A flamboyant French art expert and “master forger” fooled the Palace at Versailles into buying fake “Marie Antoinette” chairs, a court heard on Tuesday.

Bill Pallot, an expert on 18th-century French furniture, is accused of running a counterfeit operation between 2008 and 2015 as part of a €4.5 million scam that one leading gallery owner dubbed “catastrophic” for the prestige of Gallic art dealing.

With his distinctive long hair, round glasses and three-piece suits, the 61-year-old was a familiar figure in France due to his regular publications and media appearances. The kingpin of pre-Revolutionary furniture was nicknamed “Père la chaise” – a play on Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery and the phrase “father of the chair”.

On Tuesday, a court in Pontoise outside Paris accused him and his fellow defendant Bruno Desnoues, a prominent woodcarver, of producing and selling chairs from 2007 to 2008 that they claimed were historic pieces that had adorned the salons of the likes of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, and Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI’s wife and the last queen of France.

In fact, the pair have admitted they were all “perfect” fakes, made from the frames of old chairs that were upholstered with gold and other intricate ornamentation of the time.