Going, going, gone – Marie Antoinette’s last jewels
What happened at the most glamorous auction of the year? Melissa Twigg reports
More of a shock was the Duchess of Windsor’s ruby bracelet failing to reach its reserve
Marie Antoinette would have surely approved of the auction held in her name – although possibly not of the price her two diamond bracelets eventually sold for. Yesterday, in a chandelier and gilt-edged ballroom in Geneva, hundreds of immaculately dressed buyers and dealers held their breath as French history went for £6million – a sum that seems paltry only in comparison to a 2018 Sotheby’s sale, where a pearl necklace belonging to the French queen sold for an extraordinary $36million (£28 million).
More of a shock was the Duchess of Windsor’s ruby bracelet, which yesterday failed to reach its reserve of £800,000, with bids barely topping £500,000.
But everyone knew this sale was always about the French queen who had the two diamond bracelets made for her in 1776 for the then enormous sum of 250,000 livres.
By the turn of the century, much of her jewellery had been lost, sold or stolen, but she had sent these particular pieces to her friend Count Mercy-argenteau in 1791 for safekeeping months before she was imprisoned. He allegedly kept the box with the diamonds hidden until after she was beheaded and only then opened it.
They were two of just three items later inherited by the Queen’s only surviving child – Madame Royale – once she was finally released from prison in 1795, and were eventually passed on to her niece the Duchesse de Parme.
It is the Duchesse’s family that has held on to the bracelets for nearly 200 years and who brought them to auction yesterday – some small changes had been made to them over time, but they are otherwise identical to the ones the Queen bought from her jeweller Boehmer in 1776. Yesterday, at 5pm on the dot, banks of Christie’s employees sat by still-silent phones, waiting for calls from billionaires around the world; glossy attendees tapped their Hermès and Chanel-clad feet on the carpet and wondered whether to spend six or seven figures on the 77 upcoming lots.
The auction began with a bang: a Borghese tiara first owned by Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, sold for three quarters of a million pounds, and diamond and emerald Cartier rings doubled their reserve, reaching over £600,000, as private buyers and dealers frantically outbid each other in the room and on the phone from Hong Kong and London. One blonde Ukrainian buyer was dressed entirely in white with a pair of slug-sized diamond ear cuffs curling up each lobe. “I feel very connected to many of these pieces,” she explained in the minutes before the auction began. “My daughters love the story of Marie and it would be wonderful for them to own something of hers so I’m not ruling that out. But I’m more excited by the Cartier pieces because I’ve been educating myself on jewellery trends and they encapsulate everything I love.” In the end, she failed to get either.
Jewellery dealer Hadi Rahami was there to see how lots belonging to his clients would fare – he speculated that Marie Antoinette’s bracelets could reach up to £30million. “I think this auction will bring [back] the appetite for fine jewellery that was killed by the pandemic,” he said.
“They are two incredible lots to have side by side – the Queen who lost everything and the woman [Wallis Simpson] who was never allowed to be queen, but who lived in ultimate luxury.”
During the first 10 lots, the standout piece was a pear-cut diamond that sold for £3.2 million after nearly eight minutes of frantic bidding. And yet, when it came to the much-anticipated French queen lot, the frenetic atmosphere stilled, and far fewer calls came in than expected. The eventual bid was made over the phone to an anonymous buyer for an acceptable but not exciting 7.5 million Swiss francs (£6 million).
The atmosphere had nonetheless been electric all day. In the morning, as snow settled on Mont Blanc and Geneva froze on the coldest day of autumn so far, immaculately coiffed potential buyers waited in the Four Seasons lobby hoping to see – and, more importantly, to touch, try on and analyse – the hundreds of jewels on display upstairs. “I’m tired of waiting,” barked one grey haired Italian man in a thick cable-knit jumper and expensive looking shoes, while his wife placed a bejewelled and consoling hand on his leg and ordered him another hot chocolate.
A nearby table of men from the UAE paused their conversation in Arabic to look over at him warily – they weren’t giving up their slot without a fight. “We’ve come a long way for this,” one of them said loudly. That’s the problem with attending the most hotly anticipated jewellery auction in years: no matter how rich you are, there’s always someone more entitled who tries to jump the queue.
Including me, apparently. Flashing my press card, I managed to bypass more than one billionaire to spend a few minutes with both Marie Antoinette’s bracelets and the Duchess of Windsor’s bangle. It was the former that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck – with a four carat diamond in the middle and rows of slightly smaller stones above and below, they can be worn either as bracelets or together as a choker, and are so dazzling that it seems entirely right that they were debuted at the royal court in Versailles.
“Everyone is overwhelmed by these bracelets when they first see them,” said Max Fawcett, the British-born head of jewellery at Christie’s Geneva, who was sitting with me. “They really are extraordinary. The diamonds alone are worth £1 million and then there’s the provenance, which is incomparable.”
Given the owners are descendants of the Duchesse de Parme and the bracelets have been in the family for 168 years, they were understandably loathe to part with it and Christie’s had to work hard to get their hands on something with so much personal history. “Divorce, death and debt – they always say that this is when auction houses come in handy,” says Fawcett. “But it’s also about persuasion and timing. People have a very emotional attachment to jewellery and we often have to work hard to get them to part with it. We certainly did in this case, but we’re very proud to have them.” Francois Curiel, the chairman of Christie’s in Europe, explained to me that it took months of letters, Zoom meetings and phone calls for the family to agree to hand them over.
There was less of a queue to see the Duchess of Windsor’s bangles. The former king gave it to his wife in 1938 on their first wedding anniversary, and there was a small hand-written note from him on the inside of the piece.
According to records at the time, he chose rubies because they represent love, passion, good fortune, courage and prosperity. Although Fawcett had an early insight into why the piece wouldn’t sell that evening.
“I shouldn’t say this,” says Fawcett, “but I suppose by the time your piece is published it won’t matter as much. While the rubies are huge, they aren’t of the highest quality – it’s the story behind them, the engraving and the very avant garde design, that makes it so valuable.”
Not valuable enough, apparently.