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      Louis XIV’s Blue Gems: Exceptional Rediscoveries at the French National Museum of Natural History

       François FARGES

       IMPMC – CNRS, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle,

       Institut universitaire de France, Paris, France

      Rare minerals – and more particularly gems – were the preferred instruments of power for past rulers. In the 19th century, these political objects became scientific: gemology was born as a branch of mineralogy. Between thefts, sales, covetousness, fashions and other alienations, the majority of these masterpieces of lapidary art have not survived. The rare historical gems that remain today tell lost or fragmented stories: the history of art – French academic art history has long neglected the expertise of gems, relegating them to a craft without creative inspiration. In a worst-case scenario, its expensive trade would definitely disqualify it from aesthetic research, which is dedicated to a pure Bohemian nature and insensitive to markets. Entire sections of this history are, therefore, unknown and left to various “fashionable storytellers” and others who magnify myths through a literary inventiveness that distorts the work of current reasearchers. Among them is the diamond known in English as the “French Blue”, a misleading name because the gem was never named as such in French but rather as the “Grand Diamant Violet de Sa Majesté” (Great Violet Diamond of his Majesty) or the “Great Blue Diamond of Louis XIV”.

Science – be it the history of art or physical chemistry of geomaterials – helps us to restore these objects in a more rigorous way. Thus, surface morphometry and optical spectrometry combined with quantum mechanics has allowed the fabulous blue diamond of Louis XIV, which was stolen in 1792 without leaving any obvious trace, to be reconstituted exactly. Other methodologies of mineralogy allow historical but undocumented exchanges to be reconstituted. Nanotechnologies have even made it possible to recreate an exact replica of this lost diamond, which still remains an absolute natural rarity despite the opening of numerous and very productive mines since the 18th century (Brazil, Africa, Siberia, Australia, Canada, etc.). Unpublished archives also allow us to better understand the often tormented past of these gems and their presence in the French National Museum of Natural History (Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN), also known just as the Muséum).

      Figure 3.1. From museum objects to digital models. © F. Farges/MNHN

      COMMENT ON FIGURE 3.1.– (a) The blue diamond cast found at the MNHN in 2008 and the Hope diamond removed from its bezel. Note how the white paper stands out perfectly in the center of the Hope diamond, where it is thickest (12.9 mm), while in the periphery, the gem appears opaque while its thickness is reduced to 2 mm. The scan of the cast (b) allowed the arrangement of the polygons reflecting the rays of light to be located in terms of space. These data were then simplified on a computer (c) via decimation algorithms to reconstitute the effective facets of the gem, both for the top (crown) and the bottom (pavilion). This model was compared (d) to the one obtained on the Hope diamond in order to observe the correspondence between the two gems under three different angles.

3.1. Introduction

      In the 17th century, Louis XIV took possession of two of the most beautiful blue gems known at the time: the Grand Diamant Bleu (Great Blue Diamond, also called the “French Blue”) (69 carats, or almost 14 grams, Figure 3.1) and the Grand Saphir (Grand Sapphire) (135.7 carats, or more than 27 grams, Figure 3.2). They had the greatest honor as these two gems were listed at the top of the 1691 Crown Jewels inventory, items 2 and 3 respectively of the fabulous royal inventory listing hundreds of gems, amongst extraordinary gems and various jewels (Farges 2014) of which almost nothing remains today.

      However, these two blue gems disappeared in September 1792, during the looting of the Hôtel du Garde-Meuble located on the present-day Place de la Concorde (Bapst 1889). Police investigations show that the jewel was probably taken by a certain Cadet Guillot, a young swindler who fled to London where he was eventually imprisoned (Bapst 1889). The diamond disappeared forever.