Originally published at: Napoléon's good luck charm could fetch $250 million or more at auction | Boing Boing
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$250M… for a good luck charm that gave up big time on its original owner?
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It was originally faceted crystal, but Napoleon rubbed it too much.
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It’s bringing a quarter billion dollars of good luck to its present owner. There must be a way of recharging it.
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Minkey’s Paw.
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He’s dead. How lucky can it be?
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Oh boy.
“While provenance is used as the traditional method to authenticate an artifact, the Talisman of Napoleon Bonaparte was authenticated by using mathematics based upon a Probability Analysis utilizing 27 key research factors that yields a 0% chance of the Talisman being something other than what the evidence indicates that it is”
https://www.napoleonstalisman.com/authenticity-1
And there was me wondering why the auction was being run by an outfit that does house liquidations and not say Sotheby’s.
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Maybe it only works for golf?
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If you have$250-million to drop on a good luck charm you’re already lucky.
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So what was it attached to originally? A stick? It has something on the back half that I can’t figure out what it is for.
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Looks fake to me.
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Pat Boone! This would go perfect with my walk-in bathtub.
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He had a pretty good streak going for a while
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My guess is its a prop from a masonic lodge. There’s a 100% chance this can’t be proven otherwise.
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Very good point. Masons love this sort of thing. IIRC there were rumors Napoleon was a Freemason. So the two could be true. Or even a gift from the Masons at some point.
There is this cemetery I like to go to that is/was a Mason cemetery, and there is an old school crypt complete with this chamber with chairs and this podium/alter thing. Super fascinating architecture inside. Makes you wonder what they got up to in the 20s and 30s when it was built.
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I’d rather go with:
The “probability analysis” is the biggest piece of horseshit I have ever seen. They should have hired me: I was a high-school Mathlete, and I could have done a better job. (But then, my “analysis” would not have concluded, 44,100,722,636,800 to 1, that the talisman was genuine.)
omg. It just gets better. This is the “provenance”:
Pieter Hegeman, of Pennsylvania, USA, states that his deceased father, a landscape gardener dug this item up at a depth of about 15 feet near Noordwijk, Netherlands when he was a teenager (born 1922). Noordwijk borders Amsterdam on the North where the Royal Palace was occupied by Napoleon’s brother, Louis Napoleon, and Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, from 1808 - 1810.
Any grifter could have told him: he really should have had a better story than “I found this in the dirt. In Europe.”
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That site is hilarious.
“In other words, it can be mathematically proven that the Talisman of Napoleon has a 0% chance of being something other than what the evidence indicates that it is.”
Also, it can be mathematically proven that a Franklin Mint plate has a 0% chance of being something other than what the evidence indicates that it is, which is a Franklin Mint plate.
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