Queen Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793) died by the guillotine – her myth glitters to this day!
On Tuesday the auction house Christie’s auctioned two magnificent diamond bracelets from the French monarch in Geneva (Switzerland). It was the auction of the year! An anonymous telephone bidder paid 7.46 million Swiss francs (the equivalent of seven million euros) for the sparkling pieces of jewelry. A surprise – experts had estimated the value at a maximum of four million francs.
Pure extravagance! Asians in particular pay moon prices for jewelry with a historyPhoto: Martial Trezzini / dpa
The identical bracelets each weigh 97 grams and consist of a total of 112 top carats. The auction house estimated the stones to be between 140 and 150 carats. Marie-Antoinette had ordered them from a Parisian jeweler in 1776.
Queen Marie-Antoinette was born as Archduchess of Austria. Their lust for splendor fueled the French RevolutionPhoto: dpa picture alliance / Heritage Art / Heritage Images
Their ostentatiousness was the undoing of the nobles. While the people were starving, the nobility lived in ostentation – the French Revolution broke out. The queen and her husband were executed in Paris, their jewelry ended up in Vienna via Brussels, and was later shared among nieces and nephews. May the bracelets bring more happiness to their new owners.
The clunkers were not destroyed – that increases their value enormouslyPhoto: DENIS BALIBOUSE / REUTERS
The collar affair
A huge scandal aroused the royal court and all of France in 1785/86: the so-called “collar affair”. Involved in it: Queen Marie-Antoinette. Whether guilty or innocent is controversial.
Two jewelers had offered the luxury-spoiled queen a million dollar necklace made of 647 diamonds (2800 carats). She refused – too expensive! But then a fraudster sneaked the necklace and disappeared with it. It came to a complicated entanglement, a process that was exposed to vertigo.
In the course of the bloody revolution, the last queen of France climbed onto the scaffold on October 16, 1793; her husband King Ludwig VXI. had already been beheaded on January 21st.