This episode is brought to you by Leibish, the coloured diamond jewellery experts.

Did you know that pink diamonds are amongst the rarest diamonds and over 90% came from the

Argyll Mine in Australia which closed in 2020?

Welcome to this special episode of If Jewels Could Talk.

As the world wakes up to the terrible loss of priceless jewels associated with the French crown,

which are symbols of French history, stolen from the Louvre at the weekend.

From a room his ornate decoration was commissioned by the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, and contained a set of historic crowns, diadems and jewels.

We want to understand the ramifications and the full extent of this loss. So I am delighted today to

welcome the French historian and author, Vincent Mellin, who writes about history and hoot

chouallerie and is a specialist in precious stones and the author of several books. Vincent,

thank you for joining us. Thanks to you. I'm super happy to be here.

I know, but we're not happy for the reason to be here, are we? No, we're definitely not.

I mean, I'm even a bit cross, angry. I bet you are. And I want to hear about this. Can you sum up

the extent of the loss of this terrible jewel heist at the weekend? Yes, because now we know which jewels were stolen.

Basically, eight pieces of jewelry were stolen.

Fortunately, the big diamonds, the big historical diamonds, the regent, the Sancy,

the Ortencia, were not stolen, but there's a reason for that. I guess it's because

they were very difficult to sell. And the pieces which were sold were mainly jewels with

colored stone, big collared stone. They left behind the small collared stone, for example,

the bracelets and two bruches with rubies which are set with small stones were not stolen.

The pieces which were stolen were the pieces with big pearls, big emeralds, big sapphires.

So there's a reason behind all this, of course.

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