Gemmes Story Page 1A

Leonard Rosenthal’s

“Au Jardin des Gemmes”

with Illustrations by Léon Carée

A Granite Bay Design Microsite (Plus a Separate Gallery of Other Carée Artwork) ->

Au-Jardin-des-Gemmes-Leon-Carre-Book-Illustration-01 Au Jardin des Gemmes Story by Leonard Rosenthal with Illustrations by Léon Carré, Plate 1 of 12

“Before he undertakes to leaf through these pages devoted to colored stones, I must account to the reader my intentions and my aim.”

Excerpt from “Au Jardin des Gemmes”*

“My profession is not to write, and yet I published, two and a half years ago, a work entitled “In the Kingdom of the Pearl,” and here again today is a new volume whose subject is gems, and especially the three most wonderful colored stones: the emerald, the ruby, and the sapphire. Why did I want to write it?

Authorial vanity is foreign to me; the subject is not new. But just as love has formed the theme of innumerable different novels, precious stones can be the theme of a book different from those that have been published since one has been writing and reading. I must therefore say that life has not only led me to buy and sell gems: it has given me the favor of loving them for themselves, of being interested in them intellectually. Plies were not only objects of exchange for me: they appeared to me as creations of nature, endowed with a mysterious existence and singular powers, and little by little I was attracted by their secret life.

Plies had for me, who loved them and wanted to understand them, the attraction of strange enigmas. Beyond the professional interest, the curiosity of the origins seized me. To the mineralogical origins, to the study of the exciting, stubborn, cruel and sometimes tragic struggle, supported by man to conquer precious stones, to the examination of beliefs, allegories, legends, symbolisms, joined to impose themselves on my mind. It was then that I wanted to write this book.

“But I believed at first that it would be enough for me to draw on my own knowledge, and I quickly threw down on paper my personal memories, my knowledge of gems and their history, and all that life had taught me and all that my long experience had allowed me to record. I soon realized that memory and the resources of experience could not provide me with the material completed for a work of this kind, and that it was necessary to make a part for erudition.”

More About Gemstones

Sapphire: A variety of the mineral corundum, with its color caused by trace amounts of elements like iron and titanium. Sapphires are highly valued for their beauty, durability, and rarity.