By PAUL HARRIS

Last updated at 10:49 12 October 2007

Slowly, silently, they marched down into the tunnel. The roar of the traffic had been halted and the roads had been sealed by police.

This was the exact spot where the darkness had closed in on Princess Diana's life and now, ten years later, a sea of sombre faces stared towards it in the flickering neon light of the underpass.

Nothing but a damaged concrete pillar marked the site of the fatal crash. The tyremarks on the road had long been worn away.

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But everyone knew what had happened here, and for a full ten seconds no one breathed a word. Some even bowed their heads.

This was how a British inquest jury followed in the footsteps of Diana's last hours in their search for the truth about how she and her companion Dodi Fayed died.

There were no prayers or acts of remembrance, because yesterday wasn't the time or place.

Instead, six ordinary women and five ordinary men were able to bring to life the maps, film footage and diagrams they had pored over to reconstruct that final, terminal journey.

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And thus, for a few hours yesterday, a small area of Paris was transformed into a coroner's court, some 350 miles from London, as the entire inquest transferred for two days to France.

Save for the computer screens and transcription equipment of the regular courtroom, pretty much everything was here - a coroner, most of the lawyers, jury bailiffs and a shorthand writer.

They even brought a few bundles of paperwork from court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand, just in case.

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The afternoon began ominously when the coach transporting the jury pulled up outside the Ritz Hotel, first stop on the tour, and parked in the wrong place, where it was immediately surrounded by photographers and TV crew.

Members of the jury pulled curtains in the coach windows to shield themselves from view.

In the confusion, the coach collided with a police motorcyclist, nudging him gently to the ground with a 650lb motorcycle falling on top of him.

When the coach driver tried to park in the correct place he hit a metal pillar causing one of his tyres to explode.

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The sound caused French police officers to reach for their guns before they realised what had happened - and delayed the start of the trip for nearly 30 minutes.

Jurors had to wait on the bus while the wheel was changed, watched by hundreds of photographers, and curious onlookers trying to work out what was going on.

Someone spotted the luxuriant mane of barrister Michael Mansfield among the TV cameras and asked if he was a film star ("Not yet, came the reply").

Then in a scene bordering on farce, it wasn't the coroner who emerged from the hotel doors - but the unmistakable figure of Victoria Beckham.

She strutted across what were effectively the precincts of the court before disappearing with her entourage into the underground car park, pursued by a breakaway battalion of photographers.

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Out on the streets of Paris, the court group made a bizarre sight as it progressed around the city.

Legal restrictions forbid any identification of the jury, but it is safe enough to report that this was as ordinary a bunch of people as you might find on any station platform.

Ordinary people taking an everyday view of an extraordinary event. Yet however simply the coroner and lawyers had tried to explain it back in London, there could be no substitute for being here.

Place names suddenly became living images; distances were something they could gauge for themselves, not measure on a chart.

Amid unprecedented levels of security for a court hearing, around 500 armed anti-terrorist police and undercover agents shadowed the 50-strong inquest group.

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Among the officers present were 200 members of the elite CRS riot squad - clad in body armour - 200 gendarmes, dozens of officers of the anti-terrorist RAID police unit and undercover officers from the French equivalent of Special Branch, DST.

Such was the sensitivity of the visit that Michele Alliot-Marie, France's Interior Minister, assigned specialist officers to every site including the Place Vendome and Place de la Concorde.

Police officers manned key points along the route to marshal traffic and pedestrians and guard the jury's privacy and safety.

It lent the area the flavour of the Presidential cavalcade scenes from The Day of the Jackal.

Had it not been for this massive police presence, and for the motorcycle outriders, the group might have passed itself off as adult students being taken on a heritage tour.

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Except that yesterday, of course, they were making history as well as recalling it.

Their guide, the white-haired figure of coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker, slipped easily into the role of genial tourmeister.

He steadied himself on board Coach One by gripping the luggage rack and used the microphone to broadcast inquest landmarks en route.

They stopped off at sites not normally on the tourist map, but crucial to the framework of the hearing.

Among the first of these was the back of the Ritz, in particular the service entrance which Diana and Dodi used to escape photographers waiting outside the front of the hotel that night.

The CCTV camera which recorded those last, poignant images of the couple was still pointing down towards the exit.

Next, a walk along the Place de la Concorde, where they disembarked the coach to examine the road layout.

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The jury has already heard it was here that Ritz driver Henri Paul made the decision to drive along the side of the River Seine, rather than taking the more direct route up the Champs Elysees. And then, the socalled tunnel of death.

What happened ten years ago in the Pont de l'Alma underpass took place in a split second.

The jury lapped it for about 20 minutes to witness the normal traffic flow, then spent 15 minutes in the traffic-free emptiness after police closed the road that runs through it.

Once, this had been a scene of carnage and frantic activity - firemen and paramedics fighting to recover the occupants of the car, flashguns popping off in the semi-darkness. There was only calm. It's a rare day indeed here when footsteps are the loudest noise. At the invitation of the coroner, the jurors assembled in silence around pillar 13.

A large chunk of the square concrete post was still missing leaving a deep, 18-inch high scar on its leading edge and exposing the metal reinforcement.

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The fact that this was what brought a speeding Mercedes to a dead stop was all anyone needed to imagine the devastation of the impact which killed Henri Paul and Dodi, fatally injured Princess Diana and left bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones with terrible injuries. Little wonder they remained quiet.

The coroner broke the silence by inviting the jurors to walk on through the tunnel, and to look back towards the bend and the dip at its entrance.

The Mercedes, they have been told, came in here at between 60 and 65mph - twice the speed of the coach which had taken them through it a few minutes earlier.

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Later, after a break of several hours, the jurors did the whole journey again

in darkness. To be fair, it wasn't quite an exact mirror of that day in 1997.

When Diana was being driven around Paris it was in the last days of summer.

Now - five weeks from the anniversary date - the leaves were turning yellow in nearby parks and an autumn wind filled the streets.

But the pre-midnight journey was perhaps a much more realistic picture of what it must have been like that night, even down to the paparazzi who followed the coach convoy yesterday on motorcycles.

This was a watershed day in the progress of the inquest and a rare public insight into the workings of such a high-profile hearing, the first time a British inquest jury has convened abroad.

Even in criminal trials, such visits are comparatively rare, although not unique. Seven years ago an Old Bailey judge and jury in a war crime trial tramped through the deep snow and minus 20C temperatures of a Belarus winter to view the murder scenes.

Final stage of the trip was to the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, where surgeons battled to save Princess Diana's life.

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She had made the same journey in an ambulance. Afterwards, the jury settled down in a heated coach and returned to their hotel.

So will the Paris trip help answer the questions which have played on so many minds this last decade?

In an interview four months ago, Diana's sons William and Harry admitted they would never stop wondering what happened that night.

Prince Harry said he didn't think anyone would ever really know.

The inquest still has six months to run, and the jury will doubtless do its duty with great diligence.

But even after this extraordinary day, you couldn't help thinking yesterday that Harry had probably got it right.