While Marie Antoinette, the doomed French Queen, is most famously remembered for being beheaded in 1793 after offering particularly tactless dietary advice to her starving countrymen, she should also be recalled for the splendour and range of her personal jewellery collection.
Indeed, so great was her love for her various baubles and beads that, as the royal family set about dodging detention in 1791, the queen packed away her jewels in a wooden chest and sent them off to her cousin, the Austrian Emperor, for safekeeping. While Marie Antoinette herself would never lay eyes on them again, it is that very same collection that’s set to resurface at Sotheby’s in Geneva this November – after being hidden from public eye for more than 200 years.
Under the heading ‘Royal Jewels from the Bourbon-Parma Family’, the collection boasts an impressive ensemble of shiny valuables, including a pearl and diamond pendant, a necklace with 119 natural pearls and a ruby brooch – all of which have been passed down through generations of the illustrious Bourbon-Parma family, which counts Holy Roman Emperors, Popes and Emperors of France, Spain and Austria among its forbears. Posh or what.