IF Jacques-Yves Cousteau's spirit hovered about his casket in Notre Dame Cathedral yesterday morning, it must have been at home in the cavernous 12th-century nave, for it felt like the floor of the ocean. So vast and dark was the cathedral where Napoleon once crowned himself emperor, that the glimmer of light filtering down from the stained glass windows seemed to come from the surface of the sea far above us.
For a funeral to be held in Notre Dame is a rare honour, usually reserved for French heads of state. But with Cousteau, who died on June 25th aged 87, France lost its best-loved explorer. Mourners called him the last great Frenchman a citizen of the world, an inspiration and a model.
Candles barely dented the immense darkness; it took spotlights, like the ones Cousteau used to make his films on the seabed, to illuminate the purple-robed Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who presided over the service.
Cousteau's widowed second wife, Francine, a former airline hostess nearly 40 years his junior, sat in the front row in her black suit and veiled pillbox hat. Diane and Pierre-Yves, the couple's teenage children, sat beside their mother. For the space of an hour, the family appeared to be reconciled with Jean-Michel, Cousteau's middle-aged son from his first marriage.
Doomed to a ceremonial role since his party lost the parliamentary election, President Jacques Chirac sat in an armchair, to the front and off to one side. He closed his eyes through much of the funeral Mass; was he praying? Or reflecting on Cousteau's example. For many years the most popular man in France, the oceanographer turned down a chance to stand for the president in 1981.
The cathedral echoed the choir's mermaid voices and reverberated Cardinal Lustiger's homily until it was almost impossible to decipher the distorted sounds. Commander Cousteau had grown increasingly religious in the last months of his life, taking the sacraments from a close friend who was a priest and, like Cousteau, a member of the Academie Francaise. Cousteau, we were told, was "the poet of an inaccessible reality", who through his ingenuity and knowledge had enabled all humankind to discover the immense under-sea world.
Thanks to Cousteau, the cardinal said, "we find again, for a moment the original wonder of man before creation.
The former crew of the Calypso, the British minesweeper which Cousteau turned into a research vessel, carried his casket out into the cold, drizzling morning, where hundreds more people waited to pay their respects. The pall bearers clutched red knit caps like the one that Cousteau wore; one used his to wipe away tears.
More poppy-red caps bloomed in the square in front of Notre Dame. "I wore it in tribute to him," Mr Antony Guillou (27), a marine biology student, explained. He had left his home in Normandy at 6 a.m. to attend the 10 a.m. service. "Commander Cousteau made me discover my passion," Mr Guillou said. "My great regret is that I never met him."
