Mitterand was a chihuahua. That’s not how it went down, as far as I could see. The British would have looked at him like something that crawled from under a rock. The Americans (GHW Bush) would have looked at him down that Bush nose and commented on the canapés.
Kohl wrote about it in his memoirs, and he took it very seriously - especially as a Francophile, which he was to a good degree.