Hello All,
To get myself in the mood for the next part of “Midnight on the Dragon Tower”, I went to visit some exhibitions. The first was “Dynastic Jewels”.
It was located at the Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the square where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed, among others. Back then, the building was the royal furniture and treasure repository. There, the crown kept, yes, furniture, not only to rotate between royal residences, but also to be displayed to the public as a model of excellence in craftsmanship.
On July 13, 1789, the day before the storming of the Bastille, a mob stormed this building and seized its collection of ceremonial weapons, including ornate cannon that Louis XIV had received as diplomatic gifts from the King of Siam. Those cannon were reportedly turned on the Bastille the following morning. That’s a scene most fantasy novelists would cut for being too on the nose.
In September 1792, while the last intendant of the building rotted in prison (he’d be executed days later), a gang of thieves climbed the building’s facade at night, broke a window pane on the first floor, and over five consecutive nights, stole the French Crown Jewels. The Regent Diamond, the Sancy, the Golden Fleece, and the French Blue. The guards allegedly didn’t notice because the sealed doors meant they couldn’t patrol inside. Some of the jewels were recovered. Some were not. The French Blue vanished into London’s underworld and resurfaced, recut, 20 years later as the Hope Diamond. The thieves who were caught were guillotined on the Place de la Concorde, directly in front of the building they’d robbed. One persistent theory holds that revolutionary leader Georges Danton orchestrated the theft to bribe the Duke of Brunswick into retreating from France.
You cannot make this up. And if you could, your editor would ask you to tone it down.
Since we are on the theft issue, three exhibits didn’t appear because they had been stolen a few months before. Yes, on October 19, 2025, thieves disguised as construction workers stole eight pieces from the remaining Crown Jewels collection in the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery about 1 mile from the Hôtel de la Marine. The robbery occurred at 9:30 AM, right before the opening.
The thieves entered using a mechanical ladder mounted on a vehicle to reach a second-floor balcony, then sliced through the window to access the gallery. Inside, they used disc cutters to slice through display cases. They grabbed tiaras, emerald earrings, a sapphire necklace and other treasures. Then, they fled on two motorbikes through central Paris. That’s how it was discovered that the national museum was catastrophically underprotected and understaffed.
I always say that reality goes way beyond fiction.
Now the exhibition.
About half of it came from the private collection of a Quatari royal. And it’s only a small part of his collection. That’s where you start to understand what “billionaire” actually means.
The exhibition started with Golconda diamonds. The Golconda region in southern India was the world’s only source of fine diamonds for over two thousand years. The mines were exhausted by the 1830s. Every diamond in Europe before that came from there. They’re formed of pure carbon with no nitrogen, giving them a transparency early connoisseurs described as “of the first water.” Tavernier, the French merchant-adventurer who brought the French Blue back to Louis XIV in the 1660s, made six voyages to India to acquire these stones. He sold them for the modern cash equivalent of 147 kg of gold, plus a title of nobility.
That’s the kind of economy fantasy worldbuilders need. Not “the gem was priceless,” but “what did it actually cost?”
Finally, there were the tiaras. Eleven of them, spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing a clear shift between tiaras signalling royals to tiaras signalling the ultra-rich. Most of those tiara could be “unpacked” Ikea-style to be turned into brooches, necklaces or combs and the diamond were moving at the end of tips, which must have been mesmerizing by candlelight.
Till next time.
Alex
