HOPE

An amusing, if gaga, history of the world’s most prized blue stone, from a specialist in the biography of luxury.

Fowler (The Way She Looks Tonight, 1996) treats the story of the Hope Diamond as if it were a real bodice-ripper, describing the gem as “Nature’s absolute kernel of energy and beauty, of her striving, driving, pounding life-force.” And the stone delivers. Fowler’s heroine was born in southern India, with enough boron in its chemistry to give it a gorgeous violet-blue coloration. Fowler imagines the stone first as the third eye in a statue of Siva, a religious transporter, glorious and holy. But it began on the slippery slope to degradation and written history when a French trader and adventurer bought it and in, turn, sold it to King Louis XIV. Since there’s precious little to say about the stone beyond describing its settings and the ways it has been displayed, Fowler provides biographies of its owners, making them as racy as possible. From the French royal family the diamond passed, via a robbery during the Revolution, into the tawdry precincts of the Hopes, a wealthy English banking family—whose subsequent fall from financial grace bestowed upon the newly christened Hope Diamond the legend of the stone’s curse—and thence to the King of Diamonds, jeweler Harry Winston of New York, who gave the stone to the Smithsonian. Fowler manages to impart plenty of information about the diamond, but her weakness for the fabulous sweeps all before it. She may be the only writer who could make a geologic process sound like a Hamptons soirée, as a volcano unleashes the stone with “the fizz and roar of a million champagne corks.”

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the diamond’s first European owner, called it “un beau violet”—perhaps the only possible description more purple than Fowler’s prose.