French pretender fights to keep council flat

The Bourbon family silver went long ago. So did the chateau in the Loire, the palace in Palermo, the estate in Morocco and sizeable tracts of prime French woodland.

The bailiffs were at the doors when the pretender to the French throne, Prince Henri d'Orleans, had an inspiration. How about the doors?

Not those doors, but the panels given by his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, otherwise known as Louis XIV, to Marie-Antoinette to grace her sedan chair. They were painted by none other than Nicolas Poussin, one of France's greatest classical painters, and they were considered so chic that they were later made into a set of doors for a carriage.

Prince Henri owes £96,000 in back rent for his council flat, and has offered to donate the door panels to the Chateau of Versailles, which, owing to a revolution, the Bourbon family also lost.

As with other unhappy princes, Henri VII, Count of Paris, owes his straitened circumstances to love. He fell out with his father and broke his staunch Catholic and royalist upbringing by divorcing his first wife and marrying Michaela in a civil ceremony in 1984.

The prince tried his hand at writing film scripts and selling perfumes - anything to flog the old Fleur de Lys symbol. He even published a book: Searching for the Sources of the Irrawaddy - from Hanoi to Calcutta Overland.

Instead, he found himself having to move quickly from his fashionable flat in the 16th arrondissement, owing 1m francs in unpaid rent.

Paris's unforgivingly republican town hall drew up an order to seize his furniture, but the order remained dormant until May 14 when a bailiff was poised to knock on the prince's door. He may yet avoid the ignominy of a public auction of the Bourbon goods and chattel.

Even so, there is still the small question of what happened to the fabulous Bourbon fortune. When Henri finally inherited the estate it had shrunk to a mere 80m francs (£8m) and in April the prince's lawyer filed a lawsuit alleging that his client had been swindled out of his inheritance. Last week the public prosecutor opened a judicial investigation.