A French Royal Diamond, Set in a Modern Ring, For Sale in June at Christie's

A fabulous purple-pink diamond from the collection of Marie Antoinette's daughter, the Duchess of Angouleme, will be offered for sale in New York next month

Next month, auctioneers at Christie’s in New York will offer a special diamond that once belonged to the only surviving child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette—a fascinating royal figure who became one of the most important leaders of her branch of the French royal family in exile. But could it have also belonged to her famous mother? In today’s article, we examine the claims made in the auction notes and explore the life of the Duchess of Angoulême, who inherited her mother’s jewelry (and a lot of family trauma).

The death of an elderly, widowed, exiled princess from pneumonia in a minor schloss in rural Austria would not normally have been headline news. But in October 1851, newspapers across Europe were crowded with column inches devoted to the Duchess of Angoulême. The 72-year-old princess had gone by many names during her improbably long royal lifetime: fille de France, Madame Royale, Madame la Dauphine. To some, she was most properly known as Queen Marie Thérèse of France, thanks to the twenty minutes that elapsed between the abdication of her father-in-law, King Charles X, and that of her husband, the Duke of Angoulême, in 1830.

Marie Thérèse had been born into the glittering splendor of the court of her parents, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, at the Palace of Versailles in 1778. As their first child and eldest daughter, she was granted the title of “Madame Royale” in recognition of her special place in the royal family. Her parents doted on her and her three younger siblings, Louis Joseph, Louis Charles, and Sophie. But the happiness of her childhood was short-lived. The deaths of Sophie in 1787 and Louis Joseph in 1789 were tragic precursors to the horrors that would follow. After the outbreak of revolution, the King and Queen and their two children were imprisoned in Paris. After Louis XVI was executed, Marie Thérèse and Louis Charles were separated from their mother.

Portrait of Madame Royale after her release from prison, painted in Vienna by Heinrich Füger ca. 1796 (Hermitage Museum)

For more than a year, the teenage princess was kept locked in isolation in the medieval Temple Tower, mourning the death of her father and ignorant of the fates of her mother and brother. On the wall of her room, she scratched, “Marie-Thérèse Charlotte is the most unhappy person in the world.” Her unhappiness was magnified exponentially in the summer of 1795, when she learned that her mother had been executed and her brother had died in captivity. On the night before her seventeenth birthday, she was finally freed, thanks to the intervention of her mother’s imperial relatives at the Habsburg court in Austria. There, she was reunited with a box of jewelry that her mother had managed to smuggle out of France with the help of an enterprising courtier. The jewels inside were some of the only possessions Marie Thérèse was able to inherit as tangible reminders of her parents and siblings.