Paris Scrambles to Prepare for Sought-After Summit : Diplomacy: Paint is wet, computers are untested, protests have strained the city--but it’s show time.

When President Bush and the 33 other world leaders arrive at the freshly renovated Kleber Conference Center in Paris on Monday for what has been advertised as the End-of-the-Cold-War Summit, they should be careful not to touch the woodwork.

The paint is likely to be wet.

Likewise, chauffeurs in the 34 separate motorcades that will carry Bush and his fellow VIPs to a gala evening of ballet and haute cuisine at the Versailles Palace on Tuesday are advised to leave a little early.

The Paris police are not sure that a sophisticated, computerized tracking system--designed to follow the motorcades as they negotiate the maze of streets leading from the French capital to suburban Versailles--will work. It is being plugged in for the first time Sunday.

The summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is the political event of the year that France wanted desperately to host. “We wanted to give it a French brand name,” quipped Foreign Ministry spokesman Hadelin de Latour du Pin. “A summit ‘Made in Paris.’ ”

But is Paris ready? The summit is being held a month earlier than the French originally planned. Preparations have been delayed by ongoing, occasionally violent, student and trade union demonstrations. Only days before the big meeting, which historians have compared to the epoch-ending Congress of Vienna in 1813-14, the French are racing to get the city ready for their official guests and 7,000 journalists.

Officials hope they can pull off another glittering success like the enormous celebration in the summer of 1989 marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution. However, confusion and pre-party jitters have the capital in a bad mood.

“I have been forced to stuff my ears with cotton balls so I can sleep,” complained Denise Laplane, 79, who lives directly across the street from the Kleber Center conference site in the fashionable Etoile quarter of Paris. “For 10 days they have been working on the building day and night. The noise is terrible, and the spotlights glare through our windows. Nobody has even bothered to tell me what this is all about.”

Originally, the French planned to host the summit later, in December, when the spacious UNESCO Conference Center in Paris would be available.

But pushed by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who at the time wanted to have an earlier CSCE summit so that other European countries could collectively endorse the reunification of Germany, CSCE members opted for a November meeting.

The UNESCO center was booked by scholars somberly celebrating the centenary of the birth of Charles de Gaulle. In perfect Gaullist fashion, they refused to give up the space, forcing French summit organizers to look elsewhere. Finally, they came up with the costly idea of expanding the Kleber Center, which was the historic site of the Vietnam peace talks and other meetings but is much too small to host a summit of this scale.

In only two months the organizers built a 6,000-square-foot meeting room that juts into the broad avenue in front of the old Kleber building. In the middle of the huge room they installed a massive, hexagonal white-pine table, 90 feet long and surrounded by 68 white leather armchairs for the national leaders and their foreign ministers.

To make room for the conference hall and adjoining VIP reception center, architects closed and covered an adjacent side street. Special care was taken to do all the construction without touching the chestnut and sycamore trees that bordered the street, Avenue des Portugais. As a result, delegates must be careful not to bump into tree trunks that stand in the center of some of the rooms.

When the three-day conference is over, the $26-million temporary annex will be torn down.

As late as Friday afternoon, workers were still rushing to complete the work. Broad-shouldered carpenters swaggered through a Napoleon III ballroom swinging planks of wood dangerously close to priceless chandeliers. Floors and staircases still lacked carpeting. Some plumbing and light fixtures had still not been installed. The center reeked of wet paint and carpet glue.

Because of the demonstrations by lycee students calling for reforms in the secondary school system, the summit preparations have been conducted in a warlike atmosphere, with the chants of demonstrators and the klaxons of police vehicles continually in the background.

Earlier in the week, student demonstrations had erupted into some of the worst violence seen in the city since the university student movement of 1968. Again on Friday the students demonstrated, resulting in numerous arrests and injuries.

But even without the student protests, the CSCE summit--or “the Paris summit,” as the French prefer to label it--is an unprecedented nightmare of logistics, security and protocol.

Ten thousand Paris police and French gendarmes have been mobilized for the meeting. But officials worry that might not be enough. At any one time, they say, there could be as many as 100 motorcades coursing through the streets, including those of the national leaders, spouses and foreign ministers.

“It is going to be a ballet of motorcades,” said Police Commissioner Eric Le Douaron, commander of a high-tech underground police command center located two stories under Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris.

The computerized command center features a giant screen, built by Greyhawk Systems Inc., a California firm headquartered in Milpitas, that theoretically will enable the police to track the motorcades and monitor sensitive locations in the city. The police have identified more than 200 American buildings and residences in Paris as potential targets.

Remote cameras have been positioned around the city, allowing the police to zoom in on hot spots.

“It is a synthesis of computers, cartography and video,” said Le Douaron, “the only one of its kind in the world.” Among other features, the system contains maps of underground plumbing lines and building blueprints that can be instantly flashed on the screen in the event of trouble, so that police can chart possible escape or rescue routes.

The only problem is that, because the screen was only recently installed, it has never been tested. However, Le Douaron said he is confident that it will work Sunday.

On the protocol side, the main problem is caused by the egalitarian format of the CSCE. Every country, ranging from the minuscule republic of San Marino to the immense Soviet Union, is treated on an equal basis. As a result, the huge delegations from the larger countries found themselves assigned ridiculously small work spaces.

“There are a lot of bruised feelings among the larger delegations,” admitted De Latour du Pin.

Then there is the question of what to do with the countries and nations that desperately want to be part of the summit but are not. Albania, as an observer to the CSCE, has been given a little space of its own at the side of the main table. But French officials are at a loss about what to do with the “foreign ministers” of the Soviet Baltic republics of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, who showed up Friday and demanded seats.

Meanwhile, another unanticipated political dimension has been added to the summit: The prime ministers of two of the key countries, Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Michel Rocard of France, face votes that could cost them their jobs while the summit is in session.

Rocard has his challenge Monday at the French National Assembly when his minority Socialist government will be tested with a “vote of censure” over a proposal to reform Social Security financing. If he fails to find the necessary votes, he could be forced to resign.

And Thatcher faces a critical test of her leadership on Tuesday when her Conservative Party votes in London to decide whether she or former Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine should head the party. If Heseltine wins, Thatcher must resign as her government’s leader.

“It is not inconceivable that halfway through the summit meeting she could no longer be prime minister,” a British Embassy spokesman noted. President Bush is scheduled to have breakfast with Thatcher on Monday morning.

The American President, who left Washington on Friday evening, is scheduled to arrive in Paris on Sunday evening after stops in Czechoslovakia and Germany. After the Paris summit, he will travel to the Middle East, to meet with officials and visit American troops in Saudi Arabia and then stop in Egypt before returning to Washington late in the week.

Upon arriving in Paris, Bush is scheduled to have dinner with President Francois Mitterrand on Sunday night at the Elysee Palace. On Tuesday morning he is expected to have breakfast with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

In keeping with the French tradition of mixing politics with the palate, the summit will feature two elaborate meals, a luncheon banquet Monday at the Elysee Palace and a gala evening of ballet, followed by a spectacular dinner at the Versailles Palace, 20 miles west of Paris.

The 200 guests will be treated to three ballet works performed by the Paris Opera Ballet at Versailles. The opera program has been announced: “Napoli” by Danish composer August Bournonville, a pas de deux by Tchaikovsky and “Don Quixote” by French composer Marius Petipa.

However, the menu at the banquet is being treated as a state secret.

“We never release the menu in advance,” said Elysee spokeswoman Muriel de Pierrebourg. “I can only tell you what I had for lunch: ham sandwich with butter and pickles.”