The human cost of the disaster showed on the faces of the tired men, women and children who filed off airport buses into the Jacques Brel municipal auditorium yesterday. How many times would 113 - the number killed - have to be multiplied to calculate the lives interrupted, irretrievably broken by this tragedy? By two? Five? Twenty?
Many of them looked to be in their 30s or 40s - now orphans because their retired parents had saved the £8,403 for the flight and cruise of a lifetime. One middle-aged woman leaned on a boy who appeared to be her son. He must have been 12 years old, and he smoked a cigarette as they walked towards the ecumenical memorial service. There were children and old people, a man who looked Turkish, an African couple. An elegant woman emerged from a German embassy car carrying a huge bouquet of red and white roses.
An airport van arrived with three women in Air France uniform, one weeping behind her dark glasses. The airline's 11 Concorde crews are considered an elite. "We're like a family," Edgar Chillot, a pilot said, his voice choking with emotion. "We all know one another. All of the pilots are extremely sad, dumbfounded. The crew was perfectly trained. I knew the navigator and the technicians. I was at Roissy when it happened."
President Jacques Chirac and the first lady, Mrs Bernadette Chirac, sat in the front row of the auditorium, next to the German ambassador to Paris and the German transport minister. It was a rapid, makeshift arrangement: folding chairs and red velvet draped on a wall, a spray of gladioli and potted plants in front of a pulpit.
Mr Chirac had himself witnessed the Concorde crash; his regular Air France flight, returning from the G7 summit in Japan, had landed at Roissy a few minutes before the fateful flight AF-4590 took off in flames. Also in the front row were Jean-Cyril Spinetta, the Chairman of Air France - he too witnessed the crash, through his office window - and the wife of the pilot.
Human technology had failed, so the tragedy was briefly referred to the Almighty. A German pastor read from Isaiah 43. "When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee . . ." the prophet had written, and one couldn't help wondering about those 105 charred bodies or pieces of bodies already saved from the wreckage.
Monsignor Bernard Lagoutte, the head of the French Council of Bishops, read a message from Pope John Paul II, in which he assured the victims' families and friends of "his deep sympathy and his spiritual proximity". The local Rabbi from Gonesse read the 23rd Psalm, The Lord is my Shepherd, in Hebrew, and an Imam recited a sura from the Koran asserting confidence in God.
However ecumenical the service, these men of religion had not co-ordinated their Old and New Testament responses to the obvious question. "Ultimately everything is the will of God," Rabbi Nissim-Nathan Sultan from Gonesse told me. He lives only 600 metres from the Hotel Issimo which was obliterated by the exploding Concorde. "It makes you feel fragile," the Rabbi admitted.
But Father Stanislas Lalanne was adamant. "It was certainly not the will of God," he said. "God never sends death. The verses we read proved this." Mgr Lagoutte said that for the families and friends, the most difficult time was yet to come.
"For those who don't have faith, the challenge is to believe that those who have died remain living in some way. Reason cannot explain this." As the religious ceremony ended, he recounted later, "it was terrible to hear the Stabat Mater Dolorosa - the song of a woman who witnesses the suffering of her son - and hear the planes overhead. The hard reality is that the world goes on."
At the end of the service, immediate family members were asked to enter an adjacent room, where tables had been set up with juice and biscuits. Michelle Fricheteau, the seriously injured manager of the Hotel Issimo, insisted she be discharged from hospital to go to the ceremony, which she attended with her arm in a plaster cast and burn cream on her face.
For half an hour, President and Mrs Chirac moved from table to table, talking to each group about their dead. But the mourners lost all semblance of composure; many broke down in tears. A team of doctors helped several who collapsed.
Hundreds of French people had gathered outside, out of curiosity or to show sympathy for the victims' loved ones. More than 100 aircraft fly over Gonesse each day, and its residents are both fearful and angry in the aftermath of Tuesday's crash. In May, 5,000 of them participated in a protest at Roissy against the building of a fourth runway. The local mayor and member of the National Assembly, Jean-Pierre Blazy, says it would be immoral to resume Concorde flights before the exact causes of the disaster are determined. "We avoided catastrophe only thanks to the skill of the pilot," Mr Blazy said.
In the last minutes of flight AF4590, the pilot turned his plane just enough to avoid a large apartment complex and the Gonesse Hospital. Under pressure from the anti-airport lobby, the French transport minister Jean-Claude Gayssot has promised he will take a decision on a third Paris airport by the end of the summer. Some 55 million passengers go through Roissy every year.
Laly and Patrick Brege were among the local residents who waited outside the auditorium. "We live just under the trajectory, next to the hospital," Mr Brege said. "Five seconds difference and the plane would have fallen on us." The accident had taught him "fear - and the realisation that it could happen to us." Mrs Brege said it made no difference to her whether the victims were French or German. Her son died due to a medical error three years ago. She cried softly. "When you have lost someone, it touches you much more," she said. "I can imagine the passengers - all excited at leaving on holiday. On est vraiment peu de chose. [We don't count for much.] You always think it happens only to other people. It's not true; it can happen to you."