President Jacques Chirac had waited all year for this moment. Even before Mr Vladimir Putin was elected President of the Russian Federation last March 26th, the French leader asked him to come to Paris.
It took 10 months of rejected invitations to bring the black Zil limousines roaring into the courtyard of the Elysee yesterday, for Mr Putin to sit beside Mr Chirac on the podium of the Salle de Fetes, surveying the audience with his cold blue eyes.
In the meantime, Mr Putin met President Clinton three times and paid friendly official visits to London and Berlin. Having served as a KGB officer in the former East Germany, he speaks German fluently and gets along particularly well with the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder. But when Mr Chirac attempted to meet the Russian President at the G8 summit in Japan last summer, Mr Putin was too busy.
The war in Chechnya - and France's vigorous condemnation of Russian atrocities there - caused the prolonged chill between Paris and Moscow. Mr Putin couldn't forgive France for advocating symbolic EU sanctions at the Helsinki summit. And he didn't like Mr Chirac's letter of congratulations on his election, wishing him "the authority necessary to ensure a return to peace throughout Russian territory".
Moscow considered French press reports on the Chechen conflict "hysterical" and called it "scandalous" that a representative of the Chechen President, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, was received at the National Assembly.
A small group of intellectuals staged a protest against Mr Putin's visit in the rain outside the Pompidou Centre last night, but the Elysee was at pains not to offend him. "It is up to us to write a new page in Franco-Russian relations", Mr Chirac said in his toast to Vladimir and Lud mila Putin at a gala dinner.
The French President's advisers played up one specific sentence in the four-page joint EURussia declaration. "Concerning Chechnya, we agreed on the necessity and the urgency of seeking a political solution while respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation", it said. "A year ago the Russians wouldn't even discuss this", one of Mr Chirac's aides said.
Mr Putin's "concession" in accepting the phrase will be of no comfort to tens of thousands of Chechen refugees in Georgia and Ingushetia. Up to 180,000 former residents of Grozny are living without water or electricity and little food in ruins on the outskirts of their capital, which was razed by the Russian army.
At his press conference with Mr Chirac and the President of the EU Commission, Mr Putin denied that the war continues in Chechnya, an assertion angrily disputed by the French doctors' groups MSF and MDM.
"The conflict was brought about and provoked by religious fanatics and fundamentalists," the Russian President claimed. "Are we being denied the right to self-defence? We are doing everything we can to make a distinction between those who misguidedly thought they were fighting for independence and the terrorist criminals and murderers . . . We are absolutely against those who kidnap, behead and mutilate their victims, who hold them for ransom, who carry out bomb explosions."
In a one-page text published by Le Monde, the Chechen leader, Mr Maskhadov, accused Russian troops of precisely the same crimes listed by Mr Putin.
Russia was "ready to contribute to energy security for Europeans for the long term," Mr Putin said. The Russian Federation already provides 20 per cent of the gas and 16 per cent of the petrol consumed in the EU. Mr Chirac, Mr Prodi and Mr Putin discussed a plan to double that amount over the next two decades, involving billions of euros in European investment.
