Stories about Famous Precious Stones Part 8

After Emir Jemla had presented his matchless diamond to Shah Jehan, who was a man of taste in gems, he gave the Emperor to understand that the diamonds of Golconda were quite other things from "those rocks of Kandahar," which he had seen hitherto. This was a rather contemptuous phrase to use to an emperor who already possessed the Koh-i-nur.

However, the stone which Emir Jemla gave to Shah Jehan so far exceeded everything that had been hitherto dreamed of in the way of diamonds that he might be excused if he exaggerated somewhat.

It will be well here to quote Tavernier's account of the Great Mogul diamond, even though something out of the chronological order. The occasion is Tavernier's departure from Delhi on his sixth and last return from India to Europe.

"The first of November, 1665, I was at the Palace to take leave of the King (Aurungzeb) but he said I must not go without seeing his jewels since I had seen the magnificence of his fete. Next morning very early five or six officers came from the king and others from the Nabob Jafer Khan, to say the king was waiting for me. As soon as I arrived the two courtiers who had charge of the jewels accompanied me to his Majesty, and after the customary salutations they took me into a small chamber situated at the end of the hall where the king was sitting on his throne, and whence he could see us. I found in this chamber Akel Khan, the chief keeper of the jewels, who as soon as he saw me commanded the four eunuchs of the king to go and fetch the jewels which were brought on two wooden trays lacquered with gold-leaf, and covered with cloths made on purpose, one of red velvet and one of green velvet embroidered.

After they were uncovered and had been counted, each piece two or three times, a list was drawn up by the three scribes present.

Indians do all things with much care and deliberation, and when they see any one acting with precipitation or getting angry they look upon it as a thing to laugh at.

"The first piece which Akel Khan put into my hands was the great diamond which is a round rose, cut very high on one side. On the lower edge there is a slight crack and a little flaw in it. Its water is beautiful and it weighs 319 1-2 ratis which make 280 of our carats, the ratis being 7-8 of our carat. When Mergimola (_i.e._ Emir Jemla) who betrayed the king of Golconda, his master, made present of this stone to Shah Jehan to whose court he retired, it was rough, and weighed then 900 ratis which make 787 1-2 carats, and there were several flaws in it. If this stone had been in Europe it would have been differently treated, for several good slices would have been taken off, and it would have remained heavier instead of which it has been entirely ground down. It was Hortenzio Borgis, a Venetian, who cut it, for which he was sufficiently badly recompensed, for when it was seen, he was reproached with having ruined the stone, which should have remained heavier, and instead of paying him for his work, the king fined him ten thousand rupees and would have taken more if he had possessed it. If Sieur Hortenzio had understood his business well he would have been able to get several good pieces from this stone without doing any wrong to the King, and without having the trouble of grinding it down, but he was an unskillful diamond-cutter."

Tavernier held this great stone in his hand for some time and contemplated it at his leisure. It must have been a great day for him, the connoisseur, to see and examine the finest diamond in existence. It is well he looked long and keenly at it, for it was never again to be seen by European eyes. On this second of November, 1665, the Great Mogul was seen for the first, last and only time by one able to tell us anything about it. This was its meteor-flash into history and fame. It was seen by the man best able to appreciate it and then never seen again. The accompanying ill.u.s.tration is taken from Tavernier's drawing of the Great Mogul.

Incidentally we learn something more of the monster diamond from the pen of the same writer. Speaking of the Coulour or Gani diamond-mine, Tavernier says:

"There are still found there large stones, larger than elsewhere, from ten to forty carats and sometimes larger, among them the great diamond which weighed nine hundred carats (an evident slip for ratis) before being cut, which Mirgimola presented to Aurungzeb (another slip for Shah Jehan) as I have said before."

To explain these slips of Tavernier's pen it will be well to state that the great Frenchman, though speaking all European and many Asiatic languages, was yet unable to write in any, not even in his own. He therefore borrowed the pen of two different persons to write his delightful travels which give us such a living picture of Indian life two centuries ago. The Coulour mine, here spoken of, was discovered about a century before Tavernier's time, in a very singular manner. A peasant when preparing the ground to sow millet, unearthed a sparkling pebble which excited his attention. Golconda was near enough for him to have heard of diamonds, so he brought his prize to a merchant at the latter place. The merchant was amazed to see in the peasant's pebble a very large diamond. The fame of Coulour quickly spread, and it soon became a great mining center, employing thousands of workmen. Tavernier objects that the mine yielded stones of impure water. The gems, he declares, seemed to partake of the nature of the soil and tended to a greenish, a reddish, or a yellowish hue as the case might be.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT MOGUL.]

This defect was not apparent in the Great Mogul which was, he distinctly says, perfect, of good water and of good form, having but one little flaw on the lowest edge. Taking this flaw into consideration, the value of the diamond, according to Tavernier's scale of estimation, was 11,723,278 livres which being reduced to present coinage yields the goodly sum of $2,344,655. Being permitted to weigh it, he found the exact weight to be 279 9-16 carats.

Then after looking at the diamond as long as he wanted, for Akel Khan did in no wise hurry him, Tavernier was shown a mult.i.tude of other gems of lesser note, and among them a pearl perfectly round, weighing thirty-six and one half ratis of beautiful l.u.s.ter, white, and perfect in every way.

"This is the only jewel which Aurungzeb who reigns now has bought on account of its beauty, for all the others came to him in part from Dara, his eldest brother, to whose belongings he succeeded after having cut off his head, and in part from presents from his n.o.bles."

This slight remark opens to our view one of the saddest chapters of the gloomy family history of Shah Jehan's sons. And as Dara was once the possessor of the Great Mogul, we may be allowed to give his pitiful story in a few words.

Prince Dara (David) the eldest son of Shah Jehan and the Light of the World, was destined by his father to succeed him on the throne of Delhi. Having, as we have already seen, disposed of his other three sons in the furthest corners of India, the old king thought he was safe. But one of those sons, Aurungzeb, was a man of restless ambition. Not content with his appointed province of the Deccan, Aurungzeb pretended to the imperial crown itself. In 1657 Shah Jehan fell sick, and Aurungzeb, attended by a large army, which included a contingent under Emir Jemla's command, hastened toward Delhi. The aged emperor, dreading the filial solicitude which arrayed itself in so formidable a manner, sent orders to his son to return to his province. Aurungzeb not only did not return, but persuaded another brother to come up from his province, likewise attended by an army, and together they marched upon their father's capital. The course of Asiatic intrigue is too complicated and subtle for any but the merest antiquary to track it. Suffice it to say that after much lying and many protestations of obedience, matters came to a crisis, and Dara was sent by Shah Jehan to oppose Aurungzeb by force.

Dara was overthrown and returned humiliated to his father's palace.

Recollecting that his own path to the throne lay through the blood of his nearest relatives, Shah Jehan, no longer able to defend his eldest son against the undutiful Aurungzeb, gave him two elephant-loads of gold and jewels, and bade him escape. The Great Mogul diamond was apparently among the jewels thus despairingly bestowed upon his son by the enfeebled old king. At all events Dara escaped and fled from friend to friend for the s.p.a.ce of one year, and it was during this time that he was seen by Bernier, the famous French surgeon, who was afterwards attached to the service of Aurungzeb.

Meantime that successful traitor dethroned and then imprisoned his father, whose grandiloquent t.i.tle of Shah Jehan (Lord of the World) became a bitter mockery when designating the prisoner of Agra, and then he awaited the treachery of some of Dara's so-called friends. In the course of a twelvemonth, his patience was rewarded. The chief of Jun, who had reason to be grateful for many favors from Dara, gained an infamous notoriety by delivering the fugitive prince over to his usurping brother.

Aurungzeb caused Prince Dara to be publicly paraded through the streets of Delhi with his little seven-year-old grandson by his side, while the executioner stood ominously behind him. This pitiful spectacle was witnessed by all Delhi, and many tears were shed over the fall of Dara, but "no one raised a hand to aid him," remarks Bernier, who was one of the spectators. After a mock trial the unhappy prince was sentenced to death, and a slave with several satellites was sent to the prison of Gevalior to dispatch him. Dara was engaged in cooking some lentils for himself and his little grandson, for this was the only food he would touch, lest they should be secretly poisoned. The moment the slaves entered, he cried out, "Behold, my son, those who are come to slay us!"

and s.n.a.t.c.hing up a small knife he tried to defend himself and the child.

It was an unequal fight which could but end in one way. The boy was quickly made an end of, and Dara being thrown down was held by the legs while one of the slaves cut off his head. The head was then immediately brought to Aurungzeb, as a certificate that his orders had been duly executed. The king desired the face to be washed and wiped in his presence and then, when he saw that it was the veritable head of Dara, his brother, he fell a-weeping and cried aloud: "O, Dara! O, unhappy man! Take it away! Bury it in the tomb of Humaiyun."

Such was the fate of Dara, the second owner of the Great Mogul.

In conclusion Tavernier says of the treasures belonging to Aurungzeb:

"These then are the jewels of the Grand Mogul which he showed to me by a particular grace granted to no other foreigner, and I held them all in my hand and considered them with so much attention and leisure that I can a.s.sure the reader that the description which I have given is very exact and faithful, as also of the stones which I had time enough to contemplate."

Here absolutely ends the history of this magnificent gem. What became of it no one knows. Whether it was lost in the sack of Delhi, or carried off by Nadir Shah along with the Koh-i-nur, it is impossible to say, or even to conjecture with any degree of plausibility. No account of this grand diamond, however, would be complete without some reference to the extraordinary myths which have gathered around it. There is scarcely another large diamond of no matter what size, or what color, or what shape, that has not sometime, or by somebody, been declared to be the Great Mogul. Its subsequent history seems to be the happy hunting-ground of the foolish theories of writers on precious stones. Men who write carefully enough about other diamonds, launch out into the wildest conjectures about the Great Mogul. They apparently cannot bear the thought of losing so precious a gem and therefore they find it somewhere, no matter to what inconsistency and absurdity they may be reduced in the process of identification.

Take a few examples.

It has been maintained that the Great Mogul is the Orloff; that it is the Koh-i-nur; that it is both together; that it is the Orloff, the Koh-i-nur and a third beside, now lost, which Hortenzio Borgis obtained by cleavage--the precise thing which Tavernier distinctly says he did not do, preferring to grind it down; that it was not a diamond at all, but a white topaz--as if Tavernier, the greatest expert of his times, would not have detected that fact. Even Mr. Streeter, in general a most reliable authority on diamonds, is dazzled into inconsistency when he comes to treat of the Great Mogul. In his work, _Precious Stones and Gems_, published in 1877, he says under the head of celebrated diamonds: "The diamond known as the Great Mogul has received an amount of attention beyond any other. _Under the name of the Koh-i-nur (Mountain of Light)_ it played an important part in the Exhibition of 1851," etc., etc. Now harken to Mr. Streeter writing in 1882: "If this description (Tavernier's) be compared with the models both of the Koh-i-nur and of the Great Mogul itself in our possession, all doubts will be at once removed as to the essentially different character of the two crystals."

Again: "The two differ absolutely in their origin, history, size and form!" The Mr. Streeter of 1882 is wisely ignorant of the lucubrations of the Mr. Streeter of 1877.

Unable to offer the slightest hint as to the fate of the Great Mogul we can only hope that some future day may reveal it, and until then we must put up with our ignorance as best we may. It came and went in a flash of glory, the Meteor of Diamonds.

X.

THE AUSTRIAN YELLOW.

The subject of this article is, as its name sets forth, a diamond of a yellow hue. After the Orloff it is the largest cut diamond in Europe, weighing one hundred and thirty-nine and a half carats. Tavernier, who first mentions it, says "it has a tinge of yellow which is a pity." King declares, "on the highest authority," which he does not further particularize, that this tinge is a very strong one, almost destroying its brilliancy.

Yellow diamonds are not necessarily devoid of brilliancy, as we can bear witness from personal knowledge. There was recently offered for sale at a public auction in London a very large specimen known as the Orange Diamond, of one hundred and ten carats weight, which we carefully examined. The circ.u.mstances were decidedly adverse to the beauty of a diamond, for it was in the half-light of a London fog that we saw it, yet the stone seemed literally to shoot tongues of yellow fire from its facets. It was a round brilliant, and being set in a circle of about a score of white diamonds its tawny complexion was shown to admirable advantage. The jewel was supported on a delicate spring which vibrated with each step upon the floor, so that there was a constant coruscation of light around it.

It is difficult to establish the early history of the Austrian Yellow.

Tavernier saw it in Florence somewhere about 1642, but he does not say whence it came. Its appearance proves it to be an Indian-cut rose, but that does not help us much with regard to its private wanderings in Europe. A good authority on diamonds, de Laet, who flourished shortly before Tavernier's time, declared that the largest diamond then known weighed seventy carats, which would clearly indicate that he knew nothing about the much larger yellow diamond. Tradition relates that it was bought for a few pence in the market at Florence, under the impression that it was a piece of gla.s.s! If this is so, one would be glad of some particulars of the moment when the happy possessor found out his mistake.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AUSTRIAN YELLOW--TOP AND SIDE.]

Tavernier says that "the Grand Duke (of Tuscany) did him the honor to show him the diamond several times." He made a drawing of it, as he did of nearly all the large diamonds he saw, and his estimation of its value is two millions of livres (about four hundred thousand dollars)--a low price considering the size of the stone; but no doubt its yellow tinge had something to say to it. The Grand Duke of Tavernier's time was Ferdinand II., who reigned from 1621 to 1670--a man of considerable enlightenment, a protector of Galileo and an encourager of literature.

If there is any truth in the popular belief to which we shall presently allude, that diamonds promote the mutual affection of husband and wife, then indeed the great yellow stone had need of its charm in the case of Ferdinand's son and successor, Cosimo III. This luckless prince was married to Marguerite Louise d'Orleans, niece of Louis XIV., a young lady of flighty fancies and obstinate willfulness. Being deeply attached to her cousin of Lorraine, she was only induced to give her hand to the heir of Tuscany on the threat of imprisonment in a convent. She was married in 1660 and made her state entry into Florence amid unparalleled splendor. Immediately afterwards the courts of Europe rang with the quarrels of the newly-wedded pair. The Pope of Rome, the King of France, mother, sisters, aunts, amba.s.sadors, bishops, cardinals, lady's maids, each in turn interfered with the object of restoring harmony, and each in turn ignominiously failed. Here surely was work for the diamond had it been possessed of its reputed power.

During this time and for many years afterwards, the diamond about which we write was known as the "Florentine" or "Grand Tuscan." It was the chief jewel in the treasure-house of the Medici, and no doubt filled a conspicuous place in the pageants of the grand-ducal court. The Florentine sovereigns were not wealthy, but upon state occasions they made extraordinary displays which sometimes deceived foreigners visiting among them into a false idea of their affluence. A wedding was always a favorite occasion upon which to show off their finery. For example, at the marriage of Violante de Baviere with the son of Cosimo III., a magnificence was displayed such as was never before seen even in Florence. The bride sat on a car studded with gems. Her father-in-law with his crown, no doubt containing the great diamond, upon his head, met her at the gate of San Gallo and escorted her to the palace.

This princess dying childless, the throne was occupied by Giovan-Gaston, another son of Cosimo III. and the flighty Marguerite. He likewise left no heirs, so with his death in 1737 terminated the great house of Medici. Giovan-Gaston was succeeded on the grand-ducal throne by Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who was forced much against his inclination to change his paternal duchy of Lorraine for that of Tuscany. He was married to Maria Theresa, archd.u.c.h.ess of Austria, afterwards so famous as the Empress-queen who fought valiantly against Frederick the Great.

By the will of Giovan-Gaston dei Medici all the statues, books, pictures and jewels of his palace were "to remain forever at Florence as public property for the benefit of the people and the attraction of foreign visitors," and none were to be removed from out of the Grand Duchy.

Francis Stephen and Maria Theresa entered their new capital, remained there four months, and then departing carried away with them the great Tuscan diamond. So much for the respect paid to the wills of dead princes! Henceforward the yellow diamond became known as the Austrian Yellow in recognition, we suppose, of the royal thief who carried it off from Florence.

At the coronation of Francis Stephen as emperor of Germany at Frankfort-on-the-Main, on the fourth of October, 1745, the pilfered diamond was used to decorate his Majesty's imperial diadem. Maria Theresa had been extremely anxious for her husband to be emperor, both because she was fondly attached to him, and because she wanted him to hold a t.i.tle equal at least to her own as Queen of Hungary. She stood on a balcony at the ceremony and was the first to salute him with the cry of "Long live the Emperor!" when the crown had been placed upon his head. Our readers will of course be aware that the imperial dignity was an elective one. It remained, it is true, in the Hapsburg family, still it did not descend from father to son like the other crowns of Europe, and the ceremony of a fresh election was gone through at the death of each emperor.

Napoleon, who upset most things in Europe, failed not to upset the throne of Charlemagne. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist in 1806, and Francis I., the elected emperor, abdicated the old German throne to mount the brand-new one of Austria.

We return to our diamond.

Francis Stephen, although emperor and reputed owner of the yellow diamond, was quite overshadowed by the fame and splendor of his wife Maria Theresa. It is on record that one day being present at some high ceremony, he left the circle around the throne and went to sit in a corner beside a couple of ladies. They rose respectfully at his approach.

"Oh! don't mind me," he said, "I am only going to sit here and watch the crowd until the court is gone."

"As long as your Imperial Majesty is present the court will be here,"

replied the ladies.

"Not at all," said Francis Stephen. "The court is my wife and children.

I'm n.o.body."