"Rest in peace, Henri," said the sash on the large wreath of pink and red flowers placed ostentatiously on the church steps, on the altar during the ceremony, on the back of the hearse during the short journey to the cemetery and finally on Henri Paul's grave. "Your friends are not fooled."
The message may have been addressed to the late deputy chief of security at the Ritz Hotel, but it was directed at the 100 journalists at his funeral on Saturday, at the French authorities investigating the car crash, and at the world which blames Henri Paul for the death of Princess Diana.
His friends were not fooled by three blood-tests which showed Paul was drunk and drugged when he drove the car into a tunnel support column. That's what the flowers were saying. But if Paul's excessive speed and alcohol consumption did not cause the car crash, what did?
In Lorient, a town of 60,000 fishermen and shipyard workers to which Henri Paul remained fiercely attached, residents prefer to believe the conspiracy theories - that Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul were murdered - or to blame the press which pursued them.
The Lorient distrust of the press was compounded over the last three weeks, when journalists from all over the world arrived to investigate the life of Henri Paul. His grieving parents fled their two-storey white concrete bungalow in the working-class suburb of Keryado to escape them.
It was fear of the press - or of a mad "avenger" of Diana - which led Henri Paul's family to request police protection for his funeral. Neighbours said Mr and Mrs Paul received threat letters calling the deceased driver "an assassin".
In his funeral sermon, Father Leon Theraud cited the mother of Princess Diana, who said she felt "neither anger nor reproach towards anyone for the death of Diana". It was impossible not to recall another funeral two weeks ago, a gun carriage, a bannerdraped coffin and an abbey swamped by flowers.
When his parents arrived at the Sainte Therese church on Saturday morning, they clung to one another like children. Henri Paul was the second son they had lost; another died recently of cancer.
Henri's father Jean, a tall, thin, retired city employee, had to be led to his place. The hand of his petite wife Giselle, a former school teacher, trembled as she put on a pair of sunglasses. Henri looked strikingly like her. He was Giselle Paul's favourite of five sons, and she always called him "mon grand".
The couple seemed not to notice the lens shutters whirring around them. "They have been thrown into something that has completely overwhelmed them," Dominique Melo, Henri Paul's friend since secondary school, said. "His father told me, `Look what is happening to us simple people'."
The priest asked forgiveness "for ourselves and in the name of Henri", but the family chose a text from St Paul's letter to the Romans warning people not to judge their loved one. "Do you judge your brother?" it said. "Do you scorn him? Will we all not have to appear before God? Each man will have to give an account of himself before God."
Television cameramen, photographers and reporters waited on either side of a police barrier leading to the church door. Self-conscious mourners were forced to walk down the aisle between the steel barriers while the cameras clicked at them. One made an obscene gesture to the photographers.
A woman accompanied by a small girl - believed to be Henri Paul's former companion and her daughter - hid her face with the bouquet she was carrying.
Fourteen of Paul's colleagues from the Ritz - chambermaids, bellhops and security guards - arrived in a bus from Paris. They said the Ritz had sent no official representative, but a spokesman for the hotel's owner, Mr Mohamed al-Fayed, later claimed that the hotel's director, Mr Frank Klein, and its deputy director, Mr Claude Roulet, were among the 200 mourners. It was Mr Roulet who called Henri Paul back to the hotel to accompany the princess and Dodi Fayed on the night the three died.
At the nearby cemetery, the journalists watched the burial of "the man who killed Princess Diana" from behind a wall. The last mourners ebbed away, leaving a few dozen bouquets - none of the tonnes of flowers left for Diana. One was a spray of white lilies, identical to those which had adorned the princess's coffin. A lorry with a crane lowered a granite slab on to the tomb.
Henri Paul had wanted to be cremated, but his family's lawyer advised them to bury him, in case more tests are needed.
PA adds: More than 100 sick children from Great Ormond Street and other London hospitals visited the scene of Princess Diana's fatal car crash in Paris yesterday to lay flowers in tribute. The children, many wheelchair-bound, arrived at the Pont de l'Alma courtesy of London's cabbies after their annual Disneyland outing. At London's Kensington Palace last night the door was finally closed on the unprecedented tide of people who had wanted to pay their respects to Diana. As night fell, last entries in the books of condolence, opened following the princess's death, were made.
The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, attended the annual Battle of Britain Day service in Westminster Abbey yesterday, commemorating the air fight which prevented Hitler's Luftwaffe from bombing Britain into submission in the early days of the second World War.