CURSED HOPE   The man who stole it, French explorer Jean Baptiste Tavernier, went mad. Marie Antoinette, who wore it, died on the guillotine. Marie Antoinette’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe, who had worn it on several occasions, was torn to pieces by the mob. The diamond turned up next around 1800 in the possession of a Dutch diamond cutter named Fals, who shaped into its present form. Fals’s son stole it and the cutter died of grief. In remorse, the son killed himself. Eventually, the stone was bought by Henry Thomas Hope, an English banker who gave it its name. henry Hope escaped any evil consequences but his grandson, Lord Francis Hope, who acquired the diamond in 1830, had a disastrous marriage and died in poverty. The next owner, a French financier, went mad and eventually committed suicide. More than 20 people associated with the stone had met with disaster. In 1908, the diamond was sold to a Russian nobleman, Prince Kanitovski. He gave it to his mistress, Mademoisselle Ladue, one of the stars of the ‘Folies Bergere’. She was shot in the theatre by a spurned lover and two days later, the prince himself was stabbed to death in Not long afterwards, Evalyn herself died of Pneumonia and was declared bankrupt. The Hope diamond was left jointly to her six grandchildren, but they were never allowed to touch it. No doubt, the McClean family thought the Hope diamond and its sinister was out of their lives for ever. But in December 1967, twenty-five year old Evalyn McClean, the lovely young daughter of Evalyn Walsh McClean, was found dead at her home in a suburb of In 1958, it was given to the Smithsonian Institute in |
