Smuggled Out of France During a Bloody Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s Shimmering Pink Diamond Is Heading to Auction
The 10.38-carat gemstone, which carries an estimate of $3 million to $5 million, was owned by generations of European royalty
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On the night of June 20, 1791, as the French Revolution raged in Paris, the French royal family donned disguises and started an ill-fated escape eastward toward Montmédy, where they expected to find protection among royalist troops.
Instead, they were recognized and arrested in the small town of Varennes-en-Argonne, roughly 30 miles from their destination. Revolutionaries hauled them back to Paris and confined them in the Tuileries Palace under armed guard.
The royals’ reputation plummeted in the wake of their so-called Flight to Varennes. As the public realized that Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, had no intention of ceding to the revolutionaries’ demands, calls to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic proliferated. Both the king and the queen were executed by guillotine in 1793.
According to legend, before Marie Antoinette fled with her husband, children and most loyal servants, she entrusted some of her jewelry to her hairdresser for safekeeping. She’d previously smuggled a chest containing “pearls, ornaments and settings, diamonds, and other gemstones” out of the country, placing them under the care of the former Austrian ambassador to France.
In 1795, French authorities agreed to allow the royal couple’s only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse of France, to live as an exile in Austria, Marie Antoinette’s home country. There, Marie-Thérèse was reunited with many of her mother’s dazzling jewels, among them a pair of diamond bracelets that sold for $8.2 million in 2021.
Now, a striking diamond that is believed to have passed from Marie Antoinette to her daughter—perhaps with the help of the queen’s hairdresser—and then through generations of European royalty, is coming to auction as part of Christie’s June 17 Magnificent Jewels sale.
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Known as the Marie-Thérèse Pink, the kite-shaped, fancy purple-pink diamond weighs 10.38 carats. While it was once mounted in a tiara and later became part of a hairpin, the diamond is now the centerpiece of a ring created by Joel Arthur Rosenthal, a renowned jewelry designer better known by his initials, JAR.
“It has everything you could want in a piece of jewelry,” says Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry, in a statement. “The stone—likely from the prized Indian region of Golconda—has several shades of soft colors, flashing purple and pink from different angles. And it’s been transformed into a masterpiece by JAR, all while carrying the splendor of royal provenance.”
Marie-Thérèse later bequeathed the diamond to her niece, Duchess Marie-Thérèse de Chambord. It eventually ended up in the possession of Queen Maria Theresa of Bavaria.
“This extraordinary, documented and continuous royal lineage makes the diamond not only a natural wonder but a living testament to European history,” says Kadakia in a statement quoted by Artnet News’ Richard Whiddington.
The Marie Thérèse Pink first hit the auction block in 1996, when it was sold to a private owner at a Sotheby’s sale in Geneva.
That owner commissioned JAR—the first living contemporary jeweler to earn a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—to transfer the kite-shaped diamond into a ring.
Befitting the unrestrained opulence associated with Marie Antoinette, the ring features smaller diamonds on the finger band and the pink diamond’s setting. A blossoming fleur-de-lis—the symbol of the House of Bourbon—comprises another 17 diamonds.
In this state, the jewelry is estimated to fetch between $3 million and $5 million, although objects relating to Marie Antoinette have historically shattered presale estimates. In 2021, for instance, the queen’s diamond bracelets sold for triple their initial estimate.
Despite this royal pedigree, the headliner of the Magnificent Jewels auction is a 392.52-carat sapphire that remained mostly secluded in private collections following its discovery in the 1920s in modern-day Sri Lanka. Mounted in a necklace of diamonds, the so-called Blue Belle is estimated to fetch between $8 million and $12 million later this month.
Stories and infamous names like Marie Antoinette only add to the allure of already invaluable stones. Collectors and those with the means to bid for royal diamonds are “drawn to jewels with provenance, rarity or uniqueness,” Jean Ghika, global director of jewelry at Bonhams, tells Tatler’s Milena Lazazzera. The Marie-Thérèse Pink has no shortage of all three.
