Marie Antoinette's Jewels at Auction

If you happened to have been the lucky person who won the recent billion dollar Mega Millions Lottery prize then you might want to consider making a trip to Switzerland next week as the jewels of Marie Antoinette are going to auction. It's no coincidence that the jewels are not be auctioned in France so that the owner won't be forced to give special deals to the French government if they happen to want to buy them and return them to Versailles.

Since the end of the French Revolution there haven't been too many signs of the jewels that were once owned by the famous French woman. 

There are a pair of earring in the Smithsonian that are believed to have diamonds from her collection. A diamond necklace from Antoinette’s collection appeared at Christie’s in 1971 and hasn’t been seen since. Perhaps the most impressive Marie Antoinette jewel to turn up in public was a blue heart-shape diamond ring sold at the auction house in the early 1980s.

Many of her jewels were dismantled. Remarkably, a few were kept intact and have just surfaced on the market. At Sotheby’s in Geneva on November 14, 2018, the Royal Jewels from the Bourbon-Parma Family sale will include pieces that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. How, you ask, did the jewels survive? Well, according to Sotheby’s:

In March 1791, King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children began to prepare their escape from France. According to accounts written by Marie Antoinette’s lady in waiting, Madame Campan, the queen spent an entire evening in the Tuileries Palace wrapping all of her diamonds, rubies and pearls in cotton and placing them in a wooden chest. In the following days, the jewels were sent to Brussels, which was under the rule of the queen’s sister, Archduchess Marie-Christine and which was home to Count Mercy Argentau. The count, the former Austrian Ambassador to Paris, was one of the only men who had retained the queen’s trust. It was he who took delivery of the jewels and sent them on to Vienna, into the safe keeping of the Austrian Emperor, Marie Antoinette’s nephew.
In 1792, the royal family was imprisoned in the Temple tower. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were executed by guillotine in 1793 and their 10-year old son, Louis XVII, died in captivity. The king and queen’s only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse de France, “Madame Royale”, was released in December 1795, after three years of solitary confinement. After learning of the deaths of her mother and brother, she was sent to Austria. Upon her arrival in Vienna in 1796, she was given her mother’s jewels by her cousin, the emperor. Having borne no children of her own, Madame Royale bequeathed part of her jewelry collection to her niece and adopted daughter, Louise of France, Duchess of Parma and grand-daughter of Charles X, King of France, who in turn left them to her son, Robert I, the last ruling Duke of Parma.

During her time, pearls were more valuable than diamonds, so there are lots of pearls....

Wonder where these will end up?