Sober Mood Tempers Anticipated Gaiety : Paris summit: Many distracted by concerns over gulf, economies and uncertainties at home.

For a summit that started out with such joyful expectations, the 34-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe moved through its three-day agenda in a surprisingly melancholy mood.

Except for a few festive moments, such as the gala banquet for 200 Tuesday night at the Versailles Palace, the celebration of the end of the Cold War never really warmed up. Preoccupation with the tense situation in the Persian Gulf and concern over the disintegrating economies of Eastern Europe dogged the meeting. Anxiety about the uncertain future in the Soviet Union lurked behind the gilded facade.

The leaders were good sports, patiently enduring hours of speeches by fellow delegates from such places as Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Holy See and attending constant meals and receptions laid out by their French hosts.

But one image, filmed by a French television crew at the Versailles gala, seemed to capture the distracted mood: President Bush, looking considerably more restive than festive, nervously checking and rechecking his watch as ballet dancers performed on the stage of the Royal Opera.

The thoughts of the world leaders and the several thousand journalists gathered in the French capital seemed focused on other events. At a post-summit news conference called by French President Francois Mitterrand on Wednesday evening, for example, only six of the 19 questions concerned the historic meeting of European and North American leaders. Most focused on the gulf and the likelihood of war.

The French press was quick to pan the conference, which had been envisioned by many as the kind of epoch-ending event that schoolchildren would someday have to memorize, along with the Battle of Hastings and the Congress of Vienna.

“The Heart Was Never Really in the Party,” headlined a story reviewing the summit in Le Monde, the French newspaper favored by intellectuals and policy-makers.

“Excruciatingly Boring,” summarized the irreverent French weekly Canard Enchaine.

Somehow the meeting called to herald “a new era in democracy, peace and unity” had turned into un triste sommet-- a sad summit.

“The fete was a little bit sad,” concluded Le Monde’s Claire Trean.

The main villain was the cumbersome summit process itself--34 countries that had to meet and draft a document they could all salute in Paris--was hopelessly outpaced by the rapidly changing world.

Since Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev first proposed the CSCE summit meeting two years ago, all the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, except for Albania, had been toppled; Germany had been reunited, and Gorbachev’s own Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in danger of unraveling.

“With events flying around so fast in the world,” one American diplomat said, “I’m not sure that anything that happened here will have any lasting power.”

In addition, a number of leaders had come to Paris burdened with problems back home.

Gorbachev came to Paris under attack at home and under pressure abroad, mainly from Bush, to join the group of nations ready to go to war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, who normally enjoys jousting with the French on their home turf, was subdued by a war within her Conservative Party that may cost her the prime minister’s post that she has held for 11 years.

Even President Mitterrand, 73, a politician in the sunset of his career who clearly viewed the summit as a chance to bring France back to prominence on the world stage, was pestered by domestic problems at the meeting he had sought aggressively since last winter, when he met with Gorbachev in Kiev.

All over France, high school students had been demonstrating for weeks about deteriorating conditions in their lycees. On Monday night, Prime Minister Michel Rocard--like Mitterrand a member of the Socialist Party--narrowly escaped a vote in the National Assembly that would have forced him to resign.

Compared to some of their predecessors, the leaders were a decidedly bland lot: Nowhere among the three dozen aging men and women gathered about the coffin-shaped conference table at the Kleber Center was anyone with the grandeur of Charles de Gaulle or the animal force of the table-pounding Nikita S. Khrushchev.

As a result, most of the reporters gathered at the summit quickly gave up on it for news, concentrating instead on such side issues as Gorbachev’s ambiguous statements about the desirability of using military force in the gulf.

For example, the accident in which Bush’s driver slammed into a wall and destroyed the door handle of the limousine almost got more attention than Bush’s 15-minute speech at the conference.

French reporters delightedly gobbled up a White House reporting-pool item that compared the ornately uniformed Garde Republicaine, which guards the Elysee Palace, with characters in a Madonna music video.

Even First Lady Barbara Bush’s concern about wearing pants to Thanksgiving dinner with American troops in Saudi Arabia managed to get ink.

In the age of television sound bites, the ancient art of summitry had fallen on hard times. “This wasn’t a summit,” grumbled one newspaper columnist. “This was a Disneylandish holiday for heads of state.”

Not everyone, however, was willing to write off the three days of summit meetings as a non-event.

“Given the gulf crisis and the sense of gloom coming from Eastern Europe these days,” French political analyst Dominique Moisi said, “the summit achieved about as much as one could hope.

“True, we have not created a new institution in full bloom that would take care of all the problems in Europe: the disintegration of the Soviet empire; the collapse of the economies of Eastern Europe, and the prospect of huge migrations of Eastern Europeans. The CSCE is not equipped for these things.

“What is not disappointing is that we have declared an end to the Cold War,” he added. “The Summit of Paris closed out a period of history, rather than opening up a new one.”