It is believed that a pair of Marie Antoinette’s favorite rare diamond bracelets smuggled out when the last queen of France was imprisoned during the French Revolution was sold in Geneva on Tuesday for more than $8 million.
This photo taken in Geneva on September 6, 2021 shows one of two bracelets belonging to France... [] Queen Marie-Antoinette is decorated with three rows of 112 old-cut diamonds.
The bid price of approximately US$8.1 million, including hammer fees, broke the auction valuation, and Christie’s stated that the auction valuation may be between US$2 million and US$4 million.
Marie Antoinette's jewelry is especially a hot item on the market-in 2018, a diamond and pearl necklace belonging to the queen was sold at auction for 36 million US dollars.
According to historian Vincent Meylan (Vincent Meylan), Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette) from her private jeweler Charles Auguste Boehmer (Charles Auguste Boehmer) around 1776. ) Bought two three-strand diamond bracelets for 250,000 livres (equivalent to modern US$4.6 million).
Jean-Marc Lunel, a jewelry expert at the auction house Christie’s, described the fact that the bracelet managed to stay together as "miracle" and said that similar bracelets had been separated several times. Centuries.
In January 1791, when the French Revolution was in full swing, when Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace, she secretly packed her favorite jewelry into a wooden box. Then smuggled them to Austria for safekeeping, hoping that she could retrieve these jewels after the war. To Christie's.
However, she was guillotined in October 1793, and the bracelets were later returned to her daughter Marie Thérèse of France, her only surviving child. She passed the bracelets to her. Her family, they have been collecting since then.
Soon after the fall of Napoleon III, after the French government sold many jewels at auction in 1887, some French crown jewels were finally sold on the open market in order to prevent royal relatives from claiming these jewels and their related political power.
The provenance of the bracelet is supported by an entry in the accounting books of Marie Antoinette’s husband, King Louis XVI, which is now kept in the French National Archives in Paris. The record details how Marie Antoinette traded some of her gems and borrowed more than $500,000 from the king to buy bracelets. The Queen’s mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who later scolded her for the bracelet, wrote in a letter in 1776: “The news from Paris tells me that you just bought the bracelet... Therefore, your financial situation Unstable. "The art of this period shows that bracelets have become the queen's favorite accessory. A portrait painted by the Swedish painter Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller in 1785 shows Marie Antoinette wearing the painting. Three years later, in 1816, her daughter Marie Thérèse also wore one of the bracelets when she painted a portrait of Antoine-Jean Gros. The portrait still remains in the collection of the Palace of Versailles.