At auction, a necklace believed to be connected to a controversy that led to the collapse of the unfortunate French queen Marie Antoinette brought $4.81 million (£3.8 million).
About 500 diamonds make up the Georgian piece, which was purchased for nearly twice the sum Sotheby’s auction company had predicted.
“It was an electric night,” Sotheby’s jewelry specialist Andres White Correal said, adding that the anonymous female bidder was “ecstatic.”
On Wednesday night, the diamonds were sold at a Geneva auction.
White Correal claimed that the purchaser “said something beautiful to me: ‘I’m exceptionally happy that I won this lot; but I don’t own it, I’m merely the custodian until the next person will come along’.”
