The Diamond

By Julie Baumgold

Book Overview

The Diamond is a brilliant, dazzling historical novel about a famous diamond--one of the biggest in the world--that passed from the hands of William Pitt's grandfather to the French kings and Napoleon, linking many of the most famous personalities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and serving as the centerpiece for a novel in every way as fascinating as Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover or Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Rich with historical detail, characters, and nonstop drama, the story centers on the famous Regent diamond--once the largest and most beautiful diamond in the world--which was discovered in India in the late seventeenth century and bought by the governor of the East India Company, a cunning nabob, trader, and ex-pirate named Thomas Pitt. His son brought it to London, where a Jewish diamond-cutter of genius took two years to fashion it into one of the world's greatest gems.

A glittering cast of characters parades through The Diamond: a mesmerizing Napoleon and the devoted Las Cases, stuck on Saint Helena with their memories; Louis XIV and his brother, the dissolute Monsieur; Madame, the German princess who married Monsieur; the Scottish financier John Law and Saint-Simon, who sold Pitt's diamond to Madame's depraved son; the depressed Louis XV; and Madame de Pompadour. Here too are the families, the Pitts in England and the Bonapartes in France; the men of Saint Helena; nobles and thieves; Indian diamond merchants and financiers--nearly everyone of interest and importance from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century.

Written with enormous verve and ambition, The Diamond is a treat, a plum pudding of a novel filled with one delicious, funny, disgraceful episode after another. It is grand history and even grander fiction--a towering work of imagination, research, and narrative skill.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1451623976
• ISBN13: 9781451623970
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An 18K gold story

If you are interested in French history, specifically the royals and their courts, this book will fascinate you. It reads almost like nonfiction and is very detailed in its presentation. The story is woven around the true story of the Regent Diamond (also known as the Pitt diamond) in which the author weaves a story of its owners as the diamond passes through the courts, Napoleon and into a museum. The book is narrated by the fictional Count Las Cases who is in exile along with Napoleon as he is to write the emperor's memoirs. Through Las Cases and his written history -- the diamond, the courts, the history comes alive. Although this is fiction, it is hard to separate what exactly is fiction and what is true history the two are so well interwoven. I listened to the unabridged audio version of this story and it is not an audio book that you can listen to with half an ear on the story and the other half doing something else. There is so much rich detail incorporated in the story, that your attention is required to get the full blown effect of the story!

A Diamond in the Rough

This is one of the very few books that I plan to reread in the future. I bought it because I was intrigued by the connection between Napoleon and the Pitt diamond and found it to be loaded with interesting facts and sidebars about the impact of such an unusal diamond on individuals including Louis XIV, Napoleon, The court painters, and many more. If you like reading about the French Revolution and the Naopelonic era, you will enjoy this little gem of a book.