THE FAMILIES of the victims of flight AF447 arrived first at Notre Dame Cathedral, hidden from the television cameras by the Air France buses that brought them from their hotel at Roissy airport.
The airline sent an e-mail to its employees yesterday morning, asking them to attend the ecumenical service. Hundreds waited in a tense, sombre mood on the esplanade in front of the cathedral, wearing navy-blue uniforms and black ties, some walking arm in arm, with tears in their eyes. “We’re like members of one big family,” said an air hostess. “We are all in mourning. It could have happened to any of us.”
The CEO and director of Air France, the French prime minister and opposition leaders, former president Jacques Chirac and representatives of the Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim faiths all attended the service.
President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, were the last to arrive, seven minutes late. They took their seats in the front row, followed into the cathedral by the Air France personnel.
There were no television cameras inside, and journalists were not allowed to attend, at the request of the families and the airline. Several hundred anonymous mourners and a handful of tourists listened to prayers and psalms, Maurice Duruflé’s requiem, sung by the Air France choir, over loudspeakers placed outside.
“It is shock and grief that have brought us together here today, to be with those who were closest to the victims,” said Msgr André Vingt-Trois, the Archbishop of Paris. “It is shock and grief that seize us when we think of these 228 persons.” The archbishop read a message from Pope Benedict XVI expressing “sincere condolences”, “profound sympathy” and “spiritual proximity to all those touched by this tragedy”.
Msgr Vingt-Trois read a passage from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot and writer who immortalised night flights over the Atlantic in his novels and himself died in an air crash during the second World War.
A geographer tells the Little Prince that the flower he left behind is ephemeral. “What does ‘ephemeral’ mean?” the Little Prince asks. “It means ‘who is threatened with imminent disappearance’,” the geographer replies.
Thereupon, the Little Prince first knows regret. “We are filled with regret for all we have done and didn’t do, and yet we continue living. To remember, we shall now light 228 candles, as a luminous sign of their presence in their absence,” Msgr Vingt-Trois said.
The Air France staff then carried 228 lighted candles to the altar, where they burned throughout the service. It ended with a Brazilian poem titled Footprints in the Sand.