On Sunday, the nine priceless items from the French Crown Jewels were stolen by masked robbers from their permanent display in the Galerie d’Apollon of the Musée du Louvre, which included the Tiara, Necklace and one of the Earrings from Queen Marie-Amélie’s magnificent Sapphire Parure!
Featuring very fine Ceylon sapphires set in gold and high quality diamonds, the Parure now consists of a Diadem, a necklace, a pair of earrings, one large brooch and two smaller brooches, the original diadem was much larger but several pieces which were later used to create another Parure.
While the Orléans Family tradition states that the Parure comes from Queen Marie Antoinette, a letter sent by King Louis-Philippe (then the Duke of Orléans) to Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of Empress Josephine and former Queen of Holland, confirms that it was bought by the Duke for 160 000 francs in 1821. The Parure was possibly the one inherited by Queen Hortense from her mother, Empress Josephine.
As she never considered herself the legitimate Queen of France, Queen Marie-Amélie only wore her personal jewels throughout her husband’s reign, and was depicted wearing the entire parure with a Pearl and Sapphire Tiara from Bapst that she also owned for a portrait in the 1830s, attaching the many brooches to her skirt. The Sapphire Parure was taken with her into exile in England in 1849.
In 1864, Queen Marie-Amélie’s grandson, the Count of Paris, the Head of the House of Orléans, was marrying his cousin and her granddaughter, Princess Marie Isabelle d’Orléans, and Queen Marie-Amélie had the Diadem modified, removing four out of the nine original elements, before giving the parure as a wedding gift to the new Countess of Paris. While one of the removed elements was made into the large corsage brooch , the other three were added to her Pearl and Sapphire Parure by Bapst and left to her youngest son, the Duke of Montpensier, who was the father of Princess Marie Isabelle and she eventually also inherited the Pearl and Sapphire Parure in 1890, reuniting them in one collection.
The Countess was pictured wearing the Sapphire Parure from the 1860s through to the 1890s, particularly after the family’s return to Paris in 1871 through they were forced to go back into exile after the lavish wedding of their daughter, Queen Amélie of Portugal in 1886. The Countess continued to hold on to the Parure through the years in exile and it was inherited by her son, Prince Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who was separated from his wife, Archduchess Maria Dorothea of Austria, and so she never wore the Parure.
After the Duke’s death in 1926, the Head of the House of Orléans was his cousin, Prince Jean, Duke of Guise, who was married to his first cousin, Princess Isabelle of Orléans, the sister of the late Duke of Orléans and daughter of the Count and Countess of Paris, making her the next person, after her mother, to wear the Parure, which she did for a variety of royal events like the Wedding of the Duke of Apulia to her daughter, Princess Anne of Orléans, in 1927 and the Wedding of Princess Isabel Alfonsa of Bourbon-Two Sicilies in 1929, as well as several Official Portraits.
After the death of the Duke of Guise in 1940, the Headship of the House of Orléans passed to the couple’s eldest son, Prince Henri, Count of Paris, who was married to Princess Isabelle of Orléans-Braganza, and the Countess wore the Orléans Sapphire Parure for the grandest of royal events and portraits, particularly after the family’s return to France in 1950, notably including Wedding Ball of Duke Carl of Württemberg to her daughter, Princess Diane of Orléans, in 1960.
Queen Marie-Amélie’s Pearl and Sapphire Parure also belonged to the Count and Countess, but was not as frequently worn, an exception being the Wedding Gala of Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia and Princess Maria Pia of Savoy in 1955.
In 1957, the Countess gave the Pearl and Sapphire Parure to Duchess Marie-Thérèse of Württemberg when she married her eldest son and heir, Prince Henri, Count of Clermont, and that was also worn at the Wedding Ball of her brother, Duke Carl of Württemberg, to her sister-in-law, Princess Diane of Orléans, in 1960.
Meanwhile, the Countess of Paris continued to wear the Orléans Sapphire Parure for a variety of grand occasions, including the Wedding Ball of Prince Juan Carlos of Spain and Princess Sophia of Greece in 1962, the British Chamber of Commerce Ball in Paris in 1965, as well as the Wedding Ball of Infanta Pilar of Spain in Portugal in 1967.
The Countess also wore parts of the parure for society events like the Wedding of the Duc of Luynes and Christine Roussel in 1973, and a Wedding in Portugal in 1974.
She was in Portugal in 1974 and had the jewels with her in her country house when the revolution exploded.
Thank god it wasn’t as bad as expected but she decided to take the jewelry to safety in Paris . She didn’t want to carry them so she wore them including the tiara that she hid under a huge fur hat.
As she was about to board she was told to walk through a metal detector! “I almost had a heart attack !!” she told me. And as she walked through nothing happened! The metal detector did not work!
By the 1980s, the Count of Paris, with his massive brood of eleven children, had managed to exhaust the family’s extensive fortune and decided to put up the Orléans Sapphire Parure for sale in 1985, selling it at a depreciated price of 5 millions francs to the Musée du Louvre.
The Pearl and Sapphire Parure returned to the Count and Countess after the Count and Countess of Clermont’s divorce in 1984, and it was sold off to a private buyer in 1997.
The Sapphire Parure had been put on display at the newly refurbished Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, where I had the pleasure of seeing in 2020, right before the Coronavirus crisis, and most recently in February this year.
Now, the Tiara, Necklace and one of the Earrings of the Orléans Sapphire Parure are among the Jewels stolen from the Louvre in October 2025. Their location remains unknown but lets hope the jewels are recovered soon.
In a curious case of life imitating art, the Orléans Sapphire Parure was among the jewels stolen in a theft from the Metropolitan Museum in New York in Ocean’s 8 in 2019.
Follow