PERHAPS it’s the curse of the pharaohs having the last laugh. Her father-in-law, King Farouk, was thrown out of Egypt, as was her husband, King Fuad, and now the last queen of Egypt, Fadila Farouk, is about to be chucked out of her US$3m apartment on the Avenue Foch, Paris’s poshest street.

　　While it was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s band of republican army officers who forced Farouk’s abdication in 1952 and Fuad’s six months later, Fadila’s enemies are the bailiffs who have stripped her 280-sqare-meter, 10-room apartment of most of its furniture and cut off the telephone.

　　With the enforced sale of the flat due this week, Fadila, 53, has little left to remind her of her life of glamour and extravagance except for a magnificent portrait painted in 1977 when, as plain Dominique Picard, a literature student, she met Fuad in Switzerland and was introduced to a life of royal opulence.

　　Ms. Picard converted to Islam, changed her name and joined the royal exiles and stars who turned the Avenue Foch into one of the most expensive streets in the world.

　　But since divorce proceedings began in 1999, when Fuad took refuge in Switzerland, Queen Fadila of Egypt — the title she uses on her letterhead — has provided the gossip columns with little other than stories of financial distress.

　　Fadila, who has three children, claims her problems began when Fuad, who says he is broke, ignored a Swiss court order to pay her an allowance of US$1,000 a month.

　　“He accused me of being lazy and wasteful but that’s not true,” she said. “I believe he’s sitting on a secret fortune. Stories that he is suffering from severe depression because I ruined him are nonsense.”

　　But the penniless queen, despite a legal action, has no hope of staving off the enforced auction of the flat Thursday to pay off her debts, which include more than US$500,000 owed to the bank.

　　“I have no money at all,” she said. “My only income is handouts from Saudi and Moroccan princes and kings. I think there’s something very odd about the sale, a sort of plot, if you like. After all, this is really the official residence of Egypt’s royal family.”

　　(SD-Agencies)