Since in her view she was just an accessory to Mr Perelman she found it appropriate to sell off all the accessories that he

Since, in her view, she was just an accessory to Mr Perelman, she found it appropriate to sell off all the accessories that he had given her.Among the items sold at Christie’s was Ms Barkin’s diamond wedding ring.Clearly the celebrity scandal cachet was attractive to buyers, because it fetched $156,000, more than three times the anticipated sale price. Also on the block was a 32-carat apricot diamond ring that Mr Perelman gave his wife just weeks before their divorce, a pair of emerald and gold cuffs originally designed for the Duchess of Windsor and 17 pieces designed by the top-of-the-line Parisian jeweller JAR.Mr Perelman and Ms Barkin met at a Vanity Fair Oscar night party in Hollywood in 1999, and were married for just under six years. He then posted security guards at their mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side while his blindsided wife moved out along with the two teenage children she had by her first husband, Gabriel Byrne.Ms Barkin later characterised her entire marriage to Mr Perelman as an exercise in accessorising. The sale, though, ended up netting more than $20m.
“In five years, to be able to sell it and get more than you paid for it – it hasn’t happened before with jewellery,” Fred Leighton, the Madison Avenue dealer who sold many of the pieces to Mr Perelman and Ms Barkin in the first place, told a Bloomberg reporter at the auction.The split between Mr Perelman, the heir to the Revlon fortune, and Ms Barkin, who made her name with such 1980s Hollywood hits as The Big Easy and Sea of Love, became instant tabloid fodder earlier this year.It appeared, from media reports, that Mr Perelman served her with divorce papers just a few days before a key deadline laid out in their prenuptial agreement.

The 52-year-old actress offered up 102 pieces featuring diamonds, rubies, sapphires, pearls and other stones for sale at Christie’s auction house in New York on Tuesday, expecting to earn anywhere up to $15m (£8.1m). Ellen Barkin may have been unceremoniously dumped by her billionaire husband Ronald Perelman earlier this year, but she has found a way to take sweet revenge: she auctioned off the sizeable cache of jewellery he gave her during their six years of marriage and turned an unprecedented multimillion-dollar profit. Let them know that, to my last moment, I was thinking of them.”Has Marie Antoinette been wronged by history?Yes…* She never said ‘let them eat cake’* She was a more complex, even tragic, figure than popular memory allows* In the most desperate circumstances she proved a loyal friend, wife and motherNo…* She sums up the vanity, extravagance and arrogance of the ‘ancien r?me’* She remained a die-hard, absolutist monarchist to the end* Her air-headed early behaviour as queen gave ammunition to her enemies. In her celebrated final letter to her sister-in-law, written a few hours before her execution in what is now the Place de la Concorde, Marie Antoinette, by then a wizened old woman of 48, wrote: “I pardon my enemies the wrongs that they have done me.. I also had friends…

Marie Antoinette’s eight-year-old son, Louis, was taken from her and brainwashed until he accused her of sexually abusing him He died of illness and neglect. The exhibition contains a lock of his hair; it also contains a transcript of his mother’s trial, where she was accused of incest. She defended herself with great dignity.Marie Antoinette never grasped the causes of the Revolution, but it exposed in her unsuspected depths of courage and loyalty. She was, however, also plotting behind their backs to persuade her brother, the Austrian emperor, to restore absolute monarchy in France.The king was tried and executed in January 1793. Returned to captivity in Paris, she began a long, secret correspondence with a moderate revolutionary leader to try to rescue a kind of constitutional monarchy on the British pattern from the Jacobin radicals who threatened to hijack the Revolution. Her letters are tough, wily and shrewd and demonstrate a close grasp of the ever-changing minutiae of revolutionary politics.Is there a case for Marie Antoinette as a tragic heroine?Yes.

She had several opportunities to escape alone but refused to do so without her family. It is she, not him, who worked tirelessly post- 1789 to save the family business and all of their heads.She plotted to organise a failed royal flight from Paris towards Austrian-controlled territory in June 1791. Even moderate revolutionaries with whom she conspired were astonished by her fortitude and mental strength. She is refused.All the same, this was a different Marie Antoinette from the pleasure-loving girl of the early years of her marriage.

In adversity, she became the constant friend and ally of her rather hopeless husband, Louis XVI. “The great difference is that, in the final years, adversity brought Marie Antoinette closer to her husband. The Revolution revealed in her depths of character and toughness which were not apparent before,” she adds.Did the revolution change her then?Yes and no. As the daughter of an empress and wife of a monarch, Marie Antoinette remained convinced of the divine right of kings. The Archives exhibition contains the minutes of the revolutionary tribunal of the Commune of Paris when it discusses, pompously, a request from Marie Antoinette for a pair of nail-scissors for herself and her children. In coded letters from captivity, she describes the democratic ideal as a “tissue of absurdities”.