THE JEWEL THIEF

A gem cutter’s daughter hopes to avoid execution by telling the story of stealing the Sun King’s diamond.

When Juliette Pitau is brought before King Louis XIV, accused of stealing his Tavernier Violet, a blue diamond from India, she knows that explaining her motivation offers her only chance. She’s thrown in the Bastille and given a clerk to take her dictation—René, her one-time paramour. Because René believes her to be as immoral and ambitious as the king does, Juliette crafts her tale to win back his love as well as her life. Juliette’s story begins with her father’s appointment as royal gem cutter and the impossible task he was set involving a blue diamond. This, plus family deaths pushed him into alcoholism. Juliette sought out a Jewish master gem cutter; associating with Jews is listed among her crimes. The novel’s slow pace belies the urgency of Juliette’s impending doom, although the detailed descriptions of jewels and dresses compensate. Juliette emerges as a realistically flawed heroine, but René’s bursts of violent anger, jealousy, and oft-repeated insistence that she scapegoat the Jewish gem cutters to secure her own acquittal show him to be far more toxic than her besotted narration acknowledges. The ethnically Jewish characters are conversos, or Christian converts, portrayed as simply virtuous and inexplicably generous with the Christian French characters who use their knowledge for their own gain. All characters are white.

A winding tale of jewelry-based intrigue darkened by an uncomfortably unhealthy romance.