Only Wife and Three Children Remain : Friends Gradually Slip Away From Duvalier

Ousted Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier has been deserted by the friends and relatives, except for his immediate family, who accompanied him to France after he fled his country 12 days ago.

Sources at the luxury hotel where Duvalier has been closeted since fleeing Haiti on Feb. 7 said the last members of an original 22-member retinue slipped away from the lake-side refuge Tuesday night.

The former president-for-life, officially only on a transit stop in France, is now accompanied by only his wife, Michele, and her three children in the heavily guarded 35-room hotel in the Alpine town of Talloires, near the Swiss border.

The other members of the entourage, composed mainly of close relatives, left in small groups over the past week.

External Relations Minister Roland Dumas today reasserted France’s determination to get rid of Duvalier as soon as possible, saying he was “still on the point of leaving.”

But French officials, who originally set an eight-day deadline on Duvalier’s stay, confirmed that no country had yet agreed to take him off France’s hands.

They said Liberia, the one nation to have shown any willingness to offer refuge, could not yet be ruled out despite signs it had backed off from an earlier offer.

U.S. revokes visas, Page 10.