The Regent
The Regent
The 140.64-carat Pitt diamond, the French Crown's finest stone and a witness to three centuries of European political turmoil
The Regent is a 140.64-carat cushion-brilliant diamond, also known historically as the Pitt Diamond, that ranks among the most celebrated stones in the history of European jewellery. Discovered in India circa 1698, cut in London between 1704 and 1706, sold to the French Crown in 1717, and held continuously by the French state ever since, the Regent has passed through the regency of Philippe d'Orléans, the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the wars of the Revolution, the coronations of Napoleon, the Restoration, and the Third and Fifth Republics. It is now displayed publicly in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Musée du Louvre and remains one of the very finest historical diamonds of Type IIa colour and clarity.
Discovery and the Pitt connection
The rough was discovered in the Kollur mine on the Kistna River in the Golconda kingdom of southern India around 1698. The historical accounts, drawing on contemporary memoirs and East India Company correspondence, describe a stone of approximately 410 metric carats — extraordinary for its time and place — bought by an English merchant and conveyed to Madras, where the East India Company governor Thomas Pitt acquired it in 1701 or 1702. The price reported is approximately 24,000 pagodas, equivalent to a sum that ruined Pitt's reputation in his own time and earned him the lasting nickname Diamond Pitt. The provenance of the rough has at various points been the subject of accusations of bad faith, but the most careful modern reconstructions accept the East India Company purchase as legitimate by the standards of the period.
The cutting
Pitt sent the rough to London, where it was cut by Joseph Cope between 1704 and 1706 at a cost reported at £5,000 — a sum equivalent to several hundred thousand pounds in modern terms. The yield from the original rough was the principal cushion-brilliant of 140.64 carats, accompanied by a small number of cleavage pieces and minor stones. The cushion brilliant produced is, by the standards of the period, almost square in plan with a high crown and a relatively shallow pavilion, the cut chosen to maximise weight retention from a rough crystal whose original form must have constrained the cutter's options. The result is one of the finest examples of early eighteenth-century cushion-brilliant work and is the foundation on which the stone's reputation rests.
Sale to the French Crown
Pitt held the stone for over a decade, attempting unsuccessfully to sell it to several European courts. In 1717, after extensive negotiation through the financier John Law and the Regent of France, Philippe d'Orléans (acting for the young Louis XV), the diamond was sold to the French Crown for £135,000, a record price for a single stone. The acquisition coincided with the period of speculative finance in France known as the Mississippi Bubble, in which Law's monetary experiments produced extreme price movements; the timing complicated the transaction but did not derail it. The stone took its modern name from the Regent who acquired it.
Service in the French Crown Jewels
The Regent was set in the coronation crown of Louis XV in 1722 and remained a centrepiece of the French Crown Jewels through the long reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. During the French Revolution, the Crown Jewels were inventoried and placed in the Garde-meuble, from which most of the major historical pieces were stolen in the famous theft of September 1792. The Regent was among the small group of stones recovered after the theft. Through the Directoire and Consulate, the stone passed into Napoleon's possession, who had it set in the pommel of his coronation sword in 1804 — the setting visible today in many surviving portraits of the Emperor. The Restoration kings reset the stone in successive ceremonial pieces, and the Empress Eugénie wore it in a tiara during the Second Empire.
The 1887 Crown Jewels sale and the Louvre
The Third Republic decided in 1887 to sell the bulk of the French Crown Jewels at public auction, retaining only a small number of pieces of paramount historical or scientific importance. The Regent was excluded from the sale and assigned permanently to the national collections. Since 1887 it has been displayed in the Louvre, with brief interruptions for security during the World Wars, when the stone was evacuated to the chateau of Chambord and later to other secure locations.
Gemmology
The Regent is a Type IIa diamond — chemically pure, free of nitrogen impurity, and consequently of exceptional colour at near-D and clarity in the range of internally flawless or very lightly included by modern grading standards. Type IIa stones constitute roughly 1 to 2 per cent of natural diamond production worldwide and are characteristic of the finest historical diamonds, including the Cullinan stones, the Koh-i-Noor, and the Wittelsbach. The Regent's optical properties — adamantine lustre, full cushion-brilliant scintillation, and the subtle blue fluorescence sometimes associated with Type IIa stones — are essentially unrepeatable in stones of comparable size from any modern source.
Cultural significance
The Regent functions for France much as the Crown Jewels do for the United Kingdom: a stone whose continuous historical presence in the national symbol-making is part of the constitutional fabric of the state. Unlike the British Crown Jewels, the Regent has been displayed publicly for more than a century rather than reserved for state ceremony. It has been the subject of extensive historical and gemmological literature, beginning with the eighteenth-century travel accounts of Tavernier and continuing through to modern monographs published by the Louvre and by GIA scholars.
Curse narratives
Like the Hope, Koh-i-Noor, and other historic stones, the Regent attracts a popular literature of curse and misfortune. Successive owners — Pitt, the French monarchy, Napoleon — met with reverses of fortune that admit a romantic reading. The historical record offers no support for supernatural causation, and the misfortunes attributed to the stone are explicable by the political turbulence of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, in which a great many high-status objects and their owners suffered comparable fates. The Regent's curse belongs to popular narrative rather than to historical fact.
In the trade
The Regent is permanently excluded from commercial circulation by its status in the French national collections. For dealers and collectors of historical diamonds, however, the Regent functions as a calibration reference: a published, examined, and continuously documented Type IIa cushion brilliant of c. 140 carats against which other historical stones of comparable size and type can be assessed. Modern Type IIa cushion brilliants of large size, when they appear at auction, draw inevitable comparison to the Regent.