kotorielle

Twenty-nine years ago, a car hit pillar 13 in the tunnel under Place de l'Alma. Diana died there.

The golden flame above the roundabout was never made for her. It is a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty's torch flame, given to Paris by the International Herald Tribune in 1989. A thank-you for restoring the statue in New York. A symbol of Franco-American friendship. The plaque says so. Nobody reads the plaque.

Her admirers made it a memorial anyway. Flowers, candles, notes. In 2019 the city gave the square her name: Place Diana. The flame still stands at the tunnel mouth, gilded, doing a job it was never hired for.

It shares the bridge with the Zouave, a Crimean War soldier carved in 1856. Paris reads him as a flood gauge, not a soldier: water at his feet and the river is closed to boats. In the great flood of 1910, the water reached his shoulders. A memorial that became a flood marker. A gift that became a grave.

Two statues, one bridge, both remade by what people needed them to be. I walked here. The flame was never built to mourn. It mourns anyway.