THE CROWN DIAMONDS OF FRANCE.

Western Star, Issue 282, 1 February 1879, Page 7

THE CROWN DIAMONDS OF FRANCE.

The exhibition of the Crown diamonds of France in the Champ de Marshas drawn attention to a curious episode in their history. In 1792 the Constituent Assembly ordered the inventory to be made of them, and that task had hardly been completed when, on the night of August 16, they all disappeared. Forty thieves, acting iu unison, managed to escalade the house in the Place Louis XIY., in which the gems were deposited, and effected an entrance by breaking in the windows, and carried them all off. Although so many men were engaged in the enterprise only two were caught; but the diamonds could not be found. At that moment a man named Lamieville, a hairdresser, was in the prison of the Conciergerle under sentence of death for coining, but he made his escape. A few days afterwards he called upon Sergernt M ireeau, a municipal officer who had rendered him some service w bile he was in prison, and told the policeman that while in confinement he bad heard the man talking, and had discovered the hiding places of the precious objects, hid’iu the hollows of two large beams in a garret in a certain street. The sergeant went himself to search and recovered the whole of them, the Wegent, the Sancy, &c. As for Lamieville he was sent from Paris for security. Petion, the Mayor of the capital, recommendea him to the Minister of War. ami he was made an officer of a regiment of line. According to an inventory drawn up in the reign of Louis XVIII., the jewels were more than sixty-four thousand in number, weighing 18,751 carats, and were estimated to be worth 20,900,261)fr.