FRENCH KISSING.(Fremch Pres. Jacques Chirac kisses Laura Bush's hand)

The other morning dawned for the bleary-eyed average New York newspaper reader with a somewhat startling pair of stop-motion photographs. The front page of the Post showed Laura Bush having her hand bussed by Jacques Chirac, the President of France, during her trip to Paris, and the look on her face--or, rather, the absence of any look on her face--was, as they used to say, a study. "laura braves weasel kiss!" ran the headline. On the front page of the Times was a photo taken just seconds later. Mrs. Bush's face was still a study, but this time it conveyed a certain goofy and winning bafflement, as if she were thinking, What's he doing down there? rather than, How dare he?

The weird thing about this is that hand kissing isn't really much of a French manner or affectation. A woman who has lived in France off and on for a decade says that she is sure that the only two men who ever kissed her hand were a radically pro-American philosopher and Oscar de la Renta, and he isn't even French. (The Italians are the hand kissers, if anyone is, while "kissing of hands" is the British term of art for becoming Prime Minister.) What the French actually go in for, in a big, confusing way, is double-cheek kissing--this one, then that one--a practice that has, over the years, left many a Texan woman turning awkwardly away from a welcoming Frenchman and his kiss just when she ought to have been readying her left cheek for the retour. A photograph of Mrs. Bush ducking the double or even triple peck (this one, that one, this one again), like Sugar Ray Robinson ducking a combination punch, would have been infinitely more characteristic.

It was evident to any veteran of French kissing that Chirac had been so eager to bridge the gap between the two countries that he was acting like a French guy for Mrs. Bush's benefit. That is, he was acting like what he imagined her idea of a French guy was--trying to play down the perfidy by acting gallant, not knowing that this kind of gallantry is exactly what we mean by perfidy. The essential sadness of the moment was doubled for anyone who knows that, of all the Presidents in the history of the French Republic, Chirac is by nature and nurture the most American--a man who boasts endlessly about the summer he spent when he was twenty years old studying at Harvard and working as a soda jerk at Howard Johnson and courting a Southern sweetheart who called him "honey chile." He gave Laura Bush the full Charles Boyer treatment because he thought that it might suit the part and lift the occasion.

After all, for the past few months or so Chirac and his foreign minister, Dominique de ...