An Incredible Diamond Necklace–with Possible French Royal History–Heads to Auction

The upcoming Royal & Noble Jewels sale at Sotheby’s includes some astonishing pieces connected to royal families from Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, and France, including a necklace that may include diamonds once worn by Marie Antoinette’s daughter.

Sotheby’s describes this piece as a “fine diamond rivière necklace” from the late nineteenth century, with the lot notes explaining that the jewel is “designed as a graduated row of collet-set old cushion-shaped diamonds.” Like many of the pieces in November’s sale, this one was owned by members of the former royal family of Bulgaria. Princess Eudoxia of Bulgaria, the elder daughter of Tsar Ferdinand I, is the last documented owner of the piece in the literature provided by the auction house.

Princess Eudoxia was born in 1898 to Ferdinand and his first wife, Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma. She was only a year old when her mother died after giving birth to Eudoxia’s younger sister, Princess Nadezhda. (We covered Nadezhda’s life in depth recently at Hidden Gems.) When Marie Louise died, Eudoxia inherited a diamond necklace from her mother’s jewelry box, along with a pair of diamond earrings. Sotheby’s notes that Eudoxia always considered the jewels to be part of the same demi-parure.

In the portrait above, Princess Marie Louise wears the diamond necklace as part of a stack that also included a tall pearl choker necklace (situated above the rivière) and an elaborate festoon necklace (situated below the rivière). Marie Louise was so fabulously bejeweled in part thanks to the generosity of her father, the Duke of Parma. He gave her “two rows of diamonds” as a wedding present in 1893, and Sotheby’s notes that most believe that the diamond necklace inherited by Eudoxia was one of those rows.

The history of these particular diamonds, though, gets even more intriguing. Robert I, Duke of Parma was the elder of two sons born to Charles III, Duke of Parma and Princess Louise d’Artois. Louise, pictured above in a portrait with her three eldest children, was part of the French royal family. Her father, Prince Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, was a son of King Charles X of France, who reigned from 1824 until 1830. Louise was only a few months old when her father was assassinated in Paris. She spent many of her early childhood years at the court of her grandfather, where her uncle and aunt, the Duke and Duchess of Angoulême, were the Dauphin and Dauphine.

The Duchess of Angoulême was a particularly special figure in the family. She wasn’t just the wife of the heir–she was also the only surviving child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Marie-Thérèse had endured the horror of imprisonment and the deaths of her entire immediate family during the Reign of Terror. She was especially well-equipped to help the rest of the family handle the exile that followed the abdication of her father-in-law and her husband in 1830, when little Princess Louise was just eleven. The Duchess ended up becoming a central figure in the life of Princess Louise and her younger brother, the Count of Chambord, raising the children in Scotland, Germany, and Austria after they were compelled to leave France. She even brokered a marriage for Louise and the future Duke of Parma in 1845.

The Duke and Duchess of Angoulême did not have children of their own, and Marie-Thérèse ended up gifting and bequeathing many of her grand jewels to Princess Louise. These pieces included an important pearl parure from the collection of the Duchess’s mother, Marie Antoinette. Louise is wearing a diamond and pearl pendant from the suite in the portrait above. (It was sold at auction in 2018.)

While some of the grand tiaras made for the Duchess of Angoulême had been left behind in the state treasury in France when the family headed into exile in 1830, she retained several significant diamond pieces, including a pair of diamond bracelets that had belonged to her mother, Marie Antoinette. She also took a diamond tiara into exile. Originally set with state-owned diamonds, the gems were replaced with new, personally-owned diamonds at her request by her uncle, King Louis XVIII, in 1820. Because the tiara was then family property rather than part of the French crown collection, the Duchess brought it with her after the abdication.

When the Duchess died in 1851, the diamond tiara was reportedly jointly inherited by her niece and nephew, the Duchess of Parma and the Count of Chambord. Jewelry historian Vincent Meylan tells us that that the siblings decided together to have the tiara dismantled so that they could make several new pieces from the diamonds. Some of them reportedly ended up being set in a sparkling tiara worn by Bourbon-Parma princesses. Meylan writes that nine diamond rivière necklaces were also produced from the tiara’s diamonds.

The Countess of Chambord kept some of the diamond necklaces in her personal collection, and when she died in 1886, two of them were bequeathed to her nephew, Robert I, Duke of Parma. Seven years later, he apparently handed the necklaces over to his eldest daughter, Princess Marie Louise, on her marriage to Ferdinand, the sovereign Prince of Bulgaria. In this portrait of Ferdinand and Marie Louise on their wedding day, she is wearing one of the necklaces with her wedding gown.

Marie Louise, who was 23 on her wedding day, had four children over the course of the next six years. As the wife of a sovereign, she was also responsible for projecting a specific image of soft power and glamour, posing for portraits in gala gowns and jewels. In this image, Marie Louise wears one of her diamond necklaces as a corsage ornament on the bodice of her dress, stretched between a pair of diamond brooches.

One of the images of the necklace from the Sotheby’s press materials shows the necklace positioned beside one of those brooches, suggesting that the diamond lily-of-the-valley brooch will also be sold as part of the upcoming auction in November.

Four pregnancies in the span of six years weakened Marie Louise considerably, and she died of pneumonia almost immediately after the death of her younger daughter in January 1899. Her jewels were divided among her children, and the necklace went to her third child, Princess Eudoxia. (She, per Sotheby’s, actually believed that the diamond necklace had a different provenance: that it belonged to her maternal grandmother, Princess Maria Pia. Sotheby’s is suggesting that it belonged to Maria Pia’s widowed husband and his second wife instead.) Eudoxia never married, but she remained a close companion of her siblings, living near her sister, Nadezhda, until her passing in 1985. It seems likely that Nadezhda’s children, who are descendants of the former royal family of Württemberg, inherited the jewelry from Eudoxia.

Now, the diamond necklace is being offered at auction in a November 13th sale at Sotheby’s in Geneva. The jewel is expected to fetch a high price, with the estimate set at 90,000-130,000 Swiss francs (or around $104,000-150,000 USD). I think it’s interesting that a possible connection to a scandal peripherally linked to Marie Antoinette has been highly advertised regarding another important lot in the same sale, when this is the necklace that more likely includes stones that were genuinely owned and worn by her daughter. We’ll have to wait and see if the French connection amps up the price of this jewel, too.