The French prime minister, M. Raffarin, has restored the reputation for courage of Frenchmen everywhere: He visited Peking at the height of the SARS epidemic, taking a personal risk that even warriors such as Messrs. Blair and Cheney declined to take, preferring to postpone their scheduled visits till healthier times. “This psychosis irritates me,” said Raffarin before his departure; he wasn’t letting a tiny virus get in the way of large orders for Airbus.
Not that the risk he was taking (and that Blair and Cheney were avoiding) was very great. As Le Figaro pointed out, he was staying only 30 hours, and would never leave his grand hotel except togotoa scaled-down banquet attended by a few high-ups. The Chinese took care to disinfect every inch of ground he traversed, even if that disinfecting more resembled a medieval warding-off of the plague by means of vinegar, herbs, and incense than it did a scientific medical procedure.
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