Among the treasured photos they have left of their daughter is a professional portrait which captured her extraordinary beauty.
In the dark days that have passed since Cyane Panine was killed in the horrific fire which engulfed a Swiss bar on New Year’s Eve, her grieving parents Jerome and Astrid have held on to it tightly, desperately trying to blot out other images which emerged from that terrible night.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail this week, they make clear that the most unbearable of them all is one which has made worldwide headlines.
It shows 24-year-old Cyane, a waitress at Le Constellation in the Alpine resort of Crans-Montana, wearing a crash helmet and sitting on the shoulders of a colleague, clutching bottles of champagne plugged with lit sparklers which, it is believed, set fire to soundproofing foam on the bar’s ceiling.
No matter that the young Frenchwoman was simply following orders from one of the bar’s owners to ‘get the atmosphere going’.
The implication that ‘La Fille au Casque’ – ‘the girl in the helmet’ – was somehow to blame for the inferno which killed 40 and left more than 100 with serious burn injuries, is one which is compounding the family’s unending grief.
This week, at home in Sete, south of France, Jerome and Astrid spoke to the Daily Mail in the hope of reclaiming their beloved daughter as one who ‘shone and captivated’ rather than as a poster girl for a disaster for which the bar’s owners are under criminal investigation.
They recall Cyane as a happy, bright, hard-working young woman who, as a girl, adored riding horses, playing with her dogs and who made friends with ease amid the family’s frequent trips abroad.
The implication that Cyane Panine – dubbed ‘the girl in the helmet’ – was somehow to blame for the deadly inferno at a Swiss bar which killed 40 and left more than 100 with serious burn injuries, is one which is compounding the family’s unending grief
Cyane Panine, 24, was filmed wearing the crash helmet from Dom Perignon, the Champagne brand, as she was lifted onto the shoulders of Mateo Lesguer, 23, the in-house DJ
Aged nine she moved to Australia with her parents and elder sister Eoline for six months. At 11, she accompanied her family on an extraordinary round-the-world sailing adventure, backed by Unesco, to promote water conservation.
‘Cyane was spontaneous, radiant and full of heart,’ her heartbroken mother, a 64-year-old photographer, says. ‘She possessed a beauty that went beyond the physical. She embodied it. She trusted people without the slightest suspicion. She paid the ultimate price for this with her life.’
Her 59-year-old father, a hydrologist and expert in water conservation, describes her as ‘such a vital presence’.
He says: ‘I cannot accept that my daughter is remembered only as the girl with the helmet, with flares in her hands.’
As well as paying tribute to their child, who was born in 2001 and named Cyane for the colour of her eyes and the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean where the yacht-owning family spent so many happy days, the couple are full of contempt for the French owners of Le Constellation – Jacques and Jessica Moretti – and what they see as attempts to exploit their daughter.
Since the disaster, Mr Moretti, 49, a convicted pimp and fraudster who has spent time in prison and a decade ago was convicted of employing staff illegally, has likened Cyane to a ‘stepdaughter’, while his 40-year-old wife Jessica, a former actress and model, has described her as being like ‘a little sister’.
Both have insisted that they are also grieving her death while facing charges of manslaughter, bodily harm and arson, all by negligence.
Because of his criminal record, Mr Moretti is being held in ‘pre-trial detention’, while his wife has been forced to wear an electronic tag as inquiries continue.
Cyane’s parents recall her as a happy, bright, hard-working young woman who as a youngster made friends with ease amid the family’s frequent trips abroad
Cyane was named for the colour of her eyes and the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean where the yacht-owning family spent so many happy days
At 11, Cyane accompanied her family on an extraordinary round-the-world sailing adventure, backed by Unesco, to promote water conservation. Pictured: Cyane with her sister Eoline, and their parents Astrid and Jerome
They face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of manslaughter. Given that Cyane had complained to her family of being forced to work long hours with no breaks and spoke of being physically and mentally exhausted, such statements are hard to stomach for the Panines.
According to the family’s lawyer, Sophie Haenni, Cyane wasn’t on familiar terms with the Morettis. Text messages reveal she addressed them using the formal ‘vous’ rather than ‘tu’.
Cyane, says the lawyer, didn’t even have an employment contract and, after spending several winter ski seasons in Crans-Montana, had previously contacted ‘the workers’ protection service’ over her employment conditions with the Morettis.
She also claims Cyane received no safety training at work and had no idea that the sound-insulation foam on the ceiling – which Jacques Moretti himself fitted during renovations a decade ago – was highly flammable.
She was told to put on the crash helmet, a gimmick supplied to bars by champagne-maker Dom Perignon which would have prevented her seeing the catastrophic events unfolding around her.
‘Cyane is without question a victim,’ Ms Haenni said last week. She is representing the family at a criminal inquiry being held in the Swiss town of Sion amid allegations that a basement fire exit was locked on the night of the blaze and that renovations were carried out without the correct permissions.
It has already emerged that no fire safety inspections had been carried out at the bar since 2019 despite laws requiring annual checks.
Above all else, Jerome and Astrid are struggling to understand how their happy-go-lucky daughter, raised with such love and care, could have died in such awful circumstances. She wasn’t even meant to be at Le Constellation that night.
A dramatic video captured the moment the ceiling of a Swiss ski bar caught fire
Footage shows an individual desperately trying to extinguish the fire, but within seconds it takes hold, erupting into a deadly fireball that engulfed the packed bar
The French owners of Le Constellation – Jacques and Jessica Moretti – face charges of manslaughter, bodily harm and arson, all by negligence
Cyane, who travelled to Crans-Montana in late November, started work on the morning of New Year’s Eve at another of the Morettis’ businesses, a gourmet burger restaurant called Le Senso, before being sent to ‘Le Constel’ as the couple’s hugely popular ski bar was known to its young wealthy clientele.
For almost the entire evening she was on the ground floor, welcoming guests and directing them to tables for which wealthy young customers had to agree to a minimum spend of around £900.
Many were sent to the basement in the bar which Jacques Moretti renovated in 2015, expanding what was a simple cafe into a lively bar and disco. During that time he is alleged to have narrowed the basement staircase from three metres to just one.
It was Jessica Moretti who, not long after 1am on January 1, asked Cyane to go down into basement to help colleagues with an order for a large number of bottles of champagne for tables.
According to an account she gave to investigators last week, Mrs Moretti encouraged Cyane to ‘get the atmosphere going’ by putting on the helmet. Other staff put on Guy Fawkes masks and stuck sparklers in champagne bottles. This theatrical display was a regular feature at the bar.
Footage recorded on mobile phones in those final few seconds show Mrs Moretti at the back of a crowd of cheering revellers gathered around Cyane as she is held aloft by 27-year-old barman Matthieu Aubrun, who is wearing one of the Guy Fawkes masks. Mrs Moretti was filming as the first flames erupted on the ceiling above Cyane.
According to a woman named only as Louise, the sole employee to escape without injury: ‘There were seven or eight of us in that column carrying bottles. Cyane led the way, perched on Matthieu’s shoulders, just like she’d done before. Everyone was in costume.’
Cyane, blinded by the helmet she is wearing, appears still tragically unaware of what is going on above her.
High quality photographs show the very first moments of the Swiss Constellation Bar fire in Crans-Montana
As flames raced across the dimpled foam insulation, groups of young people carry on singing along to a song by urban French rapper Lacrim. A couple of teenagers try to smother the flames with items of clothing before fleeing the bar. The time was 1.26am.
According to Louise: ‘We lost between 30 and 35 seconds. With the music playing, people weren’t yelling ‘fire!’ We had our backs turned and couldn’t see it.’
Louise escaped up the main staircase. Barman Matthieu was badly burnt, taken to hospital and placed in an induced coma.
The crucial seconds which pass between the onset of a disaster and the moment people realise the urgent need to get out are known to experts as ‘pre-evacuation time’. At Le Constellation this narrow window of time was particularly critical.
Smoke and heat spread throughout the entire basement creating a ‘flash-over’ during which the entire room exploded into flames.
By then, Jessica Moretti had already left the bar. According to accounts by lawyers for the families of the dead, she has told investigators that she shouted ‘everyone out’ and appears to have been one of the first to leave before calling the fire department and her husband, who told her to drive herself home.
She is said to have been caught on CCTV cameras carrying the till with the night’s takings.
Many of those left behind tried to leave the basement up the narrow staircase at the same time, creating a massive bottleneck.
An investigating source estimates that around 85 per cent of the dead were trapped on the tiny staircase installed ten years earlier by Mr Moretti, which collapsed into the basement. Pictured: Emergency services at the scene of the blaze on New Year’s Eve
An investigating source estimates that around 85 per cent of the dead were trapped on the tiny staircase installed ten years earlier by Mr Moretti, which collapsed into the basement.
As staff, Cyane would have known there was a second door which should have offered an escape route. She and several others attempted to escape through it, unaware it had been locked.
The Morettis insist it was a ‘service door’ rather than a fire exit.
Cyane’s parents, tortured by thoughts of their trapped daughter’s final moments, have since claimed it was locked to stop party-going teens trying to sneak in without paying the exorbitant table fees. According to Jerome: ‘If the door had been open, maybe there wouldn’t have been deaths.’
Mr Moretti himself claims he was the one who broke down the door which was ‘locked from the inside and on a latch’. He claims to have found Cyane suffocating among a pile of bodies and pulled her out with the help of her boyfriend. That boyfriend, who has given his name only as Jean-Marc, says he carried Cyane to a nearby bar and tried in vain to resuscitate her ‘as much as we could’.
While her death is one of many devastating losses of young life that night, for her parents her final, terrifying minutes are an agonising contrast to the happy, sun-filled childhood she spent with them, in particular their three-and-a-half years at sea.
They set off in their 15-metre catamaran, Nomadeus, from Port Camargue on the French Riviera in October 2012 with the aim of encouraging educational links between schools and discussions about water conservation.
A cartoon of Cyane and her sister appeared on the hull of the boat and the project was promoted via a website with the tagline: ‘Follow two children sailing around the world on a water mission.’
This voyage of a lifetime took the family across the Atlantic, up the Amazon, then through the Panama Canal and on to the Seychelles and Madagascar.
After returning to France, the family settled back in Sete, where Jerome and Astrid opened an award-winning micro-brewery and bar called Brasserie La Singuliere where, when she was old enough, Cyane sometimes worked.
As she entered her teens, her remarkable beauty became ever more evident. In 2021, she was chosen to appear in an art project featuring the portraits of 1,000 women in Sete. That same year, Astrid Panine called a photographer friend and asked him to do a photoshoot with her daughter.
Recalling that time, Vincent Chambon (www.studiochambon.fr) remembers her as ‘strikingly beautiful’.
The portfolio of photographs they produced together were, he says, just for her family. After the confines of Covid lockdowns, Cyane had found work in Crans- Montana as a waitress, starting that winter. It was a seasonal job she returned to each year.
For Jerome and Astrid the story of their daughter’s life races towards that terrible moment behind the locked door at Le Constellation where it was cut short with what they now describe as ‘unimaginable suddenness’.
Last weekend, after bringing Cyane back to Sete, Jerome helped carry his daughter’s coffin into a memorial service attended by 1,000 people. Walking close behind him, sobbing uncontrollably, Astrid wore a bright blue scarf over her black mourning clothes in remembrance of her daughter.
She describes her as ‘an elusive butterfly; the kind one longs to catch and immortalise,’ before talking again about how she would like her beloved child to be remembered in the midst of a tragedy which has left so many parents utterly bereft.
Not as ‘La Fille au Casque’ but, she begs, as a ‘real and profound’ reminder of ‘all young people who are cut down in their prime’.
