Dear TIME-Reader:

ONE day when London Bureau Chief Andre Laguerre was a Free French poilu on sentry duty at General Charles de Gaulle's London headquarters during the Battle of Britain, he dropped a note in the general's Suggestion Box. The note told how Free French press relations could be improved. De Gaulle sent for Laguerre and asked if he could improve them. "Oui, mon general," said Laguerre. Thus he became press officer for the Free French and, when the war ended, head of the press department of the new French government. His immediate superior and last boss before he joined our staff early in 1946 was Minister of Information Andre Malraux.

In time, Malraux gave up active politics and turned literary recluse in his Paris apartment. Meanwhile, Laguerre became our Paris bureau chief, and four years later moved to London. When the editors wanted someone to interview the almost inaccessible Malraux for this week's cover story, they asked Laguerre to try to see his old boss. During three visits, he spent five hours with Malraux, the last three checking and double-checking what the great French intellectual had said during the first two hours. It was the first major interview Malraux has given in ten years.

THE Malraux story was written by Associate Editor A. T. Baker. The portrait was painted by Russian born, Brooklyn-reared Ben Shahn. It is the second work by a new cover artist to appear on TIME in the last few months; Aaron Bohrod did the Governor Knight cover for the May 30 issue. Shahn, who started out as a lithographer, first won success with his series of beautiful but bitter watercolors protesting the 1927 execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. As a young "social realist," he had a reputation for proletarian-protest painting; but a 25-year retrospective showing of his works early this year in Manhattan made clear that time had mellowed his work as well as himself. Today, he is regarded as one of the world's top contemporary painters.

FROM another intellectual front, I was happy to hear this week the results of a referendum among French youth conducted by Paris-Presse, an afternoon newspaper in the French capital, on our article, France, the Younger Generation (TIME, May 30), written by Correspondent Stanley Karnow. Said Paris-Presse of the results: "If Karnow was presenting this article to a jury of youth for his baccalaureate, he would have obtained the grade assez bien [much better than passing]." The paper quoted Jacques Auberger, Secretary General of the Paris Students' Federation, as saying: "It is manifest that the article . . . reflects quite perfectly the essence of the situation of French youth."

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