A necklace thought to be linked to the scandal that triggered the downfall of French queen Marie Antoinette was sold at auction for $4.81 million (£3.8 million).

The Georgian artifact contains approximately 500 diamonds and was purchased by auction house Sotheby’s for almost twice the estimated amount.

“It was an electric night,” said Sotheby’s jewelery expert Andres White Correal, adding that the unnamed female buyer was “very happy.”

The jewels were sold at an auction in Geneva on Wednesday evening.

White Correal said the buyer “told me something very nice: ‘I’m extremely happy to have won this lot; But I’m not the owner of this place, I’m just a custodian until the next person comes along.'”

“There is a clear place in the market for historic jewelery with magnificent provenance.

“People aren’t just buying the object, they’re buying all the history attached to it.”

Marie Antoinette was born in Austria in 1755 and was the daughter of the future King Louis XVI. She was sent to France to be Louis’ child bride.

The last queen of France was guillotined along with her husband in 1793, at the age of 37, at the height of the French Revolution.

Some of the jewels in the necklace sold on Wednesday are believed to be original jewels that were at the center of the “diamond necklace affair” scandal of the 1780s and may have hastened Marie Antoinette’s death.

Jeanne de la Motte, a noblewoman who had fallen on hard times, pretended to be the French Queen and tricked a cardinal into giving her the necklace without paying for it.

When Marie Antoinette, who had no knowledge of the transaction, was contacted about the lack of final payment, the cardinal was arrested but declared innocent.

La Motte was found and branded with a hot iron with the letter V, meaning voleuse (thief).

Although Marie Antoinette was found not guilty, her reputation was thought to have been tarnished by this incident and she was very unpopular with the French people, who accused her of being wasteful and exercising a dangerous influence on the king.

The jewels, decorated with 650 original diamonds and weighing approximately 2,800 carats, were sold piece by piece on the black market.

Sotheby’s said it had confirmed that a jeweler working on London’s Bond Street had bought more than half of them for £10,000 shortly after her disappearance.

Some experts say that the age and quality of the diamonds in the necklace sold on Wednesday are compatible with the originals.

The necklace was previously given to Queen Elizabeth II by the Marquess of Anglesey. It was worn at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 and was also worn at the coronation of King George VI 16 years ago.

It was part of the Anglesey family’s jewelery collection for nearly 100 years before being sold to a private Asian collector in the 1960s.