'The English are so cold. They won't even have a Mass for her'

Madame Carolino was out early yesterday morning, walking her dogs along empty streets. She paused by the golden statue of a flame standing above the underpass in which Diana, Princess of Wales, died, and remembered the events of five years ago.

"I heard a strange noise, something like a bomb," said Mme Carolino, who lives in apartments across the Seine. "I saw lights flashing as the emergency services arrived."

The car carrying "Lady Diana", as the French still call her, had smashed into the 13th pillar of the tunnel beneath our feet. Traffic still tears through the underpass at Pont de l'Alma, which has been scarred by exhaust fumes and collisions; it would be a foolish pilgrim who entered that deadly neon-lit passage, so the gilded flame became an unofficial shrine to Diana. Yesterday morning, on the fifth anniversary of the dawn that brought astonishing news to the world, only half a dozen people were there.

"I liked her, she was a very beautiful girl," said Mme Carolino, raising her voice above the noise of a tourist coach, whose guide was indicating the crash site. Nobody got out.

"It is a pity the English are so cold," said my immaculately dressed new friend. "I hear they are not even going to have a Mass for her. I could never marry an Englishman."

Her husband was a French caterer who had worked at the Ritz and she knew Henri Paul, the chauffeur. "He was not a drinker. They substituted someone else's body for his. Secret agents killed her."

Half the Parisians I spoke to yesterday subscribed to this view. The others were completely indifferent. "We find the cult of Diana unintelligible," said one couple.

The French press largely agrees. Le Figaro and Libération ignored the anniversary; Le Monde carried a small report from Althorp on its back page. Paris Match said nothing of the woman who once captivated magazine editors. Pont de Vue homed in on Harry, un prince fragile.

One correspondent could not believe that admirers of the princess still did not know the Flamme de la Liberté had nothing to do with her. It was put up 15 years ago, a replica of the torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Many of the hundreds who gathered at the crash site on the first anniversary could not believe the over-sized candle blowing in the wind was just a coincidence, so they stacked flowers around its base and wrote on the walls. Police took away the dead blooms, and blasted the concrete clean, and have done so every year since, as the number of mourners has steadily declined.

By the afternoon a constantly changing group of 20 or so people had gathered around the flame and the tributes were growing. Madeleine and John Wellfare come every year from Newhaven in Sussex for the anniversary. "We admire what she stood for. We wanted to pay our respects. Althorp is closed. Paris is a lovely place to come for the weekend."

There was fresh graffiti too. "Diana we miss you," wrote Roy and Carol of Torquay on Friday, with three kisses underneath. Other messages were shorter, even brutal: "Diana is die", said one; another asserted: "Media kills". A bizarre German note taped to the metal fence compared Diana to Princess Caroline of Monaco and claimed: "Her teeth is not her own."

The Diana Garden and Nature Centre is in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux but nobody we spoke to in that short, narrow street had heard of it. A small brown plaque on an old school building was the only indication that there, hidden behind an archway, was a quiet, beautifully kept garden containing a single cluster of white and pink blooms.

"Rosier, Princess of Wales" said a handwritten sign next to the low, double-headed bush, Paris's only memorial to the Princess. Arianne, who had popped in to the garden with her daughter did not know of its connection to Diana. "We come for the plants, monsieur, and the tranquillity."