Last week at the Hotel Continental, where the French Information Ministry is now installed, a bureaucratic mishap befell New Minister of Information Louis Frossard. He was not let into his own Ministry until the meticulous Republican Guard officer on duty, who from the first had recognized M. Frossard, wrote him out a temporary laissez passer for that day only, warned the Minister that he would not be admitted again unless he carried a proper pass bearing his photograph, stamped and signed.
Supple, ambitious Louis Frossard has been a Socialist, a Communist, then got a Cabinet job under Rightist Premier Pierre ("The Deal") Laval, today owns a newspaper called La Justice. Virtually every Paris paper reported he had taken as his office the Continental's super-ornate "Imperial Suite," in which lived for 30 years Eugenie, last Empress of the French —and after Eugenie, none except royal or titled guests until an exception was made for Admiral Byrd—but M. Frossard insisted he had not moved into Eugenie's rooms "because memories would stop me from sleeping." The onetime Communist last week not only undid a good deal of the Ministry's red tape, but relaxed French press censorship.
On the strength of the new Ministry's liberalization, Paris papers went to town on the Allies' subject-of-the-week: What About Russia? In striking contrast to the ostrich-like actions of the British Press, the Liberal L'Oeuvre debated openly with Rightist papers whether France should break with "Germany's friend" the Soviet Union while they were at the same time urging closer ties with "Germany's friend" Fascist Italy. It looked to L'Oeuvre as though the French Rightists were picking their foreign friends and foes along suspiciously ideological lines. Socialist ex-Premier Leon Blum's Le Populaire said the "proper attitude" was that outlined last month by British Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax: the Allies must not be swayed from their main purpose of war with Germany, but must not be unprepared if that leads to war with Russia. Le Temps swept debate aside, came out flatly for a new and stiffer attitude toward the U. S. S. R. "The friend of our enemies, Russia, is our enemy, whether we wish it or not. She should be treated as such. Why should we put up any longer with a fiction?"
Suritz Non Grata. Nonfiction, but in some spots very tantalizing melodrama, was the affaire Suritz, which did nothing to detract from Allied-Russian tension. Since 1919 bulging, bearded Jacob Suritz has been No. 1 Soviet diplomat, with a brilliant record in Afghanistan, Turkey, Germany and League of Nations wrangles. He was for years the only Jew in Germany permitted to keep Aryan housemaids —by personal dispensation of the Führer. Ambassador Suritz was not "purged" when his intimate friend Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff fell from Joseph Stalin's favor, but few Bolsheviks close to a fallen bigwig survive for long. Last week the Moscow radio significantly broke a story that began the middle of last month when Edouard Daladier, then French Premier, sent his Moscow Chargé d'Affaíres around to ask Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov about a not only objectionable but very queer telegram handed in at Paris for transmission to Moscow.