32 2GM Wednesday November 10 2021 | the times
Wo r l d
Two diamond bracelets worn by
Marie Antoinette have been sold at
auction for £6 million in Switzerland.
An unidentified buyer bid well
above the £3.2 million estimate at
Christie’s Geneva saleroom for the
bracelets that the queen of France
ordered from Charles Auguste
Boehmer, a Parisian jeweller, in 1776,
two years after her husband ascended
the throne as Louis XVI.
The bracelets were hidden once
she was imprisoned during the
French Revolution and resurfaced
after she was guillotined aged 37 in
1793.
The sale confirmed the appetite
among rich collectors for artefactsfrom her life. “Newly uber-wealthy
collectors still aspire to the magic and
halo effect of royal provenance,”
Tobias Kormind, head of 77 Dia-
monds, an online jeweller based in
London, said.
A blue velvet box bearing a label
“bracelets of Queen Marie Antoi-
nette” holds the double bracelets,Marie Antoinette’s bracelets fetch £6m
each composed of three strings of
diamonds and a large barrette clasp,
for a total of 112 diamonds.
Marie Antoinette managed to send
the bracelets to a former Austrian
ambassador in Brussels for safekeep-
ing. They were then sent to her
daughter Marie Thérèse, her only
surviving child, Christie’s said.
The bracelets stayed in the family
for almost 200 years and were the
property of a European royal family
at the time of the sale, Christie’s
added. The buyer was bidding by
telephone.
At the same sale, a diamond and
ruby bracelet that belonged to the
Duchess of Windsor was withdrawn
after failing to reach its estimate of up
to £1.6 million.Charles BremnerThe spirit of Charles de Gaulle has
infused the presidential race, with
contenders jostling to claim his
mantle 51 years after his death.
In a scene that would have amused
the general, all five contenders to be
the candidate of the Republicans
party, the descendant of de Gaulle’s
1960s movement, joined the annual
political pilgrimage to his tomb at
Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, his
country home in the northeast. They
included candidates from left-wing
and hard-right parties that long
reviled de Gaulle.
The arrival in the campaign of Éric
Zemmour, a far-right nationalist, has
galvanised the ritual of channelling
the wartime hero and postwar patri-
arch, whose beliefs in an eternal, sov-
ereign France pervade political life.
Zemmour, 63, who is in second or
third place in the polls, has outraged
the Republicans by calling their main
contenders — Xavier Bertrand, Val-Presidential hopefuls scrap
to claim legacy of de Gaulle
érie Pécresse and Michel Barnier —
traitors to the Gaullist cause and
boasting that he is the only true heir
to the president who was in office
from 1958 to 1969.
Zemmour paid his own tribute by
visiting de Gaulle’s childhood home
in Lille last month, where he com-
pared himself to de Gaulle, “a writer
who was everything except a profes-
sional politician. He saved France.”
Marine Le Pen, his far-right rival,
paid her homage yesterday in Bay-
eux, Normandy, to commemorate a
speech de Gaulle gave in 1946 in
which he proposed the constitution
that later emerged in the presidential
regime tailor-made for him in 1958.
The general’s family, as well as the
Republicans, are incensed by the far-
right claims because hatred of de
Gaulle fuelled the foundation in 1972
by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National
Front, the party now called National
Rally and led by his daughter. Le Pen
drew on supporters of the wartime
collaboration regime of Philippe
Pétain and on French Algerians whobacked plots on de Gaulle’s life
because he granted independence to
the colony in 1962.
Pétain’s Vichy regime, which was
fought by de Gaulle and his Free
French forces from London, has been
praised by Zemmour for supposedly
saving the lives of French Jews, al-
though it organised the deportation
to death camps of tens of thousands.
Pierre de Gaulle, the general’s
grandson, said: “To say that Pétain
saved Jewish families is shocking to
me as a Frenchman.” Nicolas Sarko-
zy, the former Republicans president,
said: “Comparing Zemmour to de
Gaulle is too much.”
De Gaulle’s enemies also included
the Communist and Socialist parties
who now revere him. The Socialist
François Mitterrand called de Gaul-
le’s Republic a “permanent coup d’ét-
at” until he won the presidency in- A spokesman for Anne Hidalgo,
the Socialist candidate and mayor of
Paris, said: “De Gaulle and the values
of the Resistance do not belong to
Zemmour, a counterfeiter of history.”
France
Charles Bremner ParisALAMYT
he chance
discovery of
vividly painted
chunks of
masonry buried
under Hadrian’s villanear Rome has given
archaeologists the first
evidence of how the
emperor’s palace was a
kaleidoscope of colours
(Tom Kington writes).The huge quantity of
pieces of ceiling fresco
was discovered beneath
a house on the site
recently occupied by a
caretaker. “For the first
time we are seeing
confirmation of how
richly Hadrian
decorated his palace,”
Andrea Bruciati, the site
director, said. Famed forhis defensive wall across
the top of the Roman
province of Britannia,
the 2nd-century
emperor also employed
thousands to build his
country retreat near
modern-day Tivoli.
The Renaissance artist
Raphael came to see
excavated frescoes at
the palace at the start ofthe 16th century, but
whatever he saw has
long since faded. That
changed when
archaeologists heard an
odd noise as they tapped
on the floor of the
former caretaker’s
house. “We excavated
and found an incredible
amount of painted
fragments,” saidGiuseppina Enrica
Cinque, an
archaeologist at Tor
Vergata University in
Rome. Cinque said they
might have been
collected in the 18th
century for sale, then
forgotten about. “We
hope to scan them and
recompose the designs,”
she said.Lost tiles add colour
to emperor’s palace
dG
C
ar
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Ro
mig
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The Teatro Marittimo at for
Hadrian’s villa, where
fragments of fresco were
discovered by chanceThe bracelets are each composed
of three strings with 112 diamonds