Tavernier Blue

The Tavernier Blue was the precursor diamond to the Blue Diamond of the French Crown (aka the French Blue). Subsequently, most scholars and historians believed that it was re-cut and, after a disappearance and reemergence into the public forum, was renamed the Hope Diamond.

In December 2007, the French mineralogy professor François Farges found in the reserves of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle the lead model of the Tavernier Blue. This model came around 1850, and was given by the Parisian jeweller Charles Achard, who explained that the Anglo-Dutch collector Henry Philip Hope was the owner of the original stone. Moreover, the size of the model definitively proved that the Tavernier Blue was bigger than the Hope. This latest piece of evidence proved that the widely held suspicions about the origin of the Hope Diamond were correct.