9 April 2008

BRUSSELS - Nine years after being revealed as the out-of-wedlock daughter of the Belgian king, Delphine Boel, 40, says she no longer craves her father's acknowledgment that she is his daughter.

In a book to be published this week, entitled ''Cutting The Umbilical Cord,'' Boel says she ''no longer obsesses'' about the fact King Albert II has yet to accept her as his daughter.

In a Belgian television interview on Tuesday, Boel, an artist living in London, called her book ''a trip back into time. I had so many questions about my origin, my parents, rejection etc''.

''I had to cut the umbilical cord,'' she said, adding she was tired of being King Albert's ''dirty laundry.''

Boel's existence was revealed in a 1999 biography of Queen Paola, King Albert's Italian-born wife, as the daughter of the Belgian monarch and Sybille Baroness de Selys Longchamps, the wife of a former Belgian industrialist.

In his Christmas message that year, King Albert admitted to an extramarital affair in the late 1960s saying it nearly wrecked his marriage to Queen Paola.

Since 1999, Boel has made several public appearances in Belgium hoping to normalise relations with King Albert who has four grown children with Queen Paola.

That never happened. In the interview on the VRT television network, Boel says ''she is fed up with being seen'' as a destabilising factor. She said she attracted media attention not because of her art ''but because I am the king's dirty laundry''.

The interview shows Boel among her art - brightly coloured papier mache dolls and collages. One collage reads: ''Truth Shall Set You Free.''

[AP / Expatica]