Three Hapsburgs and a Reporter Walk into a Canadian Vault

Summary

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.My inbox is regularly deluged with story pitches, so I considered one that came on Sept. 15 with my usual dose of skepticism. A publicist was offering “a potential exclusive” regarding “a highly sensitive, confidential matter,” involving a collection “lost to the world for decades.”It sounded almost too titillating to be true. So I agreed to get on the phone and hear more.Thus began my journey of reporting on the 137-carat Florentine Diamond, which had been missing for 100 years and was assumed to have been lost, stolen or recut and sold in pieces. It turned out the diamond had been under our noses all along: in a bank in Canada, where the Hapsburg family had stored it in a vault for security.Jewels! Secrecy! Royalty! The story had the intrinsic drama of a suspenseful yarn, and much of the reporting proved to be a fascinating romp through the history of European nobility. Moreover, I was able to fly to Quebec to watch as three Hapsburg descendants saw the diamond for the first time.Standing at a table in the bank, I looked on as Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen — flanked by two of his cousins and an expert from Austria’s former imperial court jewelers — opened the small battered suitcase that had belonged to his grandmother Zita. As he pried open the crinkly paper that surrounded the diamond, I marveled at the gem’s enduring magnificence.The suitcase contained several other glittering jewels, including a diamond-encrusted badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Hapsburg family’s house order. I recorded videos on my phone to remember the moment and joked that I would be happy to take home a watch bedazzled with emeralds.But the article also required painstaking — sometimes prosaic — research. There were so many historical facts to get straight, spanning World War I to World War II to the present.I had to get my head around the Hapsburg fam...