“Sir, I am bewildered. But—yes—it is indeed the Mazarin stone. We are greatly your debtors, Mr. Holmes. Your sense of humour may, as you admit, be somewhat perverted, and its exhibition remarkably untimely, but at least I withdraw any reflection I have made upon your amazing professional powers. But how—”
“The case is but half finished; the details can wait. No doubt, Lord Cantlemere, your pleasure in telling of this successful result in the exalted circle to which you return will be some small atonement for my practical joke. Billy, you will show his Lordship out, and tell Mrs. Hudson that I should be glad if she would send up dinner for two as soon as possible.”
THE AUTHOR OF “THE MAZARIN STONE”
WHO WROTE this story? In the entire Canon, only “The Mazarin Stone” and “His Last Bow” are recorded in the third person. Curiously, no other Canonical tales were published in the interval between these two stories (“His Last Bow” in 1917 and “The Mazarin Stone” in 1921). An inconclusive word count study by David Chizar, et al., in “Another Perspective on The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” points out that the writing style in “The Mazarin Stone” (shorter, less complex sentences) is more like a play than Watson’s short stories, suggesting that someone—most likely, Arthur Conan Doyle—wrote “The Mazarin Stone” on the basis of The Crown Diamond.
Christopher Morley, in “Watson à la Mode,” proposes that Mrs. Watson wrote the story (“her first and last attempt”) but insists that “Mrs. Watson” was Mary Morstan Watson (and not the “second” wife of Watson’s referred to in “The Blanched Soldier”). O.F. Grazebrook suggests that the author was young Dr. Verner, while Edgar Smith proposes Arthur Conan Doyle as the author. Still another contention is that of G. B. Newton, who nominates Billy the page.
Gavin Brend and others nominate Watson as the author of “The Mazarin Stone,” venturing that he wrote this story and “His Last Bow” in the third person to avoid the prohibition on writing imposed by his last wife. Thinking somewhat along the same lines is June Thomson, who expresses the belief that Watson was considering not his relationship with his wife, but that with Holmes. “Although the breach [evidenced by Watson living in his own rooms and probably caused by his marriage—see “The Illustrious Client”] was to some extent healed,” she reflects, “a certain coolness remained between the two men, a state of affairs in which the use of the more impersonal third person seemed more appropriate.” Page Heldenbrand joins the Watson bandwagon, pointing to the doctor’s remark in “Thor Bridge” respecting cases in which he was “either not present or played so small a part as they could only be told as by a third person.” And John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, sees Watson’s resorting to the third person as a matter of necessity, given that he was not in the room when Count Sylvius and Sam Merton were discussing their plans. “But Holmes was [in the room], pretending to be a wax bust of himself,” Hall notes. “Once the case was finished, for Holmes to inform Watson of what had transpired, and then for Watson to inform us, his readers, would have been very much of an anti-climax. This was simply the first [to occur] of the two cases where Watson had, indeed, to tell the tale as by a third person.”
But D. Martin Dakin rejects any theory naming Watson as the author, declaring that it “bristles with improbabilities.” Singling out numerous incongruities in the details of the story, such as the extra door to the sitting room and the fact that no violin recording of Hoffmann’s “Barcarolle” was available in London until 1907, he concedes that the final scene, in which Holmes slips the diamond into Lord Cantlemere’s pocket, seems to evoke the Holmes—with his fondness for the dramatic revelation—that Watson’s readers have come to know. Dakin guesses that Watson, who did witness the conversation between Count Sylvius and Sam Merton, might have taken incomplete notes on the case; these were then discovered by a third party, who wrote them up to the best of his or her ability. Of course, Dakin thinks little of that ability, noting with disdain, “Holmes had a delicate vein of sarcasm and was not above twitting an adversary, as witness his interview with Colonel Sebastian Moran; but the forced facetiousness of his exchanges with the Count . . . reads like a violent caricature of this tendency, and must grate on the ear of all Holmesians.”
1 “The Mazarin Stone” appeared in the Strand Magazine in October 1921; its first American publication was in Hearst’s International Magazine in November 1921. Only months before, on May 2, 1921, a play by Arthur Conan Doyle entitled The Crown Diamond: or, An Evening with Sherlock Holmes opened at the Bristol Hippodrome, after which it toured for eighteen months. The play and the events of “The Mazarin Stone” have much in common, and it is difficult to understand why Dr. Watson would have given Sir Arthur access to his notes for purposes of producing a play. The play was published in 1958 by the Baker Street Irregulars.
2 See the appendix on page 1531 for a discussion of the author of this story.
3 This was probably Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930), who succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister in 1902. His administration was marked by educational reform and establishment of the 1904 Entente Cordiale (a “friendly understanding”) with France, the precursor to the Triple Entente with Russia. But Balfour was not particularly popular, and a dispute within the Conservative party over the issue of free trade forced him to resign from office in 1905. Balfour’s most recognised action was the so-called Balfour Declaration, in which, as foreign secretary under David Lloyd George, he wrote a November 2, 1917, letter to Baron Rothschild pledging British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
4 The British home secretary, as head of the home office, is responsible for the maintenance of the peace and administration of the police, judicial, and penal systems. Aretas Akers-Douglas, 1st Viscount Chilston, served as home secretary from 1902 to 1905, the period in which the events of “The Mazarin Stone” likely occurred.
5 In “The Empty House.”
6 Despite the popular association of the gasogene (used to produce seltzer water) with Holmes, it is mentioned only here and in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (see “A Scandal in Bohemia,” note 16).
7 That this is a pose may be evidenced by Holmes’s sumptuous repasts in such tales as The Sign of Four and “The Noble Bachelor.” Holmes certainly was no gourmand, for he often dined on a hurried meal (for example, his “rude meal” of a slice of beef and bread in “The Beryl Coronet”) and Watson stated that “his diet was usually of the sparest . . . ,” but the Canon has ample examples of Holmes’s appreciation of fine dining (for example, “something nutritious at Simpson’s” in “The Dying Detective”).
8 Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661) was cardinal and chief minister of France during the youth of Louis XIV. Originally from Italy (his given name was Giulio Mazarini), the young secretary to the papal legate of Milan was sent to France in 1630, during hostilities between France and Spain, to negotiate with Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richilieu. Mazarin’s ensuing friendship with the great Richelieu not only brought him back to France in 1640 to serve the French court, but it also encouraged Louis XIII to recommend him for cardinal despite his never having been ordained as a priest. Upon the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII, Mazarin became the minister of the French regent, Anne of Austria. Before the young Louis XIV came of age, Mazarin had the regent’s implicit trust and busied himself with negotiating peace between Spain and France; after Louis XIV was crowned in 1654, Mazarin advised him on political affairs and helped him to train his staff. Some biographers make the unsubstantiated claim that the handsome, charming Mazarin was engaged in a secret affair with Anne of Austria and possibly even married her. In Mazarin’s will, he bequeathed to the French Crown the major part of his jewel collection, including the eighteen diamonds thereafter called the “Mazarin Diamonds.”
Peter Blau, in “In Memoriam: Muzaffar Ad-Din,” points out that there were no yellow diamonds among the Mazarin Diamonds. However, in the play The Crown Diamond, written by Arthur Conan Doyle and perhaps based on Watson’s records o
f this case (see note 1, above), Holmes makes no mention of Mazarin but instead describes the gem as “the great yellow Crown Diamond, 77 carats.” With this added information, Blau identifies the stone as one of the Persian crown jewels, which may have been stolen during the visit of the shah of Persia to England in 1902. Blau offers no theory, however, on why the stone is here misidentified as the “Mazarin stone.”
9 A gudgeon is a small freshwater fish used for bait. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that “to swallow a gudgeon” means “To be bamboozled with a most palpable lie, as silly fish are caught by gudgeons.” To illustrate the point, Brewer quotes the second part of Samuel Butler’s satirical poem “Hudibras” (1664): “Make fools believe in their foreseeing / Of things before they are in being; / To swallow gudgeons ere they’re catched, / And count their chickens ere they’re hatched.”
10 Holmes has a fear of air-guns, and not without reason: See “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House.”
11 Holmes appears to be combining lines from “Verses written on a window in Scotland,” by Aaron Hill (1685–1750), theatre impresario, poet, commercial entrepreneur, and friend of novelist Samuel Richardson and poet Alexander Pope: “Tender-handed stroke a nettle, / And it stings you for your pains; / Grasp it like a man of mettle / And it soft as silk remains.” However, usage of the figure of the nettle is so common that this example can hardly be seen as contradictory of Watson’s assessment of Holmes’s knowledge of literature as “nil” (A Study in Scarlet).
12 A trait the count shared with Colonel Sebastian Moran of “The Empty House.” In The Crown Diamond (see note 1, above), the villain is Colonel Sebastian Moran, a falsification perhaps suggested by this common pastime.
13 This is the only mention in the Canon of a “waiting room” at 221 Baker Street.
14 What might seem, at first blush, to be another dismissive comment directed toward Watson is, in fact, a rare showing of flattery and affection on Holmes’s part. As June Thomson clarifies, “At that period, the acknowledgement that someone had ‘played the game’ was one of the highest compliments one Englishman could pay to another. In praising Watson in this manner, Holmes seems to be looking back over his shoulder, as it were, at Watson’s role in their relationship and, while endorsing Watson’s outstanding qualities as a friend, is also signalling that the time for parting has almost come.”
15 The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) branch of the London Metropolitan Police was created in 1878, separating plainclothes detectives from the uniformed constables. (The term “Scotland Yard,” the name for police headquarters, is often used when only the CID itself is meant.) For no discernible reason, Holmes refers to the police’s criminal investigation unit as the CID only in “The Mazarin Stone,” “The Three Garridebs,” and The Valley of Fear. In all other cases, he prefers “the Yard.”
16 This is the only mention in the Canon of a “second exit” from the sitting room. Ann Byerly makes the sensible argument that Holmes had taken over Watson’s bedroom at this time, that the rooms had a door joining them, and that the “second door” was the concealed exit to Holmes’s bedroom, while the unconcealed exit was to Watson’s room.
17 Holmes also sat for a wax bust made by Monsieur Oscar Meunier of Grenoble (“The Empty House”).
18 A whist reference. In this case, a player with all the best cards of the chosen trump suit—which beats a card of any other suit—is certain to win, and the hapless opponent may as well “throw down your hand,” indicating defeat. See “The Red-Headed League” for a discussion of Holmes’s whist-playing.
19 To inform against or betray; a derivative of “impeach.”
20 A joke, for Holmes sends the “young page” to fetch Sam Merton, a “heavily- built” prize-fighter.
21 By which Holmes means that the count will be hanged.
22 Indeed, Holmes does appear to be uncharacteristically acting the part of the “wiseacre” in “The Mazarin Stone,” evidence to some of the fictitious nature of the tale.
23 A barcarolle, or barcarole, is a Venetian gondolier’s song (barcarola is Italian for “boatman”), with a rhythm suggestive of the rowing motion. The “Hoffmann Barcarolle” is the most famous operatic example of the form; it is from the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Tales of Hoffmann), which was written by the French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) and based on three stories by the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann. Les Contes d’Hoffmann was first performed in February 1881 at the Opéra Comique in Paris. The song, which opens the second act, is an empassioned duet to love and the night. Benjamin Grosbayne finds the adjectives “wailing” and “haunting” very inapt for the piece and concludes that Watson was abysmally ignorant of the literature of the violin and probably music in general. Anthony Boucher points out that there was no recording extant of the “Barcarolle” in 1902, and this must have been a private recording of Holmes’s own playing.
24 To inform against one’s companions, to tell tales. Equivalent to “peach.”
25 To “do” a person in boxing (or street fighting) is to get the best of him. A “thick ’un” is a sovereign: a crown piece, or five shillings. Thus, the total expression means something like “I’ll beat him up but good,” as one might say today.
26 See “The Empty House,” note 45.
27 To send or transport to prision.
28 The cutting of diamonds has been extensively practised in the city since the sixteenth century. Many famous diamonds were cut and polished in Amsterdam. These include the Cullinan, the largest diamond ever found, and the Koh-I-Noor (the Mountain of Light), the latter cut for the British Crown Jewels in 1852. The world’s smallest diamond, 0.00012 carat, with 57 facets, was cut in Amsterdam.
29 The only appearance of this bell at Baker Street.
30 To seize, take, or lay hold of anything, as in, “I copped us some great seats.” Here, Merton means that his capture (by the cops, coincidentally enough) seems just. In fact, this usage of the word “cop” probably comes from the Old French caper and the Latin capere, to capture or seize.
31 “Let us stress here the fact that it was a gramophone,” Anthony Boucher writes. “To most modern readers, gramophone and phonograph are interchangeable words, respectively British and American, like lift and elevator. . . . But in England in 1903, gramophone distinctly meant the Berliner-Gramophone & Typewriter disc machine, while cylinder machines were known as phonographs or graphophones.”
The gramophone was invented in the U.S. by Emile Berliner (1851–1929), a German-American inventor. Thomas Edison had recorded and reproduced sound on a cylinder, but in 1887 Berliner created a flat disk, which was made of hard rubber and played on a machine that had to be continually cranked. These gramophones sold for an affordable ten dollars, but sound quality was poor, and cranking the machine for such a long time proved tiresome. Berliner’s invention got a boost when Eldridge Reeves Johnson, who ran a machine shop, invented a simple spring motor for him, eliminating the gramophone’s most problematic feature. To advertise his invention, Berliner trademarked (on July 10, 1900) a picture of a dog staring at a gramophone, based on the 1898 painting His Master’s Voice by British artist Francis Barraud. (Barraud was inspired by his late dog Nipper.) He opened a London office in 1898, which became The Gramophone & Typewriter Company in 1900 and His Master’s Voice (HMV) in 1910.
Expanding rapidly, the Berliner Gramophone Company hired a man named Frank Seaman to market and distribute Berliner’s gramophones for him. As profits rose, Seaman grew dissatisfied with the terms of his contract and started the Zon-o-phone Company to take business away from Berliner; he then used some fancy legal manoeuvring to induce Berliner’s chief rival, the Columbia Graphophone Company—which was still using cylinders—to sue the Berliner Gramophone Company and put it out of business.
Following this fiasco, Berliner essentially retired in 1900, but Eldridge Reeves Johnson continued on by establishing the Consolidated Talking Machine Company, using (with Berliner�
��s permission) the picture of the dog and the gramophone in his company logo. After hiring engineers to improve the sound quality of Berliner’s disks, Johnson offered a free, higher-quality record to anyone who owned a Berliner machine. The gimmick worked so well that Johnson attracted the attention of his old foes Seaman and Columbia, who once again took him to court. Eldridge countersued and won, his only concession being that he could no longer use the name “gramophone,” which Seaman, as official distributor for the Berliner Gramophone Company, claimed for his own. Flush with his victory, Johnson began putting “Victor Records” on his disks and eventually renamed his company the Victor Talking Machine Company, incorporating it in 1901 and partnering in England with the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, which had remained intact. In 1929, Victor Records would be purchased by RCA, which would become RCA-Victor; in 1935, Gramophone & Typewriter Company (now HMV Records) would be absorbed by the RCA-created EMI. Both continued to use Berliner’s original “His Master’s Voice” image.
While Holmes may have been slow in other areas to adapt to new technologies (witness the absence of a telephone at Baker Street for many years), when it came to his beloved music, Holmes apparently had to have the latest recording device.
32 This is false, at least if the Canon is a fair sampling of Holmes’s behaviour. A. G. Cooper, in “Holmesian Humour,” claims to have counted 292 examples of the Master’s laughter, while Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, in “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” compiled the following table:
Frequency Table Showing the Number and Kind of Responses Sherlock Holmes Made to Humorous Situations and Comments in His 60 Recorded Adventures
Smile 103
Laugh 65
Joke 58
Chuckle 31
Humor 10
Amusement 9
Cheer 7
Delight 7
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 88