Henri Paul, the man who died behind the wheel in the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, and her escort three weeks ago, was buried Saturday morning, leaving his family and friends still perplexed by official findings that he drank heavily and took antidepressant drugs before the accident.
Paul's job that night, as the Ritz Hotel's acting security director, was to protect two of the most important charges ever entrusted to him: the princess and her escort, Dodi Fayed, the son of the hotel's owner, Mohamed Fayed, who also owns the Harrods department store in London.Nothing in the life of Paul, a 41-year-old bachelor from Brittany, explains why he would ignore those responsibilities and take heavily to the bottle, say those who knew him.
A romantic relationship had broken up two years ago, but he had gotten over it, they say. His lifelong passion was flying, and he had passed a demanding physical for his pilot's license two days earlier. Playing tennis with his closest friend in Paris on that last morning, he declined their usual post-game beer, saying he had to go to the airport with another driver to pick up Diana and her escort.
The security cameras at the Ritz bar that he himself monitored to discourage other employees from tippling did not show him drinking during his last hours there, say officials of the London-based corporation that owns the Ritz, contradicting press reports.
Yet French prosecutors said that his body showed a blood alcohol level of between 0.173 and 0.187 percent after the accident at 12:25 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 31 - more than three times the legal driving limit. Lawyers for the Fayed family were so surprised by the results of the first two tests that they insisted on a third, which also revealed traces of drugs used for treating depression.
The alcohol level in Paul's blood indicated that he had consumed about 10 drinks. The third set of tests was conducted in such a way to make certain that any possible contamination of earlier results was avoided.
"He was not an alcoholic," said Dominique Melo, a psychology teacher at the University of Rennes and a friend of Paul's for 25 years. Melo has been trying to shield Paul's family from publicity portraying him as a dissolute drinker.
"I never had any hesitancy about getting into his car with him at the end of a dinner," Melo said in a telephone interview. "What happened is just incomprehensible to all of us."
Lawyers who have heard this sort of thing before say that Paul's friends could be covering for him. And the Ritz management, which could be held responsible for criminal negligence for putting him behind the wheel while he was drunk and without a required limousine chauffeur's license, has every reason to deny knowledge that he was drinking on duty.