Princess Diana died on August 31, 1997, following a car crash in Paris, France. In his memoir, Spare, her younger son, Prince Harry, revealed that 10 years later he retraced his mother's final journey in a car of his own.
Harry was attending the World Cup semifinal in the city when he had the idea to drive through the tunnel in an attempt to gain closure.
He writes:
“The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…
I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large.
The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him.
Yes, yes. He knew it.
I want to go through it.
You want to go through the tunnel?
At sixty-five miles per hour—to be precise.
Sixty-five?
Yes.”
He continues:
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course.
But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
Harry adds:
“As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.
I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel.
I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.
No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
There is more in the video below.
