Pontoise Criminal Court, near Paris, was told that Bill Pallot, 61, convinced the palace to pay €840,000 for two chairs that its experts thought had belonged to the Comtesse du Barry – Louis XV’s mistress. They had, in fact, been made in recent decades in a workshop in Paris.

The alleged swindle is just one of many Pallot and others are accused of committing.

Pallot, author of The Art of the Chair in Eighteenth-century France, stands accused of plotting a €4.5 million fraud along with Bruno Desnoues, a prominent cabinet maker. They are two of six defendants, including a Paris gallery which is accused of buying the fake furniture before selling it on for a large profit.

The court was told that the Kraemer gallery had paid €200,000 for another set of two chairs that were said to have adorned Marie Antoinette’s pavilion at Versailles. The gallery sold them to a Qatari prince for €2 million. The gallery denies any wrongdoing.

Pallot told Le Parisien that he planned on pleading guilty. He said he and Desnoues had begun scamming people for fun. “It went off without a hitch,” he said.