The Queen of Jewels

It was recently announced that the Pearl of Asia, the largest and most beautiful of the pearls known in the world, has been discovered anew: searchers found it in a water cistern in Marseilles, where it had remained in that hiding place throughout the days of the Nazi occupation of France.

Man has been infatuated with pearls since the most ancient of ages, when their home waters were discovered in the seas of southern Asia. The ancient Chinese took care to gather them more than two thousand years before Christ, and the Brahmin scriptures, whose date goes back beyond thirty centuries, contain marvelous descriptions of pearls. These jewels are mentioned many times in the Old and New Testaments; Job the Righteous says, "A virtuous woman, who can find her? Her price is above pearls." And it is said that the Queen of Sheba, when she visited Solomon the Wise, presented him with a great quantity of pearls among the precious gifts she brought him.

In the age of the Roman Empire, pearls were the most valuable and the most widespread of jewels, for they were considered the emblem of divinity and majesty. It is related that one of the Roman commanders paid the expenses of one of his military campaigns with the price of a single pearl which he wrested from one of his mother's earrings. In truth, the passion for pearls and the pressing desire to possess them were so very great that special laws were enacted restricting adornment with them, their use being confined in that era to nobles and aristocrats; the custom was then revived in Venice and Saxony toward the end of the sixteenth century.

Cleopatra was famed for her mad love of two things: pearls and Antony. To prove the depth of her love for her paramour, it is said that she once placed the most precious pearl she owned in a cup of wine and drank it down with the wine in his honor. Pearls have played a leading role in the history of the British royal jewels since the days of the British kings began. The crown of the first Saxon kings was studded with pearls. An oil portrait of Queen Margaret of Scotland, wife of James IV, painted in the year 1482, shows that queen girdled with a belt of pearls and wearing a gown studded and embroidered with pearls. Henry VIII was famed for the quantities of them he lavished upon his successive wives. His daughter Queen Elizabeth doted on them passionately; she was extravagant in acquiring them and in adorning herself with them, so that her garments were embroidered with rare pearls and her jewels formed a unique collection of the finest pearls in the world at that time. It is believed that the pearls of the British Imperial Crown are the earrings of that captivating queen. Shakespeare immortalized the beauty of pearls in his play "Romeo and Juliet." A wave of intense enthusiasm swept through all parts of Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the custom of embroidering costly gowns with them became widespread, and the goldsmiths grew inventive in fashioning jewelry set with them. When the handsome Duke of Buckingham visited Paris, to return from it escorting Henrietta Maria, the bride of Charles I, he wore a purple silk suit embroidered with pearls whose price was valued in that era at more than twenty thousand pounds. And Queen Victoria assembled a great collection of the finest kinds of pearls in the world.

It is worth mentioning that the most famous centers of pearls, or the sources from which they are extracted, are the Emirate of Bahrain, situated at the approaches of the Persian Gulf, and the island of Ceylon. There the natives

of these two regions have busied themselves with diving to the depths of the sea to gather the pearl-bearing shellfish every year, from the most ancient times down to our own age, beginning in the month of June and lasting to the end of the summer season. Hundreds of boats and ships set out each year for the home waters of these creatures, every ship supplied with the necessary divers and diving gear — still the very same their ancient forefathers used. A single ship remains two weeks on its voyage, then returns to its base, its divers having gathered a great quantity of these pearl-bearing shellfish. When they reach shore they set about extracting the pearls, of which there may be more than one in the body of a single creature — or there may be nothing at all. The most famous world market for pearls is the city of Bombay in India, to which the pearl merchants come from all parts of the world. The strange thing, Madam, is that you may spend a matter of years searching for the pearls suited to complete a pearl necklace, or to find a single pearl to match one in your possession from which you wish to fashion a pair of precious earrings. And stranger still, pearls by their nature do not take kindly to being kept and stored away, for they lose their splendor and the beauty of their color — as though their tongue were saying: I wish to display my beauty and my radiance always, to put to shame with them the beauty of the other gems and jewels. So do not hide me, Madam, from all eyes, but display me always upon your neck or upon your wrist, that I may exchange beauty and enchantment with your tender skin, and take from it what keeps me ever radiant, and add to your enchantment enchantment and splendor.