Queen's Necklace

European auctioneers are hardened to the sad relics of royalty, but not once in a decade does one preside at an occasion so splendidly sentimental as that which drew a swank crowd of Londoners last week to Sotheby's auction rooms in Bond Street. Cherished by four generations of the House of Bourbon, fought over by the three ghostly old sisters of the late Don Jaime, Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, a famed diamond necklace was finally up for sale by the two sisters who have clung to it since 1931: 68-year-old Blanche de Castille, Archduchess of Austria, and 63-year-old Marie Beatrice Therese Charlotte, Princess of Massimo. The necklace: a riviere of 29 stones with 13 pendants which the city of Paris presented to Queen Marie Antoinette of France and which adorned her throat before the guillotine severed it Oct. 16. 1793.

Too poor to bid was the third Bourbon sister, 61-year-old Marie Alice Ildephonse Marguerite. Princess Del Prete, whom Don Jaime cut off with 12,000 francs a year. For -L-15,000 the necklace passed into the hands of jewel-fancying Sir Kamesh-war Singh, Maharajah of Darbhanga, whose bodyguard of eight tall, turbaned, immaculate Indians has been one of London's sights since the Coronation.

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