By nearly any measure and all accounts, France pulled it off.
From the gourmet tofu sandwiches to the subtle handling of negotiations compared by one analyst to a 12-dimensional Rubik's Cube, the French hosts of the UN climate conference have been showered with praise.
"It's the most skillful diplomacy I've seen in the more than two decades that I've been going to this kind of meetings," former US vice president Al Gore told AFP.
After the fiasco of Copenhagen -- which ended with some 115 world leaders scrambling overnight to save face and cobble together a political accord -- hosting the next critical climate conference was a big risk.
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Getting virtually all the world's nations to agree on transforming the energy system underlying the world economy was bound to be tricky.
But the French did not have to push hard for the assignment. "We were chosen, but I must point out that we were the only candidate," Fabius has said more than once.
But as the conference loomed he got personally involved.
Hollande spoke frequently and forcefully on the need to beat back the threat of climate change, and focused especially on the plight of poor and vulnerable nations, underlying the need for hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and yen in climate finance.
Two years ahead of the rendezvous, Fabius started to prepare the stage.
"I mobilised our diplomatic network, started organising international meetings, and put together my team," he told AFP in his windowless office at the sprawling conference centre on the outskirts of Paris.
Days before the conference opened, Fabius made rapid-fire pitstops in India, Brazil and South Africa -- all crucial for success.
The cornerstone of Fabius' team was a diminutive, silver-haired ex-professor partial to Converse sneakers.
Appointed France's top negotiator, Laurence Tubiana clocked tens of thousands of kilometres in the run up to the COP21 crisscrossing the globe to charm, coax, and cajole key actors in the climate drama.