Chirac looked presidential in a dark suit. Mawurndjul, 54, who painted the bookshop ceiling and a large corner column, was in a pin-striped jacket, orange T-shirt and stovepipe black jeans, with a pair of specially bought boots.
"This is one of the masterpieces of the museum," the President told the painter from Maningrida in Arnhem Land, pointing to the column painted in a crosshatch of black, white, yellow and ochre red. He beckoned to his wife, Bernadette, and the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan: "Come and meet the master."
"Good government, that French Government, they understand culture," Mawurndjul later told Apolline Kohen, a Frenchwoman who runs Maningrida's arts and culture centre and speaks the artist's language. Thus a culture of some 2000 years got the thumbs-up from a vastly older one.
It was a week like no other for Aboriginal art in Paris. Two exhibitions of Aboriginal art opened, one a show of desert art from the Gabrielle Pizzi collection, displayed at the Australian embassy. Nearby, the Quai Branly featured the work of eight Aboriginal artists who had been invited to adorn the museum's entrance and front building.
There are another 107 Aboriginal artworks and artefacts in the permanent collection of 3500 pieces from around the world. In his speech, Chirac described the Aboriginal contribution to the museum he first dreamed up 10 years ago as "truly extraordinary".
It was Chirac's version of Paul Keating's 1992 Redfern address. The museum paid homage to the world's "humiliated, despised" and sometimes destroyed indigenous peoples, he said. Its art showed that all cultures, like all peoples, were of equal value. With the opening, Chirac joined earlier presidents - Georges Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterand - in building a grand museum in Paris. Le Monde said the museum was "perhaps the only positive legacy Monsieur Chirac leaves us after 12 years at the Elysee [presidential] Palace".
One of Chirac's top aides says his love of indigenous art goes back to his childhood and frequent visits to the Musee national des Arts asiatiques-Guimet, a museum of Asian art in Paris. The aide says that when discussion is slow at international summits and Chirac turns to his files, often what he is looking at is not some important communique but a review of African or Pacific art.
But there is politics mixed with the passion. Quai Branly is France's declaration that it has moved beyond its colonial past. It also expresses the deep distaste of Chirac and France for globalisation - the fear that globalisation (and its perceived surrogate, Americanisation) destroys cultures by making them the same.
Chirac believes a masterpiece from Africa or Oceania can have the same value as a Venus de Milo, the aide says. "That is why you put them in the centre of Paris, at the same level as any other form of art."
Much, then, is riding on the museum, and it was bound to be a dramatic week.
On Monday France's leading architect, the shaven-headed Jean Nouvel, toured his buildings dressed in black, looking every inch the architectural prince of Paris. He scoffed at an argument in The Times that if the indigenous art was so good it should be put in the Louvre, not isolated in an "ethnic art" museum. What, he retorted, to be killed by the "art machine" in a museum it takes three months to visit? Unlike the Louvre, little museums don't pretend "you can have 10,000 emotions in one day".
It was Nouvel who asked that Aboriginal artists provide designs for the front building. In so doing, he started a five-year project so complex it has provoked huge tensions between the French and Australian camps - though not, apparently, involving the artists themselves.
One problem was translating designs onto walls and ceilings in a way that honoured the intentions of their Aboriginal creators. As Quai Branly opened, artisans had not finished at least one piece, a wall painting designed by an 84-year-old East Kimberley law man, Paddy Bedford. The work is in a corridor used only by museum staff and, apart from a glimpse afforded from the street, is largely invisible to the public - a seeming waste of work by an artist of Bedford's standing. Four of the eight works are in administrative and, again, publicly inaccessible areas of the museum. Did Australia spend $1 million on a piece of French interior decor?
An ingenious system of windows and mirrors largely solves the problem. All bar Bedford's work can be easily seen from the street. At night, with the lights on, Quai Branly becomes a blazing exhibition of Aboriginal art.
This is how the museum can educate people, says a leading Parisian art dealer, Stephane Jacob. "Because people will pass by the building, there are going to be questions. It's a marvellous opportunity to create interest."
But Jacob would like to see more prominent signage in the street, to better explain the works.
He thinks the eight artists, while inevitably not representative of allAboriginal art, have been chosen well. Mawurndjul, Gulumbu Yunupingu and Ningura Napurrula, in particular, are "fantastic examples of the modernity" of traditional Aboriginal art.
Mawurndjul worked extensively on his project himself. In January he worked in sub-zero temperatures in the unheated building, painting the ceiling and column in his rarrk patterning, a way of crosshatching in four colours that "tells people which clan you come from, like an identity card", Kohen says. Like the others, he was paid just $20,000 for the work but says he feels the project and exposure were worth it.
Mawurndjul and the rest of theAboriginal contingent seemed to be having a ball in Paris. "For John it's party time, you know?" Kohen says. "He goes from one celebration to another, he is respected, people don't stare in the street. When I walk with him in Sydney people stare at him in disgust. I'm sorry to say that but it's true."
Yunupingu, 60, only began painting a few years ago after having a dream about stars, which tell stories to Yolngu people. She cried as she spoke publicly about her ceiling of painted stars on Monday. "This building is a bridge between Australia and France," she said. "Your stars are like ours. It has made me feel like home."