized or contained impurities, broke along the way. It was a kind of natural selection, in which only superior, perfectly formed stones survived.
Then the Diamond rested for a few more million years as it became imprisoned again in a new rock conglomerate. When that in turn eroded after several million more, the gray stone traveled farther before it found itself imbedded and stationary yet again. And so it went from age to age, from the Paleozoic to the Mesozoic, when great dinosaurs swished and heaved their bulk about, to the Cenozoic, which covers the past seventy million years.
When did the first hand close around it, taking it forever from nature’s world to man’s? Was...
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
