When we met her in 1980 she was shy Di, with the streaked pageboy and lanky limbs backlighted through the thin flowered skirt. She was all raw material, charm and skin and a curtsy, the kindergarten teacher who could cross the street without stopping traffic. She would never be a perfect beauty, so the fun was watching her become a great one, the bones and the bearing taking shape before the cameras, as though by an effort of will.

But she seemed to know, maybe before we did, that there was more to playing the part than looking it. She began as a feminine icon, not a feminist one, abiding by history's demands: producing heirs, cutting ribbons, walking a conspicuous three paces behind the times. A few years and a thousand talk shows later, she became the Princess Victim, bulimic, suicidal, betrayed by a caddish paramour with a tell-all book, trapped in a loveless marriage. But that image too was fleeting, replaced by a very '90s portrait of a shrewd operator, better at public relations than all the palace spear throwers. By the time she agreed to a divorce, she had embraced the American notion that marriage is more about self-fulfillment than sacrifice or lines of succession. She had built up such reserves of public sympathy by this time that even as she lost her status, she kept her stature.

All along, she seemed to be saying that true royal behavior--courage and grace--was a gift possessed by outsiders. Like the Queen Mother before her, she won people's devotion by remaining devoted to them. As a princess, she embraced the baby with AIDS. But in her solo career, she sold off her evening wear at Christie's for charity, visited lepers in Indonesia, explored minefields in Bosnia. And the message she sent was a radical one: you don't need a palace to be a princess. You may even need to leave it to become one.

The end of the story, it turns out, is all about sacrifice. She may have escaped her marriage in search of love, but there was no escaping us. Her grip on our imagination was too firm, the bounty on her head too high. By choosing to continue with her duties, to go where she was needed and drag the spotlight with her, she gave up any chance of ever driving quietly through Paris on an August night.