The nine-carat Grand Condé is back on display at a French château for the first time since thieves hid it inside a hollowed-out apple in 1926.
A rare pink diamond that was stolen from a French château almost exactly 100 years ago — and recovered only because a hungry hotel maid bit into an apple — is on public display again.
The gemstone, known as the Grand Condé, is a nine-carat, pear-shaped pink diamond. It is one of the few royal jewels in France believed to have survived the French Revolution. The Ghana Report notes that the stone has not been shown to the public since the night it was taken in October 1926.
How the theft happened
Thieves broke into the Château de Chantilly, about 50km (31 miles) north of Paris, in an overnight raid. To move the diamond without being caught, they hollowed out an apple and hid the stone inside it.
The plan collapsed weeks later. A maid at the hotel where the thieves were staying took a bite of the apple, and the diamond was recovered.
Mathieu Deldicque, director of the Condé Museum, said the story sounds unlikely but was reported widely in newspapers at the time.
Back on display, with security questions
The diamond will be shown at the Condé Museum inside the Château de Chantilly until 3 January.
Deldicque has been asked whether putting such a valuable object back on view is risky, given a run of thefts at European cultural institutions over the past year. Those included a daylight robbery of jewellery at the Louvre in Paris.
He would not say how much the diamond is insured for. He did point out that the stone has gone through detailed academic study of its physical properties, making it uniquely identifiable — which would make it far harder to sell quietly if it were ever stolen again.
Findings from that research, along with archive material about the diamond's history and the 1926 theft that has never been shown publicly, form part of the exhibition.
Why pink diamonds matter
Naturally occurring pink diamonds are extremely rare and regularly fetch tens of millions of dollars. The auction house Sotheby's records the highest price ever paid for one at auction as $71.2 million (about £53.6 million) in 2017.
For readers in Ghana, where diamond mining in the Akwatia area has long been part of the country's minerals story, the Grand Condé is a reminder of how much of a stone's value rests on rarity, colour and provenance rather than size alone.
A long ownership trail
Where the Grand Condé came from is still unknown. It first appears in records in 1740, in an inventory drawn up after the death of Louis Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé.
It later belonged to Queen Marie-Amélie of Bourbon-Sicily, wife of King Louis Philippe I, and then to her son Prince Henri of Orléans, Duke of Aumale. He left it to the Institut de France, which today owns the Château de Chantilly and the thousands of artworks and manuscripts in the Musée Condé collection.
