PARIS (AFP).- The 106-year-old widow of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine has sold their home in the Paris suburbs, her lawyer told AFP on Wednesday, reportedly to pay her debts.

Lucette Destouches has lived at the house in Meudon, southwest of the capital, since she and her husband moved there in 1951, according to French weekly Le Point, which revealed the sale.

The magazine said she owed back taxes as well as payroll charges for the three people who help look after her, which meant she was no longer receiving a pension.

Francois Gibault, a lawyer and biographer of Celine, said that under the terms of the sale Destouches retained the right to live in the home until her death.

Celine, best known for his 1932 novel "Voyage au Bout de la Nuit" ("Journey to the End of the Night"), is considered one of France's most prominent modern novelists, but also one of its most controversial.

Fiercely anti-Semitic, Celine fled France after the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944 and was later convicted in his absence of collaborating with the Nazis.

Earlier this year the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard suspended plans to reprint three anti-Semitic pamphlets written by Celine in the 1930s, after an outcry by critics including some historians and Jewish groups.

There appear to be no plans to turn his former home into a museum, after several institutions declined Destouches' offer to sell, according to Le Point.

Celine, who died in 1961, is buried at the Meudon cemetery.


© Agence France-Presse