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The last day of Henri Paul's life began with his usual Saturday-morning tennis game. He left the central Paris apartment where he lived alone to join his close friend Claude Garrec at the courts. The men played from 10 until 11, then stopped at the Pelican bar in Paris' 1st arrondissement. There Paul drank only Coca-Cola. That didn't surprise Garrec, who knew his best friend to enjoy the occasional wine or pastis (a French liqueur flavored with aniseed that is about as potent as whiskey). At 12:30 Paul said his farewells, telling Garrec that he had to meet Diana and Dodi at Le Bourget airport, where their private jet would touch down from Sardinia at 3:15 p.m. When Paul wheeled up to the private airstrip, he found something else that had become usual, the waiting paparazzi. At this time, Paul was behind the wheel of the black Range Rover that carried the couple's luggage. He followed a Mercedes 600 driven by Dodi's regular chauffeur Philippe Dourneau. The two-car convoy was dogged by paparazzi for much of the way but apparently managed to slip past them at some point. Paul turned off and delivered the baggage to Dodi's apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Dourneau, with Di and Dodi in the rear, continued on, arriving around 3:45 at the Villa Windsor, the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, now leased by Dodi's father Mohammed. According to sources close to the investigation, Dourneau testified to police that Dodi congratulated him on losing the paparazzi on the way from Le Bourget.
Around 4 o'clock, the Mercedes, bearing Di and Dodi, would go to the Ritz, followed by Paul in the Range Rover. For the next three hours, Paul remained at the hotel, where, according to several employees, he had a couple of glasses of Ricard pastis at one of the hotel bars. At 7 p.m., Dourneau drove the couple from the Ritz to Dodi's apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. It was 7:05, and Paul considered himself off duty.
He appears to have walked to Harry's New York Bar, two minutes away at 5 rue Daunou. Since the accident, the bar's manager has systematically thrown out prying reporters, and he insists that Paul was never there. But the French journalist Guilhem Battut of the Journal du Dimanche says he has interviewed two employees of the bar who positively identified photos of Paul, saying he was in Harry's the night of the accident from about 7:30 to about 9:45. One bartender said Paul had "two or three whiskeys," ate nothing while there and left after receiving a call on his portable phone.
From there Paul apparently went on foot to the rue Chabannais, where his car was parked across the street from a bar called Champmesle. The Champmesle is a lesbian bar, where, despite his gender, Paul was a regular customer. The burly 41-year-old bachelor, a former French air-force officer and an amateur pilot, was a big teddy bear who brought flowers for the bar's regulars but otherwise left them alone. Josie, the bartender, knew him well. "He never drank much," she says, leaning on the bar under a garish mural of nude women. "I've known him for 20 years. He was a nice guy, gentle. He'd drink Coke, Perrier, maybe a beer." Josie emphatically denies Paul was an alcoholic and says he appeared perfectly normal that night. "If he'd been a drunk, we would have known about it," she declares.