Castle siege ends in death

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33741, 14 January 1975, Page 13

Castle siege ends in death

(New Zealand Press Association)

MONTAUBAN (France), January 13. A two-year siege of a French noble family’s chateau in Montauban has finallyended with the young baron dying after a gun battle with police.

Jean-Louis Portal, aged 22, last of a line dating back to the Middle Ages, fell mortally wounded with three police bullets in his stomach after 170 gendarmes stormed the (crumbling old building and (blew in the front door. I Seconds earlier, Baron I iJean-Louis used an elephant] I gun to wound a gendarme in.

a last desperate stand to hold the debt-ridden family home.

I His Polish-bom mother. Baroness Anne-Marie, aged 49, who with his sister. MarieAgnes, had kept the embalmed body of his dead ( father, Baron Leonce. in a lead coffin behind the front I door, were hauled off to gaol. The last of the Portals—one of France’s oldest families (motto: “Vengeance is our | Strength”), which could I count among its ancestry a | Navy minister under Louis XVlll—began the siege in 11973 to stop the new owner | taking possession of his beloved Chateau Fumade. - The bedridden Baron, aged ) 89, dropped dead a month (after ordering his wife — a I serving girl when he married her—and their son and (daughter to barricade themI selves in the decaying, 30room chateau in defiance of a court decision to oust them. ) From then on, with the ) baron unburied, the family took up their hunting rifles )and kept the world at bay (while weeds grew unchecked (over the once-rich pastures and vineyards of the 400-acre estate.

Meanwhile, a Toulouse businessman, Mr Louis Riviere, who said that the family owed him $U512,400 and who had bought the property at auction, had to wait.

The affair came to a head last week when Jean-Louis wounded two farm workers sent by Mr Riviere to plough the land. They were hit by flying splinters when he fired at them, and the police decided to move in.