The Grande Conde diamond – credit, Benjamin Chelly, Ecole of Jewelry Arts / press photo
It’s a beautiful stone no, the Grand Condé diamond?
Its presence in the public eye was almost lost 100 years ago, but thanks—of all people—to a hungry cleaning lady, it can still be part of new exhibitions like the one upcoming at the Château de Chantilly near Paris.
But first, some outrageous history.
Suzanne Schiltz was a chambermaid in Paris back in 1926. Cleaning fine hotel rooms was exhausting business in the most-visited city of the age, and perhaps taking her livelihood in her own hands, she gave in to the urge to swipe an apple from the suitcase of one of the gentlemen whose rooms she was cleaning.
Taking a bite, she was shocked when her teeth hit something solid—which nearly shattered them. She stared down in disbelief. Lodged inside the apple was a pink gemstone the size of a lima bean.
Schiltz had inadvertently solved the case of a most high profile heist at the Château de Chantilly, around 30 miles north of Paris. Two months earlier, a couple of amateur thieves purloined the diamond and 74 other pieces of jewelry with nothing more than a ladder. Their unlikely success could not, however, be replicated in their attempts to fence the loot.
Valued at $3 million in 1920s dollars (in other words, the grandest of fortunes) they had only managed to make a tiny fraction of that selling off various pieces. The problem was that no jewelry or pawnbroker would touch many of the items because of their obvious provenance, especially something as famous as the Grand Condé.
According to a newspaper article from the time, after the chambermaid had reported the discovery, one of the thieves was asked by police: “Do you like apples?” The burglar, dumfounded, answered: “Why?” to which the officer responded, “You have one with queer seeds in your case.”
Marking 100 years since this episode, the Musée Condé and the Château de Chantilly have decided to put the jewel on display for the public for the first time in as many years. The diamond first appeared in France around the time of the American Revolution, and transferred from private hands to the king, before being given to the Duke of Condé as a reward for service in the 30 Years’ Sar. It’s believed to be of Indian origin.
The burden of security is heavy—especially in the light of the spate of high-profile museum heists in France lately—but part of the exhibit examines why the thieves couldn’t sell the diamond 100 years ago, while also presenting a new strategy for achieving a similar layer of security today.
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Then, the stone was just too famous for anyone to risk buying. Today, many more large pink diamonds—the rarest of their kind—exist. So Mathieu Deldicque, chief heritage curator and director of the Musée Condé invited gemologists from the School of Jewelry Arts of Paris to “conduct extensive studies and scientific analysis on the stone’s chemical composition, rarity, clarity and density,” CNN reports.
In this way a sort of identity card is created, so that even if the stone were stolen, cut in half, or reshaped, its identify card would ensure that any jeweler or black-market auctioneer in the world would know what it was.
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Beyond the Condé diamond’s historical significance, Deldicque said that gemstones in general “are works of art, and works of nature.”
“Diamonds are quite particular. You can’t enjoy them through pictures, videos, photographs and so on. Their color, their light, their presence are actually so strong that you have to see them in real life.”
The exhibit, run by the museum and the school, will run from October 17th to January 3rd.
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