Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame
King Louis XVI
The French crown jewels — and the blue that vanished in the Revolution.
For a century the French crown gathered the greatest stones in Europe. The Regent, the finest of them, passed from Louis XV to Louis XVI; the deep blue French Blue, re-cut for Louis XIV and worn in the Order of the Golden Fleece, was the jewel of the line.
Then the Revolution. Thieves broke into the royal treasury over several nights in September 1792, and the collection was dispersed. The Regent turned up some fifteen months on, prised from its hiding place in the rafters of a Paris attic. The French Blue never returned — it vanished into the dark of those years and re-emerged only decades on, half its size, under a new name: the Hope.
