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A necklace considered linked to a scandal that prompted the downfall of the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette has been offered at public sale for $4.81m (£3.8m).
The Georgian piece comprises about 500 diamonds and was purchased for nearly double the quantity estimated by Sotheby’s public sale home.
“It was an electric night,” mentioned Andres White Correal, a jewelry specialist from Sotheby’s, including the unnamed feminine purchaser was “ecstatic”.
The jewels had been offered on Wednesday night at an public sale in Geneva.
White Correal mentioned the client “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 usually are not solely shopping for the article, they’re shopping for all of the historical past that’s hooked up 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 a part of the Anglesey household jewelry assortment for about 100 years earlier than it was offered to a personal Asian collector within the Sixties.
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