For most of us, the summer of 1997 is frozen in a particular kind of sadness. But before the news broke on that August morning, Princess Diana was simply having a good summer. A quiet one, by her standards. A happy one.
She was 36 years old. She had been divorced from Prince Charles for just one year; they had wed in July 1981 and had two sons, William and Harry. And that summer, she was finally building something new.
In July 1997, she brought William and Harry to the South of France. They stayed at the Villa Castel Ste Therese, set high on the cliffs above St. Tropez, on a 10-acre estate with its own private beach. A luxury yacht called the Conical was at their disposal.
It was during that holiday that the boys first met Dodi Al Fayed, the man their mother had grown close to. Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, owned another luxury yacht, the Jonikal, and photos from that sun-soaked stretch showed Diana relaxed and at ease, sunning on the deck in a multicolored one-piece bathing suit, far from the formal world she had left behind.
Royal editor Robert Jobson, in his book William’s Princess, wrote about what William witnessed during those weeks. He described how Dodi made Diana laugh, how he seemed to make her genuinely happy. And how William, who so wanted to see his mother happy, took quiet comfort in that.
“Dodi made his mother laugh; he seemed to make her genuinely happy… And William, so keen to see his mother happy, witnessed it. It was, according to those close to the young prince, a source of some comfort to him in the dark days that followed.”
As August drew to a close, William and Harry returned to their father. Diana and Dodi traveled to Paris, reportedly hoping to slip away from the paparazzi who had followed them all summer. She was planning to return to London to see her sons.
Just after midnight on August 31, 1997, Diana and Dodi left the Paris Ritz hotel. Henri Paul, the Ritz’s assistant director of security, was driving. Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, sat in the front passenger seat. Paparazzi pursued them through the streets of Paris.
Paul tried to outrun the photographers. The car crashed into a concrete support column inside the Place de l’Alma tunnel. Dodi and Henri Paul were killed instantly. Rees-Jones survived. Diana was still alive when paramedics reached her.
She was rushed to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. She went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 3 a.m. She was 36 years old.
What those final summer photographs give us, even now, is something worth holding onto. A woman laughing on a boat in the Mediterranean sun. A mother watching her boys meet someone who made her smile. A brief, peaceful season that belonged entirely to her.
