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> In picking a new Minister of Information, Reynaud went Winston Churchill's naming of Publisher Lord Beaverbrook to a nonjournalistic ministry one better. He chose Jean Prouvost, 55, owner-editor of Paris-soir (Europe's biggest evening paper; circulation: 1,399,950), its noon edition Paris-Midi (circulation: 64,999), Marie-Claire (weekly woman's magazine), Match (highly successful French imitation of LIFE), and Pour Vous (cinema magazine).
Colossally energetic, widely traveled, so often on the wire that a British journalist once said "He must have a telephone in his pocket," Prouvost has a special knack for personnel. Into the Information Ministry personnel he prepared to inject four of his best men from Paris-soir. Louis Oscar Frossard, the Reynaud appointee whom Prouvost replaced, was moved to the important Ministry of Public Works in place of Anatole de Monzie, a Daladier man.
> A real technician went into the Finance Ministry. Marcel Bouthillier, a youngster of 39, was Reynaud's Man Friday in the Finance Ministry, and knows more about the job than most Ministers since 1918.
"Vite! Vite!" But of far greater importance than these subalterns, of course, was France's war Premier, Paul Reynaud.
His importance was not one of personality.
France's extremity was so bitter last week that the outstanding superficial factor of democracy, leaders' personalities, was as nothing. What France needed last week was speed from its leaders, courage from its people. Collapse of either meant collapse of France. Reynaud invoked both.
The Reynaud personality was vital last week only in so far as France's Premier is the incarnation of speed. Like most men of tiny stature-he stands only 5 ft. 3 in.
he does not move; he darts. His face is always active, and his steel eyes move behind their Oriental shutters like little automatic rangefinders. His metabolism is such that he can sit at his desk for 48 hours on end without ever slowing down in mind or body.
In debate his speed of expression is so dazzling that he is rarely interrupted, never heckled; his hearers are too busy intercepting facts. His repartee is almost a ricochet. His memory is fast as camera film, but he is forever flashing out a pencil and jotting down notes under headings-1, 2, 3, a, b, c. As he sits at his desk directing aides, he barks: "Vite! Vite!" He loves locomotion. He has tried everything from airplane to canoe, and his favorite sport is cycling with the wind on his face. In his 61 years he claims he has traveled five times into each of the world's five continents.
But Reynaud's haste is not a mere rushing. He is fast, but only as a fox is fast.
His haste embodies caution and a hardhearted realism. He was never in such a hurry for high office that he would abandon his lonely, negative, middle-of-the-road liberalism for the sake of a band wagon.
Whenever he raised his eyes in the office which he used to occupy as Finance Minister, he would see on the opposite wall an admonition to speed-a map of Greater Germany, and a chart of working hours under the Reich Labor Front; but he would also see, on his desk, an admonition to caution-a pair of German banknotes of the inflationary period.