The Regent Diamond, like the Blue Tavernier, was stolen from the French royal treasures at the brink of the Revolution, but unlike the others this gem was recovered and restored to its place in France. A superb stone, the diamond weighed 410 carats in 1701, when it was picked up by a slave in the Partial Mines of India. The slave, following storied precedent, gashed his leg and hid the stone in the bandage. He limped his way to the seacoast. There he offered to share the proceeds of the sale of the stone with a sea captain; but unfortunately the slave did not survive the rigors of the ocean voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Bombay found the captain in sole possession of the stone.
From an Indian merchant it was bought by Thomas Pitt, then Governor of Madras, and sent to England to be cut. Political enemies bruited abroad that he had obtained the stone by questionable means; though they never got to the core of the matter, he became known as Diamond Pitt. He sold the diamond in 1717 to the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, for about $500,000, which kept the family in affluence through several generations. But at any moment in the political careers of the great English statesman, William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger—major figures in the struggles with the American colonies and the American Revolution—there might be dragged out, as a political target, that family skeleton about the coming of the Pitt Diamond to England.
The Pitt Diamond, now renamed the Regent, was cut into a cushion-shaped brilliant of 140 carats, a superbly sparkling specimen of a great gem deftly handled. Marie Antoinette used it to adorn a large black velvet hat she favored, borrowing it from the crown of Louis XV. But it remained with the royal jewels until they were all stolen in 1792.
Found in a Paris garret, the diamond came to Napoleon, who pawned it to secure funds for his triumphant campaigns. After using the stone in this fashion several times, he had it set into the hilt of his ceremonial coronation sword.
When Napoleon went into exile, the stone accompanied his second wife, Marie Louise, to the Chateau of Blois. Her father, the Emperor of Austria, returned it to Louis XVIII. The diamond shuttled between the Napoleons and the Louis until France became a republic. When the French crown jewels were auctioned in 1886, the Regent Diamond was withheld from the sale.
By lying quietly behind a stone panel of a chateau in Chambord, the Regent escaped capture by the Germans in the Second World War. It is now on display in the Louvre where, like the Kohinoor cage at the Crystal Palace, its case sinks nightly into a burglar-proof vault.
The Sancy
The Sancy and the Regent are the only jewels of the French royal treasure that were recovered after the robbery of 1792. Legend has confused the early story of the Sancy stone with that of the Florentine Diamond, but it has had enough vicissitudes to make an historic tale. A superb and fiery stone of 54 carats, one of the first ever cut in symmetrical facets, the diamond was bought in Constantinople, about 1570, by the French Ambassador to Turkey, the Seigneur de Sancy. Back at the court of his king, vicious and vain Henry III, Sancy was constrained to lend the diamond to his monarch, who set it in the cap he wore to cover his baldness.
The shrewd successor to the throne, Henry IV, made Sancy the Minister of Finance, and the again borrowed diamond was used as security to raise troops. The stone was sent to the moneylenders in Metz; but the messenger was waylaid and slain. The diamond vanished. Sure of the man’s loyalty, Sancy recovered the body and had an autopsy performed; and from the stomach of the faithful servant the diamond was recovered.