French authorities have described it as priceless. But the last time the diamond-encrusted bow, which once belonged to Empress Eugenie, was sold, it reached a reported €6.72 million ($7.8 million). What it’s worth now, three days after it was stolen as part of a raid on the Louvre Museum in Paris is much more difficult to establish.

Unless stolen to order, the plunder of royal necklaces, tiaras and earrings, is in art-market parlance already “burned”- at least in its last-known state. The Ocean’s Eleven-style robbery has been widely publicised so the pieces can’t be sold, or worn, in public. And black markets carry deep discounts. Selling the jewels separately may be more discrete but also won’t be straightforward.

The alternative is that the exquisite jewels- diamonds, emeralds, sapphires- and gold could be broken up and melted down. Officially, the eight items are worth €88 million but not if the roughly 9,000 small and large stones gems are sold separately, according to Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau.

It’s usually the precision of the heist that captures filmmakers’ attention. But the next act- moving the high-profile loot- is just as perilous.

“Often the thieves realise that the risk is too great,” said Charlotte Chambers-Farah, a client manager at the London-based Art Loss Register. “They haven’t managed to move the goods within six months to a year, the burden becomes too heavy.”

The gems are likely to hold the most value but often have identifiers like the size and weight of the stone. To get around this, the stones could be dismantled, recut and reassembled to make them nearly unrecognisable, according to Chambers-Farah. 

Tobias Kormind, managing director of jeweller 77 Diamonds, estimated that the stolen gemstones could be worth about £10 million ($13.4 million), with much of the value derived from four large diamonds set in one of the brooches that was stolen. 

“It might be somebody now pays a tenth of the market value, takes it, and if they can afford it they hold it for ten years, and then slowly start breaking it up,” he said. “If in two years time someone comes in with a stone that needs to be recut, it’s not unusual, and they go through one person and another person, and then there’s somebody relatively credible who goes to a third.”

Melted down gold is almost impossible to identify and the price has risen almost 60% this year to near-record levels. Unlike the solid gold toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019, the jewellery wouldn’t contain enough metal to make it the focus of the robbery. 

Politicians, French police, and Louvre’s security staff have been strongly criticised for not stopping the heist. The lax outdoors surveillance, that allowed a furniture hoist to park up outside the museum unnoticed, could have made it a more attractive target than the closely-guarded jewellery stores at the Place Vendôme.

“We see a shift in the last 10 years, when museums are targeted no longer for paintings but much more for precious metals or diamonds,” said Arthur Brand, an art crime detective. Most art thieves would expect to get about a third of the value of the item when reselling, but it’s hard to determine how big the market would be for these high-profile jewels.

Selling the treasure for parts would unlock the value of the haul but would immediately destroy the historical meaning. French police will be racing to try to recover the jewellery before this happens.

Last month, a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet that was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was melted down, according to the country’s interior ministry. 

Although deemed “priceless jewels” by French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, many of the pieces bore actual price tags before arriving in the vitrines of the Paris museum.

Empress Eugenie’s large corsage bow, stolen on Sunday, was purchased in 2008 with help from the Friends of the Louvre donor group for a reported €6.72 million. It had been set for auction at Christie’s in New York when the museum stepped in with the private purchase. The brooch had ceased to be part of the French crown jewels 121 years earlier when it was sold at a public auction to a jeweller for 42,200 French Francs or €85,000 at the time. An emerald necklace and earrings belonging to Empress Marie-Louise were acquired by the Louvre in 2004 from Baron Elie de Rothschild, according to the museum’s records, which didn’t include a price. His late wife had owned them, according to the records, which show they earlier passed through the jewellers Van Cleef and Arpels.

A Tiara of Empress Eugenie was sold in 1992 at a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva for more than $1 million and then donated by the donor group to the Louvre, museum and auction house records show. The stolen haul also included a tiara, a sapphire necklace, and matching earrings from the collection of Queens Marie-Amelie and Hortense, all acquired by the Louvre in 1985, according to museum records. The oldest acquisition, a reliquary brooch entered the collection in 1887.  

Rob van Beurden, an Antwerp-based diamond expert with 45 years experience in the industry, said that while it would be possible to recut the gems, he thinks it’s much more likely that they have been stolen to order.

“They always say that wherever a diamond is stolen, be it in Paris, in Prague, or in Madrid, chances are fair that it will end up in Antwerp,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone would be interested in burning their fingers on something this hot.”

“If they’re not stolen on assignment, then they will end up most likely somewhere in Antwerp, and God forbid it’ll be for the scrap value,” he said. “If ever they were to be sold just for the material, for the scrap value or for the diamonds, then it’s very little money.”

There have been questions raised about the professionalism of the gang. While making off with the necklaces and other items, the thieves left the 140-carat “Régent” diamond untouched and dropped a crown with more than 1,000 diamonds.

It’s not unheard of for stolen pieces to end up being later abandoned in a public place or reappear decades later.

In 2018,  thieves took two crowns and an orb belonging to the Swedish monarchy which were later found on top of a trash can in a Stockholm suburb. A collection of antique gold snuff boxes stolen from a stately home in Leeds, England, was found four decades later, intact. 

Sometimes items are stolen and used as leverage by a gang to get a member in prison a shorter sentence. The thieves realize they can’t sell the loot but still try to use it to gain advantage, according to Julian Radcliffe, founder of the Art Loss Register.

President Emmanuel Macron said that getting the crown jewels back in one piece is the outcome he’s hoping for. “We will recover the artworks, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice,” he said in a post on X earlier this week.