PARIS — They were artists and students, music lovers, parents and newlyweds. The victims of last week’s attacks in Paris had varied backgrounds and interests. Among the 129 killed in the attacks, here are some of their stories:

GILLES LECLERC

Gilles Leclerc’s whereabouts remained a mystery for days after the attack at the Bataclan concert hall. His partner, Marianne, escaped, but he seemed to have disappeared.

In the frenzied aftermath of last week’s attacks, families and friends frantically searched for the missing, hoping they were not among those killed.

Madam Nelly Leclerc, Gilles’ mother, went on Europe1 radio to plea for information about her 32-year-old son’s whereabouts. Gilles, known as Gillou, lived in Paris.

“We have no news,” she said. The family sent photographs of Gilles — showing his distinctive tattoos — to hospitals across Paris, to police and to investigators, to no avail.

His sister set up a page called “My brother Gilles Leclerc” on Facebook over the weekend in hopes of finding him.

She wrote: “We still haven’t found Gilles this morning but the search is continuing.”

On Monday, Nov 16, at 4.12pm (local time), his death was announced.

“We are sad to announce that Gillou has been found dead, unfortunately. Thank you for your support, your expressions and your help in the search.”

ERIC THOME

Eric Thome, 39, was an artist, fan of music and father with a 5-year-old girl and another child on the way when he died during the attack at Bataclan concert hall.

Thome and a partner were running their own Paris design studio after working in the advertising business for years.

The studio specialised in bold, fanciful, often daring illustrations and photographs. Among the art displayed on its website was a whimsical illustration of a Kalashnikov assault rifle that looks like a plastic toy covered in cartoon-like drawings. Its stock says in bold letters: “It’s not my war.”

“He was an artist, always hip, a party guy who loved music,” a friend was quoted as saying by Le Parisien. “He was full of joie de vivre and adored his kid.”

His second child was due in weeks, Le Parisien newspaper reported on its website.

CEDRIC GOMET

Cedric Gomet, 30, of Paris, was a technician for French television network TV5Monde, which posted a video showing a moment of silence being observed in his memory at the station, with employees holding photos of him in their hands.

Co-worker Eric Krissi said Gomet was roundly adored by everyone at the station. “Everyone loved him. He was always smiling ... a true professional, truly appreciated.”

Gomet, who began working at the station about five years ago, was passionate about rock music and played guitar in a local band. He died at the Bataclan.

Mr Krissi said Gomet’s family and girlfriend are in deep shock over his death

SVEN SILVA

Sven Silva was the kind of guy people remembered, and not just because of his flamboyant bushy afro hairstyle.

The 29-year-old Venezuelan could make a joke out of anything, and never said no to a good time, childhood friend Anders Borges told The Associated Press.

“If there was a party, he was there. He’d even go to my parent’s birthday parties,” Mr Borges said. “He was the one who always cheered us up, who made the jokes, who made sure everything went well. We looked to him in good times and we looked to him in the bad times, too.”

Like many middle-class Venezuelans, Silva decided to leave the economically struggling South American country after graduating from college. He moved with his younger sister to Ireland last year to study English, and then settled in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, where he worked as a computer programmer, Mr Borges said.

Last week, Silva travelled to Paris to meet up with two old friends, fellow Venezuelans now living in Europe, and decided to head to a show at the Bataclan.

His mother, Madam Giovanina Perugini, said in a Facebook post that the family would remember Silva’s smile, jokes, optimism and charisma.

She had visited her son in Spain a week before the attacks, Mr Borges said. The family was planning to celebrate Christmas together. Silva would have been the life of the party, Mr Borges said.

OLIVIER HAUDUCOEUR

A man of many talents and interests, Olivier Hauducoeur died doing one of the things he loved: Listening to a rock concert. He was among the victims of the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris.

Hauducoeur, a banker, worked for the BNP Paribas Group. Outside of work, he liked to play guitar, enjoyed badminton, and belonged to an athletic club in Yerres, the Paris suburb where he lived, according to the profile he created in Copains d’avant, a website for connecting with old chums.

His profile said he was married with two children. He also ran cross country, according to the website of L’Express newsmagazine. Travels had taken him around Europe, to North Africa and the United States, according to his Copains d’avant profile.

MANU PEREZ

Just minutes before gunmen stormed the Bataclan, Manu Perez, 40, of Paris posted on his Facebook page: He was enjoying the concert there by Eagles of Death Metal, he said, in “all its simplicity”.

The California-based rock band, whose members survived the attack, said in a statement that Perez would be remembered as one of their “record company comrades”.

Mr Pascal Negre, president of Universal Music France, Perez’s employer, said via Twitter that the Universal Music family is “in mourning” over the deaths of Manu and two colleagues. Apparently it was one of those colleagues, Thomas Ayad, who provided Perez with the tickets to attend the concert at the Bataclan.

Perez’s last Facebook posting was a photo of the Eagles performing at the Bataclan just before the attack. The time was 9.03pm.

The photo posted less than an hour before was of a pair of concert tickets, with a message from Manu saying “Merci Thomas!”

CHRISTOPHE FOULTIER

Motorcycle-riding graphic designer Christophe Foultier loved rock music, peppering his Facebook page with photos from shows and posts about bands. Some posts enthuse about Eagles of Death Metal, the last band he would ever see. Foultier, 39, was killed at the Bataclan.

Foultier worked at healthcare communications agency Havas Life, which mourned him on its Facebook page. He and his wife, Ms Caroline Jolivet, were raising their two small children in suburban Courbevoie.

Foultier also was working on an album of his own with a friend, according to an essay by Mr Francois Sionneau, the editor-in-chief of the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur’s website and a colleague of Jolivet’s.

The last time he saw Foultier, the designer was picking up his wife at work on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with a luminous smile, “the kind that make you believe in man”, Mr Sionneau wrote. He admired the bike, and Foultier knew it.

“He’d promised me we’d take a big trip together,” Mr Sionneau wrote. Now, “it’s his smile and his thirst for life that will remain”.

OLIVIER VERNADAL

Olivier Vernadal, 44, of Paris, lived near the Bataclan concert hall, and went there regularly for shows. He died there in the terrorist attack during a rock concert.

Vernadal worked as a tax collector, but his first love was football.

A native of Ceyrat in central France, he played football there and coached the local team, according to the website of the newspaper Liberation.

A banner was put up at city hall saying: “We are all Olivier”. The town’s football stadium, where Vernadal used to play, will now be renamed after him, according to the France Televisions website.

CHRISTOPHE LELLOUCHE

He was Christophe Lellouche to some, Chris Kelevra to others, and “Moke” online — a communications worker, a musician, a football fan site provocateur. And he was at the Bataclan when the attackers stormed in.

Lellouche, 33, was a guitarist and backup vocalist in an indie pop band, Olivier, and he had composed music for Jung Forever, a 2014 Belgian short film about a therapist and a despondent, cancer-stricken woman.

He and director Jean-Sebastien Lopez had barely met, but Lellouche immediately grasped the film’s nuances, and he and another musician quickly created exactly what Lopez was looking for, the director wrote on his Facebook page in a tribute. Lellouche had an instinct “that captured all of what I was feeling and that transformed all of it into notes and melody”, he wrote.

Lellouche was also an all-in football fan — his beloved team, Olympique de Marseille, tweeted that he would “always be among us”. Under Moke and other aliases, he was a piquant commentator on fan sites including the satirical Horsjeu.

Sure of himself but never boastful, Lellouche was “a sharp mind, willingly offbeat and caustic, who knew how to get the most out of life”, Mr Guillaume Duhamel, who was among his circle of friends, told The Associated Press. “He left a mark on a lot of people, and his memory will endure.”

ESTELLE ROUAT

Tributes poured in for Estelle Rouat, 25, who died during the attack at the Bataclan concert hall.

She had recently begun her first regular teaching job and a ceremony was held in her honour at the Gay Lussac middle school where she taught in Colombes, a Paris suburb. Students, parents and teachers were leaving flowers in her memory at the school’s entry, the website of Le Parisien newspaper reported.

Teachers were encouraged to talk to their students about the loss, and counselling was provided. Rouat, a native of Concarneau on France’s Atlantic coast, was hired to teach English. Academic Director Philippe Wuillamier was quoted on the Liberation newspaper’s website as saying: “This young woman was passionate about her new profession.”

A website for parents also announced her death, saying: “It’s with shock and pain that we learn of the brutal loss.”

PIERRE-ANTOINE HENRY

Pierre-Antoine Henry, 36, who died during the attack at the Bataclan, was a communications-systems engineer from a politically active family. His father, Eric Henry, has worked with a member of France’s National Assembly, Mr Serge Bardy, who said on his blog he was “deeply affected” by the family’s loss.

Pierre-Antoine Henry had earned a degree in 2002 from Paris’ L’Ecole de L’Innovation Technologique, the engineering and technology school said on its website.

He and his wife had two small daughters, according to Le Courrier de l’Ouest, a newspaper in western France. A cousin, Ms Amandine Panhard, told Bloomberg News the two “were young professionals, doing well in life”.

“They killed the nicest guy in the world,” she told the news service.

VERONIQUE GEOFFROY DE BOURGIES

Veronique Geoffroy de Bourgies, 54, was out to dinner with friends who were visiting from out of town when attackers began shooting at La Belle Equipe, a restaurant near her home that she and her husband had recently discovered.

Her husband, photographer Stephane de Bourgies, who was in China for work when the attack happened, had lost his parents in an accident three decades ago, and he and his wife had spoken to their children about death. They talked about the importance of letting people know you love them because that love can carry you through when something terrible happens.

The pair had adopted their daughter Melissa, 14, and their son, 12, both from Madagascar. Shortly after Melissa’s adoption they decided to do something to help other children from that country off the coast of south-east Africa. They founded Zazakely Sambatry, a humanitarian organisation whose name means “happy children” in the Malagasy language, according to the organisation’s website.

“She was the one who did everything. I supported her in this project, but she was really the one who threw herself into it,” Mr Stephane de Bourgies told French television station TF1, adding that it was important to his wife to help the children learn and grow up able to support themselves so they would stay and help improve the country.

As soon as he got the call that his wife had been killed, Mr Stephane de Bourgies began the trip home to be with the couple’s children, who were being cared for by the friends who had been with his wife when she died.

“They were doing surprisingly well, almost better than me,” Mr de Bourgies said in the interview with TF1. “I fell apart and it was them who made me feel better.”

Veronique Geoffroy de Bourgies was very funny and had a tremendous energy and strong personality, her husband said.

“If she didn’t like something, she didn’t hesitate to say it,” he told the television station. “But that was a fault that often became a positive trait.”

The couple lived relatively close to the scene of the Charlie Hebdo attack earlier this year, so terrorism wasn’t a foreign notion to them.

“We had talked about it like everyone talks about it,” he said. “We know it happens, but we didn’t imagine it would happen to us.”

CHLOE BOISSINOT

Chloe Boissinot, 25, had stopped in at a Paris restaurant with her boyfriend when the terrorists attacked. He survived; she didn’t.

Boissinot came to Paris two years ago to be with him and began working in a pub, according to the 7 in Poitiers news website. Friends and family poured out their grief on social media.

“Chloe was full of life and health. I want everyone to remember her that way,” her sister Jenny posted on Facebook. Her mother, Babette, wrote parting thoughts to her departed daughter: “You will stay my little one always. You won’t grow old. You won’t get cancer.”

Others were angry and defiant. One family friend wrote to the attackers: “Terrorist, does my freedom of thought bother you? I’m a woman, French, I wear a skirt, put on high heels, drink wine. Look at me: I think, speak, spit my hatred in your eye. I am diversity. I am tolerance. Look at me: you won’t make me tremble.”

At Chateau-Larcher in western France, where Boissinot went to school, residents observed a moment of silence. Writing in a guestbook, according to the news website Francebleu, one friend called Boissinot “a beautiful flower ripped from the ground by terrorism”.

CLAIRE SCESA CAMAX

It was a night out for Claire Scesa Camax, a chance to indulge her love of music by seeing Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan.

When the terrorists struck, the graphic designer and mother of two children was killed. Her husband, Mr Laurent Camax, survived.

Claire Camax, who was in her mid-30s, loved the arts, from drawing and painting to comics and rock music, her husband told Le Courrier des Yvelines, a newspaper in the Paris suburbs.

“She was extremely energetic, joyous, warm,” a multi-talented person and dedicated friend, he told the newspaper.

A graphic-arts school graduate, she started her own design business several years ago, creating websites, logos, ads and more in a clean, sometimes whimsical style. Her clients included Paris’ famed Crazy Horse cabaret, which tweeted its “infinite sadness” about her death.

She and her husband were raising their children, 3 and 7, in Houilles, a Paris suburb. They were, he told Le Courrier des Yvelines, leading “a peaceful, middle-class French life.”

ROMAIN DUNET

Romain Dunet’s interest in teaching had taken him around the world. The 28-year-old was an English teacher at a Paris high school when he was killed at the Bataclan, but he had done a stint helping instruct New Zealand students in French in 2013.

He pursued another passion, music, at open-mic nights in Paris bars and cafes, where he was known as Romain Dunay. Mixing covers and his own material, “he was a natural with creating vocal harmonies, and the effect was always stirring,” a friend from that scene, Mr Riyad Sanford, told The Associated Press. A video that friends put together features him playing uptempo, acoustic pop-rock on guitar and singing about living in a virtual world.

Fellow musicians enjoyed his easygoing, fun-loving attitude as well as his music, Mr Sanford said.

“He had a fabulous sense of humour,’’ he said. “Extremely approachable, he made many friends very quickly.”

During his time in Dunedin, New Zealand, Dunet “formed an incredibly positive relationship” with students, Ms Judith Forbes, the principal of one of the several schools where he was an assistant teacher, told the Otago Daily Times.

A former student, Sashika Hendry, agreed.

“He just really wanted to help everyone,” she told the newspaper, “and make French fun, as well”.

NATHALIE JARDIN

Nathalie Jardin, 31, was the lighting designer for the Bataclan hall rock concert targeted by terrorists. She died doing a job to which she was devoted and for which she was known for her dedication and passion.

Nicknamed Natalight, Jardin was originally from the town of Marcq-en-Baroeul in northern France. She came to Paris to work for a succession of bands. One of them, Les Fatals Picards, wrote an intimate tribute to her on its Facebook site, remembering her love of music and surfing, talent for preparing the punch bowl before concerts, ability to down an entire salad bowl of cut vegetables, and disapproval when they decided to change the set list at the last moment. A friend added that she liked good french fries. Another friend commented on the live entertainment website ampthemag.com: “Wherever you are, I know you’ll make them dance again.”

MAUD SERRAULT

Maud Serrault, 37, of Paris, had just begun married life when she died in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall. Days later, her Facebook site still showed her strolling down a wooded path at a hotel in Germany with her groom in a tuxedo for their June wedding.

She wore a rainbow-coloured tiara and clutched a bouquet. In the other hand, she was holding the train of her wedding gown, covered casually by a denim jacket. Serrault and her husband were together at the concert at the time of the attack, but he managed to flee, according to the hotel trade website Hospitality ON. Serrault was director of marketing and e-commerce for Best Western France.

A native of Paris, she studied marketing and communications at CELSA Paris-Sorbonne.

ALBAN DENUIT

Alban Denuit, 32, born in Marmande, France, artist, who was attending the concert at Bataclan hall. He taught and showed his work in the city of Bordeaux, according to the Sud Ouest news site. The Eponyme Gallery in Bordeaux, which promoted Denuit’s work, issued a statement speaking of its “deep sadness” over the death of this emerging young artist.

GREGORY FOSSE

Gregory Fosse, 28, of Paris, who worked for the D17 television station as a music programmer, died at the Bataclan concert hall doing what he loved best: listening to music. Mr Terry Jee, of Paris, a singer and friend, said Fosse embraced music of many styles. He had given considerable play time to Mr Jee’s song, Peace and Love, which is a call for goodwill and tolerance, and that’s how the two men became friends.

“He wanted people to hear this message of peace,” Mr Jee told The Associated Press. “He wore his heart on his sleeve and was always ready to help others.” Fighting through tears, Mr Jee added, “Now I see that life is unfair.”

Fosse had worked in recent years for the TV station in Boulogne, on the outskirts of Paris. The station put out a statement saying, “We all knew his kindness, his special smile, and his passion for music,” according to the Liberation newspaper. Mayor Rgis Bizeau in Gambais, where Fosse grew up, said the community was “deeply shaken”, according to the toutes les nouvelles news website.

Mr Jee said he has now dedicated Peace and Love — called Vive la Paix in its French version — to his friend.

ANNE AND PIERRE-YVES GUYOMARD

Among the audience at the Bataclan, Anne and Pierre-Yves Guyomard were particularly steeped in music. He was a well-known sound engineer who taught his craft at a technical institute, and she was a former student.

“He was a kind human, super-competent, extremely funny and fun-loving,” singer Leslie Winer told The Associated Press by email. “Peerless” in both the studio and live settings, Pierre-Yves Guyomard, 43, worked with artists including Winer and the French rock band Tanger, said guitarist Christophe Van Huffel, a former Tanger member and a collaborator of Winer’s.

Anne Cornet Guyomard, 29, had been one of her husband’s students before changing careers to paediatric nursing, Mr Van Huffel said in a bio provided to AP. She worked at a child care centre near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the Paris suburb where they lived and were married in May 2013 by Mayor Emmanuel Lamy, according to the French newspaper Le Parisien. He recalled a couple “full of life and hope”.

The two had lived for a time on the Indian Ocean island of Runion, where Anne Guyomard’s relatives told news outlet L’Info they had spent an agonising day and a half wondering about the couple’s fate, calling unanswered phones, and appealing for word of the two via Facebook before being told they had been killed.

Anne was “the daughter I would wish on all parents — one who’s attentive, one who’s full of life”, and she loved children and people in general, brother-in-law Chris Hamer told L’Info.

The last time Ms Winer spoke to Pierre-Yves Guyomard, she said, “he told me they were hoping to have children sometime soon”.

ROMAIN DIDIER AND LAMIA MONDEGUER

Romain Didier and Lamia Mondeguer were celebrating a friend’s birthday at the La Belle Equipe bar when terrorists killed them and 17 others there.

Didier and Mondeguer had been dating for just four months, since her 30th birthday party in July, said her employer, talent agent Mathilde Mayet.

Fun-loving, assertive, lively, funny and very frank, “she really incarnated youth today”, Ms Mayet told The Associated Press in an email.

Mondeguer was in charge of Noma Talents’ work with actors and had worked at the agency for five years, Ms Mayet said. A graduate of l’Ecole suprieure d’tudes cinmatographiques, a Paris film school, Mondeguer was passionate about culture and cinema. She’d made a film that interviewed visitors at an environmentally themed 2009 exhibit that aimed to get at the similarities and differences of people around the world, the Goodplanet foundation wrote on its website.

Didier, 32, had come to Paris from the wine-making community of Sancerre, where residents and the mayor gathered Monday for a moment of silence in his honour, according to local news outlet Le Berry Republicain. In the capital, he studied drama and managed the Little Temple Bar for several years with a big smile, “great energy, great kindness, great jokes, great joy and a warm welcome”, according to a tribute on the bar’s Facebook page.

Some of his free time was spent playing with Crocodiles Rugby, and the team said his “joie de vivre was unequalled” in a post on its Facebook page.

“You knew what the words `courage’ and `unity’ meant,” the team wrote.

MANUEL COLACO DIAS

Manuel Colaco Dias, a 63-year-old Portuguese man who has lived in France for more than 40 years, was the only person who was killed near the Stade de France, where three attackers blew themselves up outside the stadium. Dias was a driver with the French company Regnault Autocars, according to the French newspaper Le Parisien.

His daughter, Ms Sophie Colaco Dias, told The Associated Press that he travelled from his hometown Reims, about 150km away from Paris, with three clients attending the game.

“After dropping them off, he gave a call to my mother and told her he preferred to stay outside instead of buying a ticket for the match so he could speak with her on the phone,” she recalled. “But my mum was already speaking with me on another line. She told my father that she would call him back. After that, she constantly reached his voicemail”. AP