Paris, August 31st, 1997
I had actually been briefly to the Marais once, before the memorable lunch at L’Ambroisie I described before. I was there to have dinner with my family and a Colombian baby sitter we had then, Tatiana.
We had just arrived in Paris after a two week vacation in the South of France, where we had rented a house in Mougins, near Cannes. At he hotel we were staying for one night someone mentioned a restaurant called Ma Bourgogne, on Place des Vosges, and we decided to have dinner there. The next morning we would be flying back to New York.
I remember the date very well: August 31st, 1997. Dinner was nice, the place very interesting, but by 10 pm the kids were tired, and we headed back to our hotel. We will never forget that night: it was the night Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris. And we had passed on the same tunnel the accident took place, only half an hour before.
We learned about it the next morning, checking out of the hotel. Tatiana had been out and came back almost in tears: “Princess Diana died not far from here last night”, she said. I remember the silence that fell upon all of us in the hotel lobby. No one could say a word.
That strange silence stayed with us on the way to the airport. Paris was quiet that morning, there was a weird stillness in the air, even the driver said nothing. My then ten year old daughter commented on how quiet things were and on Princess Diana’s death. I replied with something like “she was a beautiful person and she died in the most beautiful city”. But no one really talked much.
We got to a Charles de Gaulle airport heavy with security guards, at the same moment Prince Charles‘ Royal Air Force jet was landing. He had come to Paris to claim Diana’s body. Unreal.
A long time after that date, I learned that the young French woman who, with her doctor boyfriend, got to Diana’s car crash site before anybody else, was the daughter of someone I knew well. The girl herself had been my guest in New York, years before. Small world we live in…
I still remember well the days that followed, the amazing display of emotions worldwide, the feeling that Diana left too early. Some people capture our imagination more than others, I guess. She had something different, something hard to describe - she was real.
I never met her, but each time I return to the Marais and beautiful Place des Vosges, I remember Diana. And I feel that we all lost something, that night in Paris.