Diamond necklace linked to Marie Antoinette sells for $4.8m

A necklace thought to be linked to a scandal that prompted the downfall of the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette has been sold at auction for $4.81m (£3.8m).

The Georgian piece contains about 500 diamonds and was bought for almost double the amount estimated by Sotheby’s auction house.

“It was an electric night,” said Andres White Correal, a jewellery specialist from Sotheby’s, adding the unnamed female buyer was “ecstatic”.

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The jewels were sold on Wednesday evening at an auction in Geneva.

White Correal said the buyer “said something beautiful to me: ‘I’m exceptionally happy that I won this lot; but I don’t own it, I’m merely the custodian until the next person will come along’.”

“There is obviously a niche in the market for historical jewels with fabulous provenances.

“People are not only buying the object, they are buying all the history that is attached to it.”

Marie Antoinette was born in Austria in 1755 and sent to France to be the child bride of the future King Louis XVI.
The last queen of France was guillotined in 1793 at the age of 37, along with her husband at the height of the French Revolution.

It is believed some of the jewels in the necklace sold on Wednesday were the original ones at the centre of the “affair of the diamond necklace” scandal in the 1780s, that may have hastened Marie Antoinette’s demise.

Jeanne de la Motte, a noblewoman fallen on hard times, pretended to be French Queen and tricked a cardinal into giving her the necklace, without paying.

When Marie Antoinette, who had no knowledge of the transaction, was contacted about the absence of the final payment, the cardinal was arrested but declared innocent.

La Motte was found and branded with a V, for voleuse (thief) – with a hot iron.

Although Marie Antoinette was found to be blameless, her reputation is thought to have been tarnished by the affair and she was unpopular among the French people, who accused her of being wasteful and a dangerous influence on the king.

Jewels from the original, which was set with 650 diamonds and weighed around 2,800 carats, were sold piecemeal on the black market.

A jeweller working on London’s Bond Street confirmed he bought more than half of them for £10,000 shortly after their disappearance, Sotheby’s said.

Some experts say the age and quality of the diamonds in the necklace sold on Wednesday point to a match with the originals.

The necklace was previously worn by the Marquess of Anglesey at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, and it was also worn 16 years earlier at King George VI’s crowning.

It was part of the Anglesey family jewellery collection for about 100 years before it was sold to a private Asian collector in the 1960s.