Albright pleased the French by inviting President Jacques Chirac "to put his shoulder to the wheel" in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. She also succeeded without ruffling French feathers in sidetracking a proposal for a five-power summit to allay Russian concerns over NATO's projected expansion eastward.
"We've had some ups and downs, why not have an up period?" a pleased French Prime Minister Alain Juppe told Albright at the end of their meeting.
And Foreign Minister Herve de Charette, who like Juppe has had some rough times with the first Clinton administration, was velvet smooth during a joint news conference with Albright at the Quai d'Orsay. "We did everything to dispel the impression there are clouds in the relationship," he said.
Chirac greeted Albright with a kiss on each cheek, and de Charette went one-up, kissing the U.S. secretary of state five times, according to State Department spokesperson Nicholas Burns, four times on the cheek and once on the hand.
"Our relationship is very solid and positive," Albright said.
Burns said the United States and France had found common ground on urging reforms in Zaire and wanting neighboring countries to steer clear of a rebellion in the eastern part of the African county.
Only a year ago, the French were grumbling that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher's trip to Africa was an election ploy. French officials suggested they had a special expertise that the United States should respect.
And in the Middle East, de Charette complicated Christopher's drive to halt cross-border attacks between Israel and Lebanon by riding his own diplomatic shuttle and advising the Arabs to hold out for better terms.
On his last trip to Paris in November, Christopher was presented with five French novels by de Charette, who told him he would have a chance to improve his French in retirement.
While signaling along with the French the onset of better relations, Albright checked reports from Beijing that Deng Xiao-ping, architect of China's economic modernization, was near death. She said she could not corroborate the reports.
And she monitored what she described as very serious concern about tensions on the Korean peninsula, authorizing spokesman Burns to say a resumption of food aid to North Korea would be announced within a few days.
After delivering about $6.1 million worth, food shipments were halted when a North Korean submarine ventured into South Korean waters last September.
In Seoul, South Korea authorities said the country would send food aid and nuclear technicians to North Korea despite tension with its communist rival over the shooting of one defector and a standoff involving another.
The one apparent uneasy moment occurred earlier in Bonn when German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel hotly rejected any suggestion the Church of Scientology was being singled out as Jews had been in Germany early in the Nazi period.
"We perceive Scientology not as a religion but as a profit-making organization," he said. "Scientologists are not persecuted."
Albright, at a joint news conference, said it was "historically inaccurate and totally distasteful" to draw parallels between the Scientologists and Germany's Nazi past. She registered the United States' concerns during an hourlong meeting with Kinkel.
Germany's treatment of Scientologists was mildly criticized last month in the State Department's annual human rights report, saying the church had "come under increasing scrutiny by both federal and state officials" in Germany.
On the main business at hand, forging a united approach on NATO's absorption beginning this summer of Central and Eastern European countries, Albright declared triumphantly: "We are on the road to Madrid."
She referred to the NATO summit meeting planned in the Spanish capital for July 7-8 in which invitations will be issued, probably to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Kinkel voiced Germany's support for a French proposal that the four biggest NATO countries - the United States, Britain, France and Germany - meet with Russia in April on ways to allay Russia's concerns with the alliance's expansion eastward.
"We have to do everything we can to make it easy for Russia to accept NATO enlargement," he said.
AP PHOTO
French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette welcomes Secretary of State Madeline Albright as she arrives at the Elysees Palace to meet President Jacques Chirac.