The nurse leaned close to the bed, and the woman in it, the one the whole country knew by a single jewel, asked for the stone one last time. Evelyn Walsh McLean was sixty years old, dying of pneumonia in a Washington bedroom while an oxygen tent labored above her. By one account, she insisted on wearing the Hope Diamond on her deathbed. It may be the kind of detail that stories grow around, the way they grew around everything she owned.

But if it is true, then the blue stone she had first wanted on a night in Paris in 1910 was with her on the last night, too. Among those at her bedside were a Jesuit vice president of Georgetown University who gave her the last rites, a justice of the Supreme Court, and the owner of the Washington Times-Herald, a woman Evelyn had once said she never really felt she knew or wanted to. She died on the 26th of April, 1947, seven months after finding her only daughter dead. She had outlived her father, her mother, her brother, her eldest son, her husband, and her daughter, and she had kept the diamond through all of it.

The story of how she came to hold it, and what it cost her, began in a Colorado mining town in the summer of 1886. She was born Evelyn Walsh in Leadville, high in the Rockies, the daughter of Thomas Walsh, a farmer’s boy from Tipperary who had come to America in 1869, and Carrie Bell Reed, a former schoolteacher. For her first ten years the family money came and went like the weather. Her father worked as a carpenter, first for the Colorado Central Railroad, then chased ore across the state through Del Norte, the Black Hills, Central City, Rico, and Silverton.

In 1879, in Leadville, he and two partners bought the Old City Hotel, enlarged it, and called it the Grand Hotel. His daughter would remember it with a smile: the sheets were not always clean, but the guests were not particular. Tom Walsh had a carpenter’s patience and a gambler’s nerve, and in the summer of 1896 he finally found what he had been looking for. The family had gone to Ouray, deep in the San Juan Mountains, nine miles from a basin called Imogene that other miners had walked over and abandoned.

Only one man, Andy Richardson, had kept his faith in the ground there. That autumn, Walsh found gold telluride in rock the others had passed over. He bought up the claims quietly for a reported $10,000, and the assays came back at up to $3,000 a ton. When he showed his daughter a piece of the ore, he wet it with his tongue and held it near her eyes.

“Like thread ends,” she wrote, “in its texture glistening circles and specks of black. ” Then he told her, in five words: “Daughter, I’ve struck it rich. ” The mine was called the Camp Bird, and soon the mules coming down the trail wore saddlebags lettered in black paint with its name. In its first four years it produced $2.

5 million of metal at a cost of $885,000, and in 1902 Tom Walsh sold the whole thing to a company in London for more than $5 million. A girl who learns at ten that a mountain can simply open and pour out money may spend the rest of her life expecting the world to do it again. Evelyn Walsh did exactly that. By the time she was twelve the Walshes were living in Washington, and her father was planning a house that would cost more than any other in the city.

He hired a Danish-born New York architect named Henry Anderson and told him to design a suitably impressive place to entertain Washington’s elite during the winter social season. The result rose at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue, a mansion of roughly sixty rooms with a theater, a ballroom served by early elevators, a French salon, columns of yellow marble, and a conservatory clad in copper with stained glass. At the center of it all, a galleried stair hall rose through three stories under a skylight, and people called it the steamship stair because it looked like the promenade deck of an ocean liner. The building cost $835,000 in 1903, the most expensive private house in Washington, and by one story a bar of gold was set into the arch over the front door while a nugget of Camp Bird gold was buried somewhere in the foundation, so that the house literally stood on the mine.

By one account that nugget has never been found. Evelyn grew up between that house and Paris, and she did not grow up quietly. At about fourteen she was sent to Paris to study singing; instead, by one summary, she lived a wild life, coloring her hair, adding rouge to her cheeks, and drinking alcohol. In 1904, given a letter of credit for $10,000 by her father’s bankers, she bought a sports car with it.

Her father did not break her for it. There was an allowance too, $1,000 a month, and by one account it never lasted the thirty days. None of this made her unkind. She was generous to the point of carelessness with things, and she stayed that way all her life.

What the money never taught her was how to hold on to anything. In Washington she made friends in the highest places, among them Alice Roosevelt, the president’s daughter. She took her mother’s lesson about being noticed and made it her own: she liked to be talked about, and she liked to be the one doing the telling. In the summer of 1905 the family took a rented house in Newport, Rhode Island, for the season.

The car that summer was electric, with her younger brother Vincent at the wheel. He lost control of it. The date recorded for his death is the 19th of August, 1905. Vincent Farnum Walsh, born in Denver on the 9th of April, 1888, was seventeen years old.

His sister, beside him, was not yet twenty and survived with her leg crushed. Her injuries were worse than anyone could see from across a ballroom. The leg, by one account, was badly set and needed what that account calls a dangerous operation. A magazine that reported her death more than forty years later went further: her right leg was left shortened by an inch and a half, and after the operation came morphine.

The accounts divide on the addiction. One source says the dependence was temporary and that she overcame it. Another describes a powerful addiction. A third says she lapsed back into the habit later, after her father’s death and after another loss still to come.

None of them disputes that the crash that killed her brother also put a drug into her life at nineteen, when she was least able to refuse it. She stopped being careful after Newport. She had never been careful with money. After Newport, she stopped being careful with anything.

Her father had built his whole life on one piece of good fortune in the Imogene Basin, and now fortune had taken his only son. Evelyn was the only child he had left. Four years after the crash, when she had a son of her own, she named him Vincent after the brother she had lost. The name would come back to her.

So would the road. She eloped in 1908 with Edward Beal McLean, called Ned, heir to the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Inquirer, the son of publisher John R. McLean. His friends called him Ned.

He had grown up with everything and with very little asked of him; one account of his boyhood says his mother bribed other boys to let him win at baseball and never pushed him to acquire a real education. Evelyn’s old friend Alice Roosevelt summed him up in five words: “No chin and no character. ” The fathers paid. By one account each gave the couple $100,000.

Another puts it more vividly: their pockets were stuffed with $200,000 cash. They went across Europe and on into the Middle East. In Constantinople they were received by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and one source says it was in his collection that Evelyn first saw a great blue diamond that would one day be hers. What is certain is a shop at 13 Rue de la Paix, belonging to the jeweler Cartier, where Ned bought his bride a pear-shaped diamond called the Star of the East.

It weighed 94. 8 carats. The price was $120,000. She never forgot the moment it was put in her hand.

She turned to her husband and said, “Ned, it’s got me. I’ll never get away from the spell of this. ” She meant it as a joke and as a declaration of love for a stone. Read now, it sounds like a prophecy.

Their first child was born on the 18th of December, 1909, a boy. She named him Vincent Walsh McLean after her dead brother. The newspapers called him the hundred million dollar baby for the two fortunes waiting for him. Tom Walsh had one more enthusiasm in his last years: in 1909 he founded the Aero Club of Washington and became its first president, a mining man from Tipperary turning his mind to flying machines.

Then, on the 8th of April, 1910, he died of lung cancer at his house on Massachusetts Avenue. He was sixty. The New York Times called him one of the foremost mining men in the country. He was buried at Rock Creek near his son.

His daughter was twenty-three, with a husband, a son, two fortunes, and one of the largest diamonds in the world. She had buried a brother and a father. Every piece of her luck had come to her suddenly without effort, and every loss had come the same way. So she did what people do at the top of a winning streak.

She kept playing. That same year in Paris, a jeweler named Pierre Cartier came to her hotel with a second stone and a story to go with it. He came to the McLeans at the Hotel Bristol, carrying, as she wrote, “tenderly, a package tightly closed with wax seals. ” He did not open it at once.

First he began to talk, and one of his first questions was a strange one for a jeweler to ask a young American bride: “You know about the Turkish Revolution? ” The stone was called the Hope, and it was large, more than 45 carats, and blue in a way few diamonds are blue. As Cartier told it, it came trailing misfortune behind it, owner after owner undone. Later the Smithsonian Institution would say plainly that the whole idea of a curse owed a great deal to his salesmanship.

At that breakfast table in Paris, nobody was saying anything plainly. At first she declined, because she did not like the setting. Cartier took the stone away and had it reset as a headpiece on a three-tiered circlet of sixteen large white diamonds, so that it could be worn in the hair or at the throat. Then he suggested she simply keep it for a few days.

She did, and she wrote about that night afterward with an honesty that still reads as a confession: “At some time during the night I began to want the thing. ” She did not say she admired it. She said she began to want it the way a person wants something that is bad for them and knows it. She had her answer ready.

“Bad luck objects,” she said to Cartier, “for me are lucky. ”

The sale included a clause allowing the buyers to exchange the diamond. One version of its wording survives: “Should any fatality occur to the family of Edward B. McLean within six months.

” A jeweler who did not believe his own story would hardly have needed it. A buyer who did not half believe it would hardly have asked. The deal was done on the 28th of January, 1911, in the offices of the Washington Post, the family newspaper. The price is recorded two ways: $180,000 by Cartier’s records and in the Smithsonian’s history, $154,000 by Evelyn’s own memoir.

Arguments over the terms went on for a year and ended in a lawsuit. Her friends urged her to get rid of it. So did her mother-in-law, Emily Truxton Beal McLean. By one account Cartier would not take it back, so she kept it, and she began to wear it.

She took the diamond to a priest to be blessed. “A priest will bless the stone,” said someone she calls Maggie, “and be sure that will foil the devil in it. ” They set out in her electric Victoria for the church of Monsignor Russell. He donned his robes and put her Bible on a velvet cushion.

Then, she remembered, lightning flashed and thunder shook the church. There was no wind or rain, just darkness and lurid lightning thrusts. Across the street, a tree was struck and splintered. “Monsignor Russell’s Latin words gave me strange comfort,” she wrote.

“Ever since that day I’ve worn my diamond as a charm. ” She came out of the church with a phrase she would use for the rest of her life: she had had it blessed herself, and she was sitting back on the sidelines, letting the curse and the blessing fight it out together. She showed it to Washington in February of 1912 at a reception at her family’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, wearing the Hope and the Star of the East together, two of the most famous diamonds in the world on one young woman. The stone lived a double life after that.

At night it went to a vault with its own guard, a former agent of the Secret Service named William Shindel, and two private detectives besides. By day it went almost anywhere she did. Her Great Dane was called Mike, and more than once the most famous blue diamond in the world hung from his collar. A historical marker in Washington says she actually lost it a few times, and one of those times was by putting it on Mike.

She hid the diamond in her garden for guests to find, turning it into a party game. She tucked it behind the cushions of her sofa and even in her toaster. She reportedly tossed it into her swimming pool like throwing a quarter in the pool and diving for it. She wore it to the White House and to her charity events.

By one account she wore it on roller coasters and fishing trips in the icy north. She lent it out for weddings. A reviewer of her memoir picked out the line that explained her better than any other: “It is only when the thing I buy creates a show for those around me that I get my money’s worth. ”

The stage for all this was an estate called Friendship, lying out on Wisconsin Avenue in the northwest of the city, seventy-five acres that had come into the McLean family in 1898 when Ned’s father bought it as a summer retreat.

Around the Georgian house designed by John Russell Pope grew an 18-hole golf course, a cast-iron swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and Italian gardens. In 1916 the whole estate passed to Ned and Evelyn, and they would live there until 1941. A white llama bought from the Ringling Brothers Circus wandered the grounds at will. The electric bill was reportedly the highest of any private house in the capital.

Presidents came to play golf on the course. Her parties were frequent and mammoth; she rarely invited fewer than 100 people, often entertained two or three hundred, and spent as much as $50,000 on a big affair. She slept between pink silk sheets that cost $4,000 apiece. She loved to seat ideological or personal enemies next to each other at her tables, Republicans with Democrats, gossip columnists near their prey.

One senator, finding himself among people arranged to provoke one another, looked around and said aloud what others were thinking: “This sort of thing is what brings on a revolution. ” To much of Washington she was new money with a cursed diamond and a circus llama, a spectacle to be enjoyed and a little despised. There was another side to it which the jokes left out. In 1916, after Ned’s father died, the will did everything to say what the old man thought of his son.

The newspaper was put in a trust, none of the properties could be sold until twenty years after Ned’s own children were dead, and whatever income they produced would reach Ned only in monthly installments. Two of the richest young people in Washington were, in the eyes of the men who made the money, children who could not be trusted with it. Ned still came to control the Post, and in his hands it became a kind of social passport. When Warren Harding was elected to the Senate in 1914, his wife Florence was introduced to Evelyn by Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The two women took to each other at once. According to the First Lady’s Library, they shared a belief in astrology and the supernatural and a passion for the humane treatment of animals. Early in 1920 Florence consulted Evelyn’s astrologer about her husband’s chances. The prediction was a double one: if Harding could win the Republican nomination, he would go on to win the presidency, but he would not live to complete the full term.

The nomination came, the presidency came, and the McLeans moved with the Hardings into the center of American power. Harding played poker at the McLean tables, by one account usually at their townhouse on I Street or out at Friendship. A future president played golf on the McLean course. By the spring of 1919, her eldest son, the one who carried her brother’s name, was nine years old.

The day was the 18th of May, 1919, a quiet Sunday morning. Accounts written long afterward say he slipped away from the people who were meant to be watching him and ran across the road in front of Friendship, Wisconsin Avenue, the road that passed their own gate. One of them names the car that came along it: a passing Model T Ford. One detail stands out.

The man watching her son that morning was old John R. McLean’s valet, a man called Megot, the grandfather’s own man pressed into service on a quiet Sunday. The family that kept three men to guard a diamond had a borrowed valet watching the heir to two fortunes. Her memoir tells the moment with terrible plainness: the boy had an idea, the kind every nine-year-old has on a spring morning.

“Let’s go outside the gate,” said Vincent. They went outside the gate. The car hit him. “Vincent seemed to be not badly hurt,” she wrote.

He was hit shortly before 11:00, and he lived for another eight hours. He died that day, nine years old. It was almost fourteen years since his namesake, her brother Vincent, had died in a car at Newport. Two boys named Vincent.

Two cars. Two families of hers, each losing a son to the new machine that rich young people loved because it was fast. The hundred million dollar baby had lived long enough to learn his own nickname, and not long enough for any of the money to reach him. The cursed tellers had been waiting since 1911 for the stone to prove itself, and now, as they saw it, they had their proof.

One account says that after her father’s death, and again after her son’s, she lapsed back into the morphine she had first been given at nineteen. It is a single source and it may not be exact. But if it is true, it would mean that the wound from Newport had never closed, and that the second Vincent reopened it. Her mother, Carrie Bell Walsh, died in 1932.

The last of the family who had come down the mountain from Ouray was gone, and Evelyn inherited the house on Massachusetts Avenue with its steamship stair. By then the question was no longer how to fill the house. It was how to pay for it. The marriage had always run on storms followed by grand gestures.

Once, after a tempestuous quarrel, she had chartered a yacht and left her husband; he sent her sixty consecutive telegrams begging forgiveness, and she came back. By the late 1920s Ned McLean was drinking hard enough that by one account he used a sling to steady his hand. He grew erratic. He spent recklessly even by the standards of a household that had never counted.

He was unfaithful. In 1931 she sued him for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. Ned tried another country, taking up residence in Riga in Latvia and filing for divorce there. The Latvian decree was granted on the 13th of December, 1932.

He sent her the Latvian divorce summons done up in a Christmas box decorated with tiny reindeer and holly. The man who had once sent sixty telegrams to bring her home now sent a Christmas box to be rid of her. By the spring of 1932 she had had enough of watching the family paper go down with him. She went to court on behalf of her three children and called her husband the millstone around the bowed neck of the Post.

Under the settlement, Ned would resign as publisher. It was too late to save the paper. It was not too late to take it out of his hands. That same year, with her marriage finally ending, a man she had met years before came to her with an offer no mother who had lost a child could easily refuse.

On the 4th of March, 1932, three days after the Lindbergh baby vanished, Evelyn McLean and a former federal agent named Gaston Means came together over the stolen child. She already knew him. The FBI’s history says she had become acquainted with Means as a result of some investigative work he had performed for her husband some years before, and that she approached him because she felt she might be of material assistance to Colonel Lindbergh in procuring the return of his child. Her memoir remembers the question she put to him: “Do you know where the Lindbergh baby is?

” Means was a remarkable figure even by the standards of Washington in those years. He had been hired by the Bureau of Investigation in 1921. In 1917 he had been charged with the murder of a wealthy widow named Maude King, acquitted by a jury, and later convicted of forging her will. In 1930 he had published a book called The Strange Death of President Harding, accusing Florence Harding, Evelyn’s close friend, of murdering her husband.

The book was a hoax, confessed by its ghostwriter. But Evelyn met Means all the same. His pitch was simple and monstrous: he could reach the kidnappers because he had been invited to participate in a big kidnapping some weeks before and had declined. He felt certain he could secure a contact with the kidnappers.

All it would take was money. The ransom, he told her, had doubled. Evelyn, the woman who had once put a diamond on her dog to show she was not afraid of anything, handed him $100,000. One account says she pawned the Hope Diamond to raise it.

Another says she sold valuable real estate. Her own memoir says something more precise: “Means told me the kidnappers wanted $100,000 ransom. By placing a short-term mortgage on the Oxford block I raised the money and then gave the $100,000 to Gaston Means. ” One account adds that she drew it from her bank all in old $50 and $100 bills as Means had asked.

In the code the swindlers gave her, she was a number, and the number was 11. Means himself was number 27. An associate was number 19. The stolen Lindbergh baby was called “the book.

” The kidnappers’ leader was called “the Fox,” a disbarred Washington lawyer named Norman Tweed Whitaker, whom Means introduced to Evelyn as the king of the kidnappers. On the 18th of March she went to her cottage in Aiken, South Carolina, upon Means’ representation that the child would there be surrendered to her. A doctor friend loaded for her a special fountain pen whose barrel was filled with a deadly poison disguised as ink. The baby did not come to Aiken.

Means promised it instead at El Paso, Texas, and she went there too, registering in the hotel as Mrs. Lane. The baby did not come to El Paso either. On the 18th of March she gave Means another $4,000.

By the 17th of April she had waited long enough. She demanded her money back. Means refused. Her own words from that moment are among the few that survive from any of her worst days: “I realized that the plan had failed.

” She sent a priest to demand the $100,000 back. Means gave her a story: he had permitted some associates to take the money to be used in a whiskey deal. Then she went to the authorities. Means was arrested in May of 1932 and convicted of larceny and embezzlement, sentenced to fifteen years.

Whitaker was sentenced to two years for conspiracy. The money was never recovered. Asked where it had gone, Whitaker said, “I do not know and I wish I did. ” Means died in custody in December of 1938.

J. Edgar Hoover once told him that every bit of his story had been a pack of lies. “Well,” Means answered, “you’ve got to admit that it made a whale of a good story. ” The diamond, if it had been pawned, had to be fetched back.

One account says she briefly pawned the Hope in New York, then retrieved it herself, without a bodyguard or so much as a bag, and simply stuffed it into her dress. She never pretended she regretted trying. “I shall always be glad,” she wrote four years later, “that in my heart there was something that compelled me to try my best to take part in the effort to ransom the Lindbergh baby. ”

The next year she lost the one thing in the family that still had a voice.

On the 1st of June, 1933, the Washington Post was sold at a bankruptcy auction. Court-appointed trustees had the job of selling it. An auctioneer opened the bidding at $250,000. Evelyn bid for it, and by one account she came to the auction wearing the Hope Diamond.

She went to $600,000. Then she stopped. A mystery bidder went on and won the Post for $825,000. The buyer, who had stayed home preferring to remain anonymous and had been ready to go up to $2 million, was finally revealed on the 13th of June: Eugene Meyer, the same financier who had offered Ned $5 million for the paper in 1929 and been turned away.

Evelyn’s own words that day survive: “I have done everything I could to save the Post. I love this old paper. It is true that I bid $600,000 to keep the Post for my boys, but I could go no higher. ” The seller was the trust old John R.

McLean had set up in 1916 because he did not believe his son could be trusted with the paper. The father had been right about the son, and it had not saved the paper. Within five months came the worst. On the 31st of October, 1933, a jury in Towson, Maryland, declared Ned McLean legally insane and incapable of managing his affairs, and the court ordered him committed indefinitely to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, a psychiatric hospital.

One account says it was Evelyn who had him committed for treatment of his drinking. She did not speak publicly about it, or if she did, her words have not come down to us. What the record shows is what she did next. She turned to her own life and wrote it down.

In 1936 she published her memoir, Father Struck It Rich, 395 pages from Little, Brown and Company, written with Boyden Sparkes. It is the source of almost every word of hers that survives. It begins with a joke about dying her hair. It lingers lovingly on the Leadville hotel, the house on Vine Street, the mule trains with Camp Bird painted on their saddlebags, and the day her father wet a piece of ore with his tongue and held it near her eyes.

It is the book of a woman who wanted the world to know she had once been a girl in the mountains with a father who loved her. Ned McLean died of a heart attack at the hospital in Towson on the 28th of July, 1941. He was fifty-two. He had spent almost eight years as a committed patient in the institution.

Friendship, the seventy-five-acre estate, had come to them through Ned’s father, and after Ned died it passed to his father’s trust. In 1942 the trust sold the land to the federal government for wartime housing for $1 million. The house where the llama had wandered, where presidents had played golf and Mrs. Coolidge had knitted on the porch, outside whose gate a small boy had run into the road, was torn down.

Evelyn moved to a house at 3388 R Street in Georgetown, a five-story mansion built around 1830 by a Colonel William Robinson. For more than a century it had carried a name of its own: it was called Mount Hope. She renamed it. She took the old sign with her and put it on the new house.

A historical marker notes that it is still there. She could not keep the estate. She kept the name, and she gave up a house called Hope to do it. Ten weeks after Ned’s death, on the 9th of October, 1941, her daughter Eevie was married.

She was nineteen. Her husband was a United States senator from North Carolina named Robert Rice Reynolds, and he was fifty-seven. It was his fifth marriage. The new mother-in-law was two years younger than he was.

Eevie wore the Hope Diamond at her wedding. “The something blue,” one historian of the stone said, “was the Hope Diamond. ” The baby was born in the autumn of 1942, a daughter, My Spears Reynolds. She would grow up to be an owner and driver for the Reynolds racing team and the first woman ever to qualify for the Daytona 500, but that was decades away.

In the 1940s she was a baby, and she did what babies do with anything shiny. A historical marker in Washington tells the story with evident pleasure: Evelyn lost the Hope Diamond a few times, and one of those times was by allowing her granddaughter to teethe on it. On the 20th of September, 1946, Evelyn Walsh McLean found her only daughter dead. Eevie was twenty-four.

She was found in her mother’s home, and a coroner’s inquest was later held. The inquest ruled that she had died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. That is the official finding, and it is the one most records give. It is not the only account.

Others then and since have called her death a suicide. Nothing in the record settles the question. What is known is the age, the date, the pills, the inquest’s verdict, and the person who found her. The magazine that had announced the birth of her daughter four years earlier now carried her death in the same column, in the same flat voice: “Died, Evelyn McLean Reynolds, 24, fifth wife of ex-Senator Robert R.

Reynolds, daughter of wealthy Evelyn Walsh McLean, owner of the unlucky Hope Diamond, reportedly of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in Washington. ” Even in a four-line notice of a young woman’s death, the stone had to be mentioned. Her friends watched what it did to her. By one account they said afterward that her daughter’s death took away her will to live.

She kept going after a fashion. In the spring she went out walking her dog in the rain. By the account of the magazine that wrote her obituary, she died twenty-four hours after an oxygen tent was put up in her bedroom as pneumonia took hold. That night, by one account, a justice of the Supreme Court took the Hope Diamond and the rest of her jewels and rode around Washington in a taxi cab until the banks opened.

Another account says the Hope was found stored in shoe boxes in her bedroom along with $4 million worth of other jewels. Both stories may hold part of the truth. She was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in the Walsh family tomb near her father, near her brother, and beside her daughter. Her will left her estate and her jewels, the Hope Diamond among them, to her seven grandchildren in trust, to be managed by four trustees until the five eldest had passed their twenty-fifth birthdays.

The trustees included a justice of the Supreme Court and two former government officials. It did not work, at least not for the jewels. The debts were too large. Within two years, as the Smithsonian records it, the court ordered the sale of her jewelry collection to pay off debts and claims against her estate.

In 1949 a New York jeweler named Harry Winston bought the whole collection, the Hope Diamond with the rest, for approximately $1 million. The Star of the East went with it. In November of 1958, Harry Winston gave the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, and he sent it there by ordinary registered mail. “It’s the safest way to mail gems,” he said.

“I’ve sent gems all over the world that way. ” The package was postmarked on the 8th of November, 1958, traveled to Washington in a railway post office car, and was delivered by a letter carrier named James G. Todd, who the postal service later noted seemed shaky from all the attention. The postage and insurance came to $145.

29. It has been on display at the National Museum of Natural History ever since. Millions of people have stood in front of it. The Smithsonian’s own answer to the question everyone asks is short: is the Hope Diamond cursed?

Of course not. The museum says the stone has brought it nothing but good luck. The rest of her story scattered. Her granddaughter who once teethed on the Hope became the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500.

One of her grandsons was killed in Vietnam in 1969. Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes” carried her name for decades after she was gone. What she lost is harder to list than what she owned, but it can be done. She lost the brother who sat beside her in the car.

She lost the father who came through the door with five words. She lost the boy who ran into the road. She lost the husband who had once sent sixty telegrams. She lost the newspaper that was meant for her sons.

She lost the estate and kept only its sign. She lost the daughter she found. Not the diamond. The diamond was the one thing she never lost for long.

“Bad luck objects for me are lucky,” she had said in 1910 to a jeweler at her breakfast table. In her memoir she wrote the sentence that holds the whole of her: “Do I believe a lot of silly superstitions, legends of the diamond? I must confess I know better. And yet knowing better, I believe.

” Out on Wisconsin Avenue, where Friendship used to stand, there is a historical marker now among the buildings of McLean Gardens. It tells of her portrait, and of the White House, and of the curse the Smithsonian says is not true. And it tells, of course, about the day she lost the most famous diamond in the world by putting it on the collar of her Great Dane, Mike.