death, debt, divorce

The expression death, debt, divorce is a three-part summary of the Hope Diamond’s sinister reputation: the misfortunes said to follow the stone’s owners are made to sound like a pattern. The phrase gives that reputation a compact, memorable form, even as the story distinguishes the tales told about the diamond from proof that the stone caused them.

The Phrase and Its Reputation

The phrase is presented as the Anglo-Saxon summary of the diamond’s ill omen. Its French equivalent, décès, dette, divorce, makes the same three losses explicit: death, financial ruin, and the breakdown of marriage. Pierre Cartier invoked stories of curses when promoting the diamond’s sale in 1910, helping make its supposed history part of its commercial appeal. The three Ds give that history a sharpened refrain, turning a succession of separate events into an apparent pattern.

The Diamond Behind the Saying

The reputation reaches backward to the stone’s French royal history. After Louis XIV, the diamond was forgotten for a time; in 1749 Louis XV incorporated it into the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Louis XVI later wore it. During the French Revolution, it was stolen with other crown jewels when the national Garde-Meuble was looted in September 1792. A blue diamond weighing 45.5 carats appeared among London jewelers in 1812, apparently recut so that it would not be recognized. Thomas Hope acquired it, and the stone came to be known as the Hope Diamond.

After remaining in the Hope family, the diamond passed through other hands and reached Cartier in 1910. The account links its reputation to Henry Francis Hope Pelham-Clinton, who inherited it in 1887: he squandered his fortune, and his wife left him for another man. It also relates the diamond to earlier royal calamities, including the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the decline of Louis XIV’s reign, and the loss of France’s first colonial empire under Louis XV. Those associations extend the supposed curse across different periods, but they do not establish a cause-and-effect connection.

Stories of Misfortune and the Limits of the Curse

The account’s most concentrated sequence of personal tragedies concerns Evalyn Walsh McLean, the wealthy American who bought the diamond from Cartier. Her nine-year-old son was struck and killed by a car; her husband became an alcoholic and left her for another woman; and her daughter died of an overdose. McLean later lost her reason and remained institutionalized until her death. These events make the three-part saying feel persuasive as a story of repeated misfortune, while the narration’s qualification remains important: associating tragedy with a rare stone is not the same as showing that the stone caused it.