A picture shows gold bars and porcelain fragments looted from the French Prince de Conty shipwreck that were seized by US authorities, during their official restitution to France, in Brest, eastern France, on June 15, 2022. SANDRA FERRER/AFP via Getty Images

An 80-year-old American novelist and her husband are among several people facing a possible trial in France over the illegal sale of gold bars plundered from an 18th-century shipwreck, after French prosecutors requested the case go to court.

Eleonor "Gay" Courter and her 82-year-old husband Philip have been accused of helping to sell the bullion online for a French diver who stole it decades ago, but have denied knowledge of any wrongdoing.

Le Prince de Conty, a French ship trading with Asia, sank off the coast of Brittany during a stormy night in the winter of 1746. Of the 229 men aboard, only 45 managed to survive, according to France's culture ministry.

Its wreck was discovered more than two centuries later, in 1974, lying in 30 to 50 feet of water near the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer.

The wreck was looted in 1975 after a gold ingot was discovered during a site survey.

Archaeologists in the 1980s discovered fine 18th-century Chinese porcelain, the remains of tea crates, and three Chinese gold bars in and around the shipwreck.

But a violent storm in 1985 dispersed the ship's remains, ending official excavations.

Some of the ship's looted gold bars eventually found their way to an auction in San Francisco, CBS Bay Area reported.

In 2018, the head of France's underwater archaeology department Michel L'Hour spotted a suspicious sale of five gold ingots on a U.S. auction house website.

He told U.S. authorities he believed they hailed from the Prince de Conty, and they seized the treasure, returning it to France in 2022.

"These objects tell the history of France, its commerce, and its people," said Steve Francis, a high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a statement at the time. "HSI is proud to have played a role in ensuring these artifacts continue to be part of France's history for future generations to enjoy."

Investigators identified the seller as a certain Eleonor "Gay" Courter, an author and film producer living in Florida.

Tracking the gold
Courter said she had been given the precious metal by a couple of French friends, Annette May Pesty, today 78, and her now deceased partner Gerard.

Pesty had told the "Antiques Roadshow" television series in 1999 that she discovered the gold while diving off the west African island of Cape Verde.

But investigators found this to be unlikely and instead focused on her brother-in-law, now 77-year-old underwater photographer Yves Gladu.

A 1983 trial had found five people guilty of embezzlement and receiving stolen goods over the plundering of the Prince de Conty.

Gladu was not among them.

Held in custody in 2022, he confessed to having retrieved 16 gold bars from the ship during around 40 dives on the site between 1976 and 1999.

He said he had sold them all in 2006 to a retired member of the military living in Switzerland.

But he denied ever having given any to his American friends the Courters.

He had known the author and her husband since the 1980s, and they had joined him on holiday on his catamaran in Greece in 2011, in the Caribbean in 2014 and in French Polynesia in 2015, investigators found.

The Courter couple were detained in the United Kingdom in 2022, then put under house arrest.

French investigators concluded that they had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total.

They found they had sold 18 ingots for more than $192,000, including some via online sale platform eBay.

But the Courters claimed the arrangement had always been for the money to go to Gladu.

"They are profoundly nice people"
A prosecutor in the western French city of Brest has requested that the Courters, Gladu and Annette May Pesty be tried, according to a document obtained by AFP on Tuesday.

An investigating magistrate still has to decide whether or not to order a trial, but prosecutors said a trial was likely in the autumn of 2026.

The U.S. couple's lawyer, Gregory Levy, said they had had no idea what they were getting into.

"The Courters accepted because they are profoundly nice people. They didn't see the harm as in the United States, regulations for gold are completely different from those in France," he said, adding the couple had not profited from the sales.

Lawyers for the other suspects did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.

Courter has written several fiction and non-fiction books, some nautical-themed, according to her website.

One is a thriller set on a cruise ship, while another is her real-life account of being trapped on an ocean liner off the Japanese coast during a 2020 COVID-19 quarantine.

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