Jewelry Talks by Richard Klein

Author:Richard Klein [Klein, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81618-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Diamond ring given to Princess Diana by Dodi al Fayed (Illustration Credit 2.1)

They had known each other only a couple of months; Diana didn’t like him pressuring her. But all agree she was prepared to wear it. She’s supposed to have told her closest friend, Rosa Monckton, the granddaughter of Walter Monckton (the Duke of Windsor’s trusted aide): “He’s given me a bracelet. He’s given me a watch. I know the next thing will be a ring. Rosa, that’s going firmly on the fourth finger of my right hand”—as far as possible from the fourth finger of the left.1 Notice too, Zeem, the order in which he gave her the presents: a princess might at first accept a watch, only then a bracelet, and finally a ring. A bracelet, a pure ornament with no utility, speaks more intimately—bears more weighty significance—than a useful watch, but less than does a ring.

It seems certain they were planning to live together in the former house of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in le Bois de Boulogne (with the spiraling staircase in the trompe l’oeil entry). It’s hard to believe Diana and Dodi would have chosen to live in sin in that place of all places of abomination, the spot on earth that for decades had been the object of the royal family’s obsessive distrust and loathing. In those ghostly rooms, Diana would play the Duke of Windsor, casting herself in the role of the beloved royal who gives up all rights to the throne and suffers exile for love of a pariah, the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson—an Arab businessman. The repetition is uncanny. Could it be purely accidental? Mythically, it makes the Princess of Wales into the ex-Prince of Wales. And what if Dodi, like Wallis, had been a sort of cross-dresser?

What exactly were they planning? Repossi won’t tell! The jeweler, true to his motto, insists that he will never ever tell us the secret the ring congeals. He even declined to reveal the number of its carats. Of course, anyone who announces publicly that he can keep a secret has already made it obvious that he can’t. To reporters Repossi’s spokesman coyly avers that the ring came from a collection of engagement rings designed by Repossi himself, in a series entitled “Dis-moi, oui.” This is a ring to strike a bargain; it gives incomparably much (estimates go up to $250,000) in order to elicit from her a single little word. Say Yes to Me! he says to her, as he slips it on her very slender finger. You wear my ring that speaks, that says to the world you said yes.

When they saw it in the window of Repossi’s she exclaimed, “That’s the one I want.” What does a Princess see? And what does she want? To judge from the picture in the Times, it’s an awfully large ring: in the center looms a 3- or 4-carat, emerald-cut, flawless white diamond solitaire surrounded by four triangular diamonds whose points make a star

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