Conflicting Portrait of Diana’s Driver Emerges

In the down-market neighborhood cafe where he would sit by himself and sip wine or beer laced with lemonade, Henri Paul, the man who drove the car in which Princess Diana died, was treated by the staff as a “monsieur” --a real gentleman.

“I thought he was an airline pilot,” waitress Myriam Lemaire said of the balding, muscular Breton who lived next door to the 10-table Le Bourgogne on the Rue des Petits Champs. “Never did he speak of his work.”

A regular customer, the stocky 41-year-old, who never married, “was a decent man, very reserved,” Lemaire said. “And always alone.”

The occupation the discreet former serviceman kept under wraps was that of the No. 2 security official at one of Paris’ best-known and most glamorous hotels, the fabled Ritz on the Place Vendome. On Saturday evening, hotel employees said, he received a call from a subordinate.

Diana and her new love, Dodi Fayed, the son of the Ritz’s Egyptian-born billionaire proprietor, were at the Ritz and were being tracked by paparazzi photographers. What to do?

Paul, who had driven the couple to the hotel after they landed in the French capital earlier that day, came back in. A hotel chauffeur said Wednesday that the security man obviously had been drinking.

Nevertheless, the quiet fellow from Brittany wound up with the keys to a powerful, 2-ton limousine in which to drive Diana and Fayed away from the Ritz.

All three of them died in a high-speed crackup of the Mercedes-Benz 280 SE in an underground tunnel near the River Seine early Sunday. Only Diana’s bodyguard, former British paratrooper Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, survived.

Post-mortem tests found that Paul, known to other Ritz workers for his seriousness, trustworthiness and coolness under pressure, had drunk so much--a bottle and a half of wine, by one estimate--that his blood-alcohol level was more than 3 1/2 times the legal limit.

“He had boozed a little, and we knew that,” the Ritz chauffeur, who was not identified, said on Europe 1 radio, speaking through a device that distorted his voice so it could not be recognized.

Another hotel employee told a French newspaper that “the security chief arrived Saturday night overexcited and drunk as a pig.”

For some who knew Paul, it simply doesn’t seem possible that he may have been responsible for the death of one of the world’s most famous people.

“You can’t say that he was a boozer,” a third Ritz co-worker has protested to Le Parisien newspaper. Incredulous at the results of the posthumous blood tests, relatives of Paul, a native of the Atlantic port city of Lorient, have demanded another.

At the neighborhood cafe, not far from the Pompidou Center, the Comedie-Francaise and the Ritz, Paul would nurse his “little glass of wine” or other drink, Lemaire said.

That Paul, an ardent amateur pilot in his spare time, once had a drinking problem has been mentioned by several people who knew him.

Journalist Robert Johnston, 32, who was a student in Paris when he met Paul 10 years ago, told the Daily Mail, a London tabloid: “He would always be in Willie’s bar most evenings, always sitting in the same corner and drinking whiskey. His main topic of conversation was always fast cars and motorbikes.”

One Ritz employee, however, told a French newspaper that the security official had recently slowed down. “Mr. Paul went on the wagon one year ago,” the Ritz employee said. “A few days ago, at a cocktail party for the departure of a housekeeper, he only drank orange juice.”

When Paul was off hotel premises and on his own time, it was evidently a different matter, but some acquaintances said he was far from a lush.

A spokeswoman for the Ritz declined to comment Wednesday on why Paul was chosen to drive the princess of Wales and the owner’s son while the ordinary chauffeur was used in an abortive gambit to divert the waiting photographers. A hotel employee also indicated that Ritz officials had played back the videotapes of security cameras to scrutinize them for signs of tipsiness that Paul might have betrayed when he arrived, and found none.

There has been speculation that Paul, a former officer candidate in the French air force who helped train draftees and organize the security detail at the air base at Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, felt too dedicated to his job at the hotel, where he had worked since 1986, to refuse the assignment. After all, the owner’s son was in town.

“As soon as the Al Fayeds are here, it’s panic on deck,” the hotel chauffeur said on Europe 1, using the full surname that Dodi Fayed’s father has adopted. “They are all scared of Al Fayed. No one may refuse orders from Al Fayed.”

Paul also reportedly found irresistible the glamour of hobnobbing with the Ritz guests and being photographed with them. He prided himself, it is said, on remembering their pet peeves and what they liked.

Though Paul was not a full-time chauffeur, the hotel has said he took two driving courses at the Mercedes track in Germany and sometimes chauffeured visiting guests. But on Europe 1, the regular driver questioned Paul’s legal right to use the big sedan, claiming that the security official lacked the necessary special permit from the prefecture of police. A Fayed family spokesman said a normal driver’s license was enough.

Officials at Paris police headquarters declined to comment, saying only that Paul’s case is now subject to the secrecy of a judicial inquiry.

In Lorient, friends said Paul loved to rent a plane and fly home on weekends from Paris to sail or fish. The life of his family had already been touched by tragedy, one neighbor pointed out: His younger brother died in a car crash, and his sister of an illness.

“He doesn’t merit an epitaph like this,” Lemaire, 45, said. “It’s disgusting to see how they’re speaking of him.”

On Tuesday, an investigating magistrate began scrutinizing evidence and witnesses’ reports to see if six photographers and a photo agency motorcycle driver may have played a part in the crash of the Mercedes, which hit a concrete pillar in the underground tunnel.

As Paul pulled away from the Ritz with his VIP passengers in the back seat, he was pursued by a number of photographers bent on snapping pictures of Diana and her beau.

After the crash, some paparazzi “machine-gunned” the battered limousine and its dead or dying passengers with their flash-equipped cameras rather than do anything to help the victims, official sources and witnesses have said. The seven official suspects, whose 20 rolls of film were seized and examined by police, are being investigated to see if they should be charged with manslaughter or for breaching a French law that requires people to come to the aid of injured people.

On Wednesday, official sources said other photographers suspected of having taken photos and fled the accident scene might be hauled in for grilling by the elite Criminal Brigade. The sources also said police, posing as eager buyers of pictures of Diana’s final hours, had set up a successful sting operation to locate and confiscate photos being offered for sale by an unnamed Paris photo agency.

On television, Laurent Sola, director of the Paris L.A. Presse photo agency, admitted having offered for sale photos of Diana’s fatal crash snapped by his paparazzi. But he said he ultimately decided not to deliver the shots. Media interest was frantic, Sola said, and bids for the pictures reached about $2.4 million in Britain and $250,000 in the United States.

“The word spread like wildfire,” Sola said. “I had calls from dozens and dozens of media who are now denying it and saying, ‘We never wanted to publish them.’

“That’s a lie.”

Sola’s photographers managed to get their photos and flee before police could collar them. The director said he was questioned by detectives and held for 24 hours. He turned over proofs of the photos but said he refused to divulge the names of his photographers.

“I will protect them to the end,” he said.

* MONEY: It turns pros into paparazzi. A14