Books: The Flight of the King

HOLY WEEK (541 pp.)—Louis Aragon —Putnam ($5.75).

France breeds intellectuals the way Australia breeds tennis players—and follows their careers with almost equal attention. "The French tend to think of the Russian Revolution as a step in the intellectual development of André Gide," cracked British Historian D. W. Brogan recently, "and of the Chinese Revolution as an incident in the literary career of André Malraux."

By this reckoning, Communism and the Resistance movement were the major episodes in the education of France's brilliant Poet-Essayist-Novelist Louis Aragon, 63. Aragon was always in revolt; before he became...