In 1926, at a hotel in Paris, a female cleaner named Suzanne Schiltz felt very hungry one day. While she was tidying up a room, she noticed an apple in the suitcase of two young men. She took a bite of the apple and almost broke her tooth on an incredibly hard object inside – the “Grand Condé” diamond, one of the rarest gemstones in France at the time and known to be stolen.
Two months before Schiltz’s apple incident, amateur thieves looted the historic Château de Chantilly located 50 kilometers north of Paris with minimal equipment, relying solely on a few tall ladders to carry out the burglary.
The scale of the theft was massive, with over 75 pieces of jewelry valued at up to $3 million being stolen from the castle museum. Law enforcement initially suspected experienced acrobats or museum staff colluding as insiders. In reality, the culprits, Léon Kauffer and Emile Souter, were just two young former French pilots in their twenties.
The operation clearly exceeded the capabilities of the duo. Despite successfully snagging the jewelry, they struggled to offload it. Before being caught, they only made a profit of 30,000 francs (around $1200 at the time) from the stolen goods. Their biggest mistake was taking the “Grand Condé” diamond, a gem so renowned that no jeweler dared touch it for fear of getting into trouble.
The Grand Condé diamond, a legendary 9.01-carat pear-shaped pink diamond from the Golconda region in India, is currently housed in the Musée Condé at the Château de Chantilly in France. This diamond has a close historical connection with the Bourbon prince and great Condé (Le Grand Condé, Louis II de Bourbon) and his family history in French history.
“The police across Europe were all searching for this diamond at that time,” said Mathieu Deldicque, Chief Curator and Director of the Musée Condé, in a telephone interview with CNN.
In October of this year, the natural pink diamond will be displayed at Château de Chantilly to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the robbery. Deldicque expressed that this would be the first time in a century that the diamond would be featured in a large-scale public exhibition.
According to reports from 1926, one of the thieves was once asked by the police, “Do you like apples?” The thief was stunned and replied, “Why?” The police responded, “Because there’s an apple in your suitcase with strange seeds.”
Initially, the diamond was set in the Order of the Golden Fleece’s insignia, one of the most important orders of knighthood in Europe, before being removed and reset into a ring. A written announcement from the 18th century mandated that the eldest son of the Condé family must inherit the diamond for generations as a symbolic part of family heritage.
“It is a symbolic part of the family’s heritage,” Deldicque remarked.