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From the House of Orléans to post-war London: a Mellerio tiara given to Marie Isabelle d’Orléans in 1864, the emeralds of her daughter Amélie, the last Queen of Portugal, and a Kashmir sapphire and Colombian emerald ring linked to Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”.

An Empire’s Showpiece, a Pretender’s Bride

In 1862 the Parisian house of Mellerio dits Meller sent a diamond tiara to London for the International Exhibition, a piece designed to show how gracefully French jewellers could speak the classical language then fashionable at the court of Napoleon III. Two years later it was bought as a wedding present for a bride of the House of Orléans, the family that had lost the throne of France in the revolution of 1848 and that the Second Empire kept in exile. Marie Isabelle d’Orléans was a granddaughter of King Louis Philippe, deposed in 1848, and in 1864 she married her cousin Philippe, Count of Paris, the Orléanist pretender to the French throne. Sotheby’s catalogue calls the paradox by its name: a jewel inspired by a prestige project of the Empire ended its career in the treasure of the dynasty that represented the previous regime.

The tiara opens the second part of this preview of Sotheby’s Royal & Noble Jewels sale in Geneva on 11 November 2026, where it is joined by two emerald jewels that belonged to Marie Isabelle’s eldest daughter, Amélie, the last Queen of Portugal. Sotheby’s presents them as separate highlights. Read together, they trace one family’s jewels from the hope of a French restoration to the exile of a Portuguese queen.

The Greek Key at the 1862 Exhibition

Mellerio had every reason to understand the Orléans. The house traces its royal privilege to 1613, when, according to its own history, Queen Marie de Médicis allowed the family to practise its trade in France free of the usual restrictions. François Mellerio opened a shop on the rue de la Paix in 1815, and in 1830, when Louis Philippe and Marie-Amélie came to the throne, the house became official supplier to the Queen. In 1850 it opened Mellerio-Hermanos in Madrid and received many commissions from Queen Isabella II, whose sister, the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, was married to the Duke of Montpensier, Louis Philippe’s youngest son. It was Montpensier and his wife who chose the tiara for their eldest daughter.

The design belongs to its moment. Sotheby’s catalogue connects its meander, the Greek key of antique friezes, to Napoleon III’s acquisition of the Campana collection of classical antiquities for the Louvre in 1861, a purchase that put ancient jewellery at the centre of Parisian taste. Mellerio’s own records note a Prize Medal at the London exhibition the following year, awarded for its Lilas brooch. The tiara is set throughout with old mine-cut diamonds and accented with rose-cut diamonds; each square of the meander suspends a collet-set diamond, and the frame detaches so the band can be worn as a necklace. It is unsigned, dated circa 1862 with later alterations, catalogued by Sotheby’s as the work of Mellerio dits Meller, and estimated at CHF 300,000–500,000.

Its descent stayed within the family for nearly a century. Marie Isabelle, Countess of Paris (1848–1919), left the tiara to her youngest son, Ferdinand, Duke of Montpensier (1884–1924). In 1921 he married the Spanish aristocrat María Isabel González de Olañeta e Ibarreta, Marchioness of Valdeterrazo, who wore it from the 1920s until her death in 1958. The jewel now comes from a private collection.

The Daughter Who Became Queen

Amélie d’Orléans (1865–1951) was born to Marie Isabelle and the Count of Paris during the family’s exile in England, and grew up in Paris at the Hôtel Matignon after the fall of the Second Empire allowed the Orléans to return. In 1886 she married Crown Prince Carlos of Portugal. The catalogue recounts that the lavish engagement celebrations were read by the Third Republic as a statement of dynastic ambition and helped bring about the renewed expulsion of the Orléanist pretender from France. Among her wedding presents was an important emerald and diamond parure, attributed by Sotheby’s to the former French Crown jeweller Bapst, given by her parents and her great-uncle the Duke of Aumale.

Carlos succeeded as King in 1889, and the reign that followed was overshadowed by the British Ultimatum of 1890 and two state bankruptcies. Amélie’s charitable work, which included the founding of a national association against tuberculosis, won her a public sympathy that her husband’s reign was steadily losing. On 1 February 1908, as the royal family crossed Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio in an open carriage, gunmen killed the King and the Crown Prince, Luís Filipe; the Queen and her younger son, Manuel, survived. Manuel II reigned for less than three years before the revolution of 5 October 1910 sent mother and son into exile, first in England and, for Amélie, from 1920 in France, where she outlived Manuel by almost two decades and died in 1951.

Amélie divided her jewels among her relatives. The Bapst parure went to the head of the House of Orléans; a cabochon emerald bangle, a brooch and an emerald devant-de-corsage went to her niece and goddaughter, Princess Esperanza (1914–2005), who gave them as wedding presents to her daughter, Princess Maria da Glória of Orléans-Braganza, on her marriage to Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1972. All three were sold at Sotheby’s New York in December 1981 and bought by the collector Gabriele Murdock, and all three reappeared there in December 1999 after her death. Only the bangle and brooch return to Geneva. The devant-de-corsage, pictured below, was offered separately by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in 2016; according to that sale’s catalogue, it was a wedding gift from Amélie’s godfather, the Duke of Aumale.

The bangle (lot 1071) centres on a detachable cabochon emerald of 27.38 carats in a border of old mine-cut diamonds accented with rose-cut diamonds; it dates from the 1880s, carries French import marks, and is accompanied by an SSEF report confirming Colombian origin with minor oil.

The brooch (lot 1070), late nineteenth century with later alterations, frames a cabochon emerald in a double border of old mine-cut diamonds and suspends a detachable emerald drop beneath a pear-shaped diamond; SSEF identifies both emeralds as Colombian, with moderate oil. Each is estimated at CHF 70,000–100,000, among the most accessible ways into the royal material of the sale.

Coronation Opals

From Lisbon the sale crosses to London and to the twentieth century. The Cartier black opal and diamond tiara, necklace and brooch combination (lot 1082, CHF 780,000–1,100,000) was commissioned in 1937 by Mary Cavendish, then Marchioness of Hartington and later Duchess of Devonshire, and worn as a necklace at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, when she served as Mistress of the Robes. It was shown for the first time at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cartier exhibition in 2025, and in February 2026 it returned to a red carpet on Emerald Fennell at the London premiere of Wuthering Heights. Its story, from the opals of a 1936–37 government tour of Australia to Westminster Abbey, is told in full in HJD’s dedicated article here.

Kashmir and Colombia, for Sarah Miles

The most literary lot in the sale is also one of its finest pairs of coloured stones. Lot 1068 is a toi et moi ring of the mid-twentieth century that sets a cabochon Kashmir sapphire of 7.83 carats beside a similarly shaped Colombian emerald of 6.77 carats, between shoulders of baguette and square diamonds accented with single-cut diamonds.

Each stone has been examined twice, by SSEF and by the American Gemological Laboratories, in August and September 2026: both laboratories find the sapphire to be from Kashmir with no indications of heating, and the emerald to be Colombian with minor oil. A Kashmir sapphire of almost eight carats with no heating, documented by two laboratories, would be a serious lot on its own; set beside a Colombian emerald, it brings together the two origins against which collectors judge every other sapphire and emerald. The estimate is CHF 350,000–500,000.

Sotheby’s states that the ring belonged to Catherine Walston (1916–1978), the woman widely regarded as the inspiration for Sarah Miles, the heroine of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951). Born Catherine Crompton in Rye, New York, she married the British landowner and politician Henry Walston in 1935; he was made a life peer in 1961, and she became Lady Walston. Greene stood as her godfather when she was received into the Catholic Church, and their affair in the years after the war coincided, in the catalogue’s words, with a period of great creativity in his work. He dedicated the novel “To C.”, an initial nobody in their circle needed explained, and the two remained in close contact until her death.

What Survives a Dynasty

Around these highlights the sale gathers smaller witnesses to the same courts. From St Petersburg come an antique ruby and diamond necklace in a fitted case stamped Bolin, circa 1905, bearing the marks of the workmaster Vladimir Finikov and detachable into a pair of bracelets (lot 1078), and a group of four gouache jewellery designs by W.A. Bolin (lot 1079). From Paris come Suzanne Belperron’s rock crystal and diamond ‘Éventail’ clips (lot 1081) and Art Deco jewels by Lacloche Frères and Cartier.

What unites the Orléans tiara, the emeralds of Queen Amélie and Lady Walston’s ring is the way each jewel outlasted the world that commissioned it: a restoration that never came, a monarchy ended by gunfire and revolution, a love affair turned into fiction. The sale will be on view at the Mandarin Oriental, Geneva, from 6 to 10 November, and the live auction begins there on 11 November 2026 at 5pm CET.

For Part I of this overview, click here.

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Sources

The sale

• Sotheby’s, press release “Sotheby’s Geneva Royal & Noble Jewels Sale Highlights”, Geneva, 29 October 2026 (PDF supplied by the Press Office)
• Sotheby’s, Royal & Noble Jewels, Geneva, 11 November 2026 – sale page

The Mellerio Orléans tiara (lot 1072)

• Sotheby’s, lot 1072 – description, provenance and catalogue note
• Mellerio, “Au fil du temps” (house history)

The emeralds of Queen Amélie (lots 1070–1071)

• Sotheby’s, lot 1071 – bangle: description, SSEF report, provenance and catalogue note
• Sotheby’s, lot 1070 – brooch: description, SSEF report and provenance
• Sotheby’s, Magnificent Jewels & Jadeite, Hong Kong, 2016, lot 1712 – Important Emerald and Diamond Brooch

The Devonshire opals (lot 1082)

• Sotheby’s, lot 1082 – description, provenance and catalogue note
• Victoria and Albert Museum, “About the Cartier exhibition”

The Walston ring (lot 1068)

• Sotheby’s, lot 1068 – description, SSEF and AGL reports and catalogue note

Other lots

• Sotheby’s, lot 1078 – W.A. Bolin ruby and diamond necklace
• Sotheby’s, lot 1079 – W.A. Bolin gouache designs
• Sotheby’s, lot 1081 – Suzanne Belperron ‘Éventail’ clips