Paris - The death of Princess Diana was announced at a 5.30 a.m. press conference by the French Interior Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who called her "modern, courageous and sensitive to human suffering".
Dr Bernard Riou, the surgeon who had tried unsuccessfully to save Diana, told how her left pulmonary vein had haemorrhaged. "Though we closed the wound . . . we could not get circulation restarted, and we pronounced her dead at 4.00 a.m.," he said.
A few hours later, French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, rushed back from La Rochelle, where his Socialist Party is holding a conference, to pay his respects at the PitieSalpetriere Hospital. "It is deeply tragic that this beautiful young woman should die in our country," he said. "Many French people loved her charm, her naturalness, her humanity."
It took only a few hours for the places connected with Diana to become sites of pilgrimage and mourning. The French somehow felt guilty she had died here. "Forgive, children of Ladi (sic) Di, " was scrawled on a cardboard heart pinned to a bouquet of red roses and yellow daffodils below the iron doors of the British ambassador's residence, where the Union flag hung at half mast.
"The French love your Mama with all their heart."
All day, they laid bouquets on the ground at the British embassy, in the tunnel next to the Seine where the Mercedes 600 crashed after midnight, in front of the hospital where she died.
More than 1,000 people lined the pavement when Prince Charles and Diana's sisters, Jane and Sarah, arrived in the British ambassador's Jaguar at 5.30 p.m.