EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — The big handshake between the trans-Atlantic odd couple, President Bush and President Jacques Chirac of France, finally happened here this hot and muggy Sunday afternoon on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was, in the end, both a dramatic letdown and a diplomatic success: decorous, accompanied by polite chatter, but with no glimpse into the feelings of two emotional men.
What was far more telling was watching Bush on a flower-filled terrace of the 19th-century Hotel Royal — as Chirac stayed by his side — working the room of fellow global power brokers.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, who supported Bush on Iraq, got a big neck squeeze. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, who in late May spent two hours lounging around the pool with Bush at his Texas ranch (and who supported him on Iraq), got an arm around the back. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the president's closest ally on Iraq, got a swinging handshake, as if he were one of Bush's Yale fraternity brothers.
The annual summit is really a messy family reunion, one of those long-scheduled ones that everyone is forced to attend, that this year falls after one of the biggest fights in decades. The even G8 lineup of four against four adds to the tension. The United States, Britain, Italy and Japan supported the war; France, Germany, Russia and Canada did not.
So on Sunday in this sleepy, not terribly fashionable resort town of spas, a big casino and the natural spring water bearing its name, nobody missed the fact that Bush's friends got the Texas treatment and that Chirac, in his first face-to-face encounter with the American president since Iraq, got something less.
In Evian, body language was all.
"How much thought has been given to the handshake with President Chirac?" a White House correspondent asked a senior administration official who was briefing reporters en route to France on Sunday morning on Air Force One.
"None," the official crisply replied, to laughter. "No, the president is going to do what the president does — he's a friendly person, he's going to, I'm sure, shake President Chirac's hand, and we're looking forward to seeing him. He had an encounter with Chancellor Schroeder last night; they shook hands."
The reporter persisted, "You know it's customary to kiss on both cheeks, right?"
"That's only if you are French, I think," the official replied. "We don't do that in the United States. In Texas they don't do that."
A larger question was how the inhabitants of Evian were reacting to the presence of Bush, who was nestled into the hillside in a suite at the Hotel Royal, originally built for the pleasure of King Edward VII. The consensus, at least among the few natives who could be found along the town's lakeside promenade, was that they did not like the American president and they liked the war even less, but they were nonetheless pleased he was here.
"I would be very happy to see him somewhere," said Julienne Frederique, 35, who works as a clerk in a local supermarket. "Nothing ever happens here, so it's very exciting for me."
Even less seemed to be happening Sunday evening, when the promenade, which looks out toward the Swiss shore and Lausanne, was nearly deserted of evening strollers. People had fled because of a long holiday weekend and the headaches of having the world's leaders descend on the town, leaving behind a strange quiet. The lake was serene — fishing, swimming and boating had been banned for security reasons for the duration of the meeting — as the French Alps overhead turned blue in the dusk. At the Casino Evian, the tables were silent.
"There is nobody here — it's a dead town," said Pierre Vigliano, 60, a hotel builder and financier who was out walking near his home. As for Bush, he said, "it's not normal that he went to war against Iraq. He didn't have a good reason to go to war. And President Chirac thinks the same."
Nonetheless, Vigliano said, the war turned out all right. "This compensates for my bad opinion," he said. Having Bush just up at the Hotel Royal, he said, made him "very proud."
On Sunday, Chirac said that his conversations with Bush were "positive" and that he did not feel the slightest "discomfort" — even though Bush had implicitly criticized him as recently as the day before, when Bush said in a speech in Krakow, Poland, that "this is no time to stir up divisions in a great alliance."
None of that split was evident on Sunday, as Chirac stood with Bush at the Hotel Royal and prepared for a half-hour meeting with him on Monday. At the family reunion in Evian, everyone, for now, is on the best behavior.