Explained | How French crown jewels ended up in New Jersey

Hidden away in a nondescript building in Parsippany, New Jersey, are four dazzling remnants of the crown jewels of France.

They are safeguarded there by their owner, Tiffany & Co. The jewelry emporium bought the diamond-filled works of art through an improbable chain of events, beginning with a grand public auction by the French state 137 years ago.

Tiffany, in turn, was bought in 2021 by luxury powerhouse LVMH. That means that jewels created for French royalty now belong to LVMH chair Bernard Arnault, who is the richest man in France and the king of more than 75 brands.

The jewels are not publicly displayed and have never been lent to a museum. But in an exceptional gesture, Tiffany invited The New York Times for a viewing, transporting the jewels in secret from the northern New Jersey facility where it stores thousands of its treasures to the private clubhouse reserved for wealthy clients on the top floor of its Fifth Avenue store.

"They are a big part of our legacy," Victoria Reynolds, Tiffany's chief gemologist, said as she caressed the gems laid out on a display table. "We show them only on very special occasions."

The story of the auction of most of France's crown jewels is bizarre and out of character for the country, given its passion for preserving its "patrimoine" -- its cultural heritage. It is not highlighted in tours in the Louvre Museum's Apollo Gallery, which showcases most of the jewels that remain in France.

Over centuries, French royals amassed a mountain of gems that remained with the French state through wars, royal rivalries, revolutions and theft.

But in the years after the founding of the Third Republic, the parliamentary government created in 1870 from the ashes of Napoleon III's empire, an anti-monarchical republican fervor swept France. Some extreme republicans branded the crown jewels "stones waiting for the monarchy's restoration." Seizing an opportunity to cleanse the country of its royal symbols, the government ordered the crown jewels be sold and the profits converted into government bonds.

The jewels were organized in lots. Gems were torn from their settings; jeweled ornaments were broken up. Only a small number of jewels of historic or geologic import were kept.

Diamond merchants, importers and jewelers from many countries -- including the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt -- descended on Paris for an 11-day auction in May 1887, when more than 77,000 stones were sold.

While France was shedding its symbols of royalty, rich Gilded Age Americans were eager to appropriate and wear them. Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co., known as America's "diamond king," was the largest buyer, scooping up 24 of the 69 lots -- just over a third of the inventory.

"Tiffany takes the cake!" The New York Herald exclaimed after the first day's sale, when Tiffany bought a necklace with four rows of diamonds and sold it the same day to Kate Pulitzer, wife of publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Within four months of the auction, all the jewels he had purchased had been sold.

The proceeds of the auction, more than $30 million in today's money, were much lower than expected. They did not reflect the historical, aesthetic and monetary worth of the jewels of the French royals. Ever since, the value of those gems has soared. When a pink 19-carat diamond surfaced at a Christie's auction in Geneva in 2017, an anonymous buyer snatched it up for more than $14 million.

For more than a decade, Tiffany has been trying to buy back French crown jewels that it had once bought and sold -- no matter what the setting or even the price. The four pieces Tiffany now owns, which belonged to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, are the result.

"It was so audacious," Reynolds said. "An American jeweler goes and buys a third of the French crown jewels." She said it "was a shame, really a shame" that France sold off most of its royal gems, but she praised Tiffany's "chutzpah" in buying so many of them.

Cristina Vignone, a Tiffany archivist, chimed in. "All the time we actively look for things, aggressively," she said. "It is part of our daily work. We have acquisitions specialists who monitor the market. We deal with dealers, major auction houses, past clients."

The first of the four jewels Reynolds showed was a brooch with 125 diamonds set in gold and silver that Eugénie ordered from Bapst Frères, the court jeweler, in 1855. Three diamond leaves curve around the top of the brooch; a cascade of diamonds hangs from a cluster at its center. The brooch was part of a larger leaf bodice decoration that was exhibited at the 1855 Universal Exposition in Paris. Tiffany initially sold it to American industrialist JP Morgan, who offered it to an associate's wife as a Christmas present.

Matching the brooch is a pair of large and very modern-looking diamond clip earrings, shaped like leaves, that once were part of a necklace or large bracelet.

Also intriguing is a brooch with a large central emerald from Colombia, pendants with larger natural pearls, and 26 rose-cut diamonds set in a circular gold and silver frame, made in 1864. It was part of an oversize jeweled belt the empress asked Bapst Frères to make. She wore the piece even though it was said to be uncomfortably heavy.

Tiffany bought the diamond brooch and earrings in 2011, and the emerald-centered brooch in 2013. Asked what it paid for them, Reynolds said, "We don't usually disclose." Tiffany probably did not reveal itself as the purchaser, Vignone said.

Finally, there is a 65-carat diamond necklace that was fabricated with six of 18 strands of stones plucked from an elaborate comb. Shortly after the 1887 Paris auction, Morgan's father, American financier Junius Spencer Morgan, bought the stones from Tiffany in trust for his granddaughter Mary Ethel Burns. The jeweler Boucheron later fashioned it into a necklace, which was sold and resold at auctions over the years; Tiffany bought it back in 2015 for $1.5 million.

For several decades, the Louvre has struggled to buy back, piece by piece, any jewels from the collection that came up for sale. One condition must be met for the Louvre to make the purchase, however: The gems and the adornments must be in their original settings.

"We are very careful to buy jewelry that has not been reset and that is in the same condition as it was at the time of sale," said Anne Dion-Tenenbaum, the museum's chief jewels curator.

One of the Louvre's most spectacular recoveries was a 9-inch-long diamond brooch in the shape of a tasseled bow that had been created for the jewelry-obsessed Eugénie, who was empress from her marriage to Napoleon III in 1853 until he was overthrown in 1870. It had been owned by the Astor family for decades. In 2008, when it became available through Christie's, the Société des Amis du Louvre in Paris and other private donors paid $10.5 million for it.

Except for the crown jewels in the Louvre, few of them are on public view anywhere in the world. One exception is the French Blue, a flawless steel-blue diamond that was mined in India, sold to Louis XIV in the 17th century, stolen in 1792 amid the chaos and violence of the Revolution, recut to a smaller size and resold multiple times. Eventually, jeweler Harry Winston bought the gem and donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It is displayed there today as the Hope Diamond, one of the largest blue diamonds in the world.

Perhaps the story is not over. For more than 25 years, LVMH has been a major donor to the Louvre. (In 2023, it contributed 15 million euros to help the Louvre buy a small 18th-century painting of strawberries by Jean Siméon Chardin.)

Will LVMH keep Tiffany's small collection of crown jewels hidden away in a New Jersey vault? Or could they one day adorn the Apollo Gallery?

Asked if she would like to see Tiffany's crown jewels in an exhibition in the Louvre, Dion-Tenenbaum allowed herself to fantasize. "You can dream," she said. "Perhaps one day."

LVMH would be delighted to make it happen. "But of course!" said Jean-Paul Claverie, an adviser to its chair, Arnault. "It would be a very beautiful initiative to see Tiffany's jewels in the Louvre. Everything begins with a dream. People make it come true."