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Mysterious 18th-century diamond necklace — linked to Marie Antoinette’s demise — could sell for over $2 million
A mysterious 18th century necklace made from around 500 diamonds, some of which are believed to have been taken from a piece that contributed to French Queen Marie Antoinette’s demise, will go on sale in November, Sotheby’s said on Monday.
The piece, from a private Asian collection, will go under the hammer in Geneva on November 11, with online bidding opening on the auction house’s website on October 25.
The necklace, which is composed of three rows of diamonds finished with a diamond tassel at each end, will make its first public appearance in 50 years on Monday, and is expected to fetch between $1.8 and $2.8 million.
Jordan Pettitt/PA Images via Getty Images
“It’s a wonderful find because, normally, jewelry in the 18th century was broken up in order to be repurposed… so to have an intact piece of the Georgian period of this importance, this amount of carats… is absolutely fabulous,” Andres White Correal, chairman of the Sotheby’s jewelry department, told AFP.
“The jewel has passed from families to families. We can start at the early 20th century when it was part of the collection of the Marquesses of Anglesey,” he added.
Members of this aristocratic family are believed to have worn the jewel twice in public: once at the 1937 coronation of King George VI and once at his daughter Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
Beyond that, little is known of the necklace, including who designed it and for whom it was commissioned, although the auction house believes that such an impressive antique jewel could only have been created for a royal family.
It probably would have been made during the decade preceding the French Revolution, it added.
It is thought that some of the diamonds may have come from the famous necklace linked to what became the scandal of the “Affair of the Necklace,” which contributed to the advent of the French Revolution and eventually Marie Antoinette’s death, said Sotheby’s.
On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined — but it turned she was actually innocent of the necklace fraud that she was accused of.
The auction house said the diamonds are likely to have been sourced “from the legendary Golconda mines in India.”
The diamonds from Golconda are still considered to be the purest and most dazzling ever mined.
The necklace will be on public display in London until Wednesday before beginning a tour that will take it to Hong Kong, New York and Taiwan.
In 2018, a large, drop-shaped natural pearl pendant sold for more than $36 million at a rare auction of jewelry that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. The “Queen Marie Antoinette’s Pearl,” a diamond-and-pearl pendant, was among the highlight offerings on the block at the Sotheby’s sale of jewelry from the Bourbon-Parma dynasty in Geneva.
At the time, some of the Marie Antoinette jewelry hadn’t been seen in public for 200 years. All told, the pieces reaped nearly $43 million at the auction
HUNTSVILLE — A Texas man who had waived his right to appeal his death sentence was put to death Tuesday evening for killing his 3-month-old son more than 16 years ago, one of five executions scheduled within a week’s time in the U.S.
AP
Travis Mullis, 38, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m. CDT. He was condemned for stomping to death his son Alijah in January 2008.
Mullis was the fourth inmate put to death this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. Another execution was carried out Tuesday evening in Missouri, and on Thursday, executions were scheduled to take place in Oklahoma and Alabama. South Carolina conducted an execution Friday.
Authorities said Mullis, then 21 and living in Brazoria County, drove to nearby Galveston with his son after fighting with his girlfriend. Mullis parked his car and sexually assaulted his son. After the infant began to cry uncontrollably, Mullis began strangling the child before taking him out of the car and stomping on his head, according to authorities.
The infant’s body was later found on the roadside. Mullis fled the state but was later arrested after surrendering to police in Philadelphia.
Mullis’ execution proceeded after one of his attorneys, Shawn Nolan, said he planned no late appeals in a bid to spare the inmate’s life. Nolan also said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that Texas would be executing a “redeemed man” who has always accepted responsibility for committing “an awful crime.”
“He never had a chance at life being abandoned by his parents and then severely abused by his adoptive father starting at age three. During his decade and a half on death row, he spent countless hours working on his redemption. And he achieved it. The Travis that Texas wanted to kill is long gone. Rest in Peace TJ,” Nolan said.
Mullis declined an offer earlier in the day to phone his attorney from a holding cell outside the death chamber, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Hannah Haney. His lawyers also did not file a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
In a letter submitted in February to U.S. District Judge George Hanks in Houston, Mullis wrote that he had no desire to challenge his case any further. Mullis has previously taken responsibility for his son’s death and has said “his punishment fit the crime.”
At Mullis’ trial, prosecutors said Mullis was a “monster” who manipulated people, was deceitful and refused the medical and psychiatric help he had been offered.
Since his conviction in 2011, Mullis has long been at odds with his various attorneys over whether to appeal his case. At times, Mullis had asked that his appeals be waived, only to later change his mind.
Nolan had previously told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during a June 2023 hearing that state courts in Texas had erred in ruling that Mullis had been mentally competent when he had waived his right to appeal his case about a decade earlier.
Nolan told the appeals court that Mullis has been treated for “profound mental illness” since he was 3 years old, was sexually abused as a child and is “severely bipolar,” leading him to change his mind about appealing.
Natalie Thompson, who at the time was with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, told the appeals court that Mullis understood what he was doing and could go against his lawyers’ advice “even if he’s suffering from mental illness.”
The appeals court upheld Hank’s ruling from 2021 that found Mullis “repeatedly competently chose to waive review” of his death sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the application of the death penalty for the intellectually disabled, but not for people with serious mental illness.
If the remaining executions in Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma are carried out as planned, it will mark the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.
The first took place Friday when South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death. Also Tuesday, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri. On Thursday, executions are scheduled for Alan Miller in Alabama and Emmanuel Littlejohn in Oklahoma.
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