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The Shah of Persia, presented to the Emperor Nicholas by the Persian monarch, is a very beautiful stone, irregularly shaped. Its weight is eighty-six carats, and its water and lustre are superb. The various stories attached to the Sancy diamond, the next in point of value, would occupy many pages.
In conversation with the high treasurer, Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's chief minister, Sancy found him even colder than his queen; Burleigh laid great stress upon all that the queen had already done for France, and on the one million five hundred thousand gold crowns she had lent to the king.
I had climbed the Sancy, and entered a little inn, near a pilgrim's chapel called Notre-Dame de Vassiviere, when I saw a queer, ridiculous-looking old woman breakfasting alone at the end table. She was at least seventy years old, tall, skinny, and angular, and her white hair was puffed around her temples in the old-fashioned style.
"You are in a self-accusing mood to-day. Let us talk of our neighbors. Bad as that practice is, I believe it is better than talking about ourselves: Mrs. Sancy thinks so, I know?" "Who is Mrs. Sancy?" "I will introduce you to-morrow." Next to being principal in a romantic affaire de coeur is the excitement of being an interested third party.
After a brief silence she turned to me with a smile: "Pardon my mental desertion. It is not good to talk of our own lives. We all become Adams again, and imagine ourselves sole in the universe." On this hint I changed the conversation, and we returned to the hotel to lunch, after which, I saw no more of Mrs. Sancy for that day. That afternoon, my correspondent, Mr.
From that prince it passed into the hands of Antonio king of Portugal, who, when a refugee in France, sold it for 70,000 francs to Nicholas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy; thus it has since been known, in the history of precious stones, as the Sancy Diamond. Sancy was a faithful adherent to Henry IV. of France, and, during the civil war, was sent by that monarch to solicit the assistance of the Swiss.
It has been shown in different parts of Europe, but no one yet has been able to meet the price of this extortioner who owns it." "And yet, as Saint Simon says, there is no dignity too great for the throne of France." "Yet, meantime, the king will have no use for it for several years to come. There is the Sancy stone "
Sancy could do better; and one thing she could do that none of the rest of us could, which was to swim out and float herself in on a surf-board, like a native island woman; and seeing Mrs. Sancy do this became one of the daily sensations of Clatsop Beach. I had known Mrs.
De Sancy had arrived just as without his knowledge Sidney had been despatched across the channel with the brief mission already mentioned.
The pledged diamond never was redeemed; it remained in the hands of the Israelite money-lenders, till Louis XIV. purchased it for 600,000 francs. It then became one of the crown-jewels of France; but its vicissitudes were not over. In 1791, when the National Assembly appointed a commission of jewellers to examine the crown-jewels, the Sancy Diamond was valued at 1,000,000 livres.
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