Place de la Sorbonne, three days later, and Panditji and I get out of a taxi, opposite a Chinese restaurant—Shanghai, was it called? (It is still there!) Green shrubs, in square lacquer boxes at the windows, with red Chinese characters on the glass walls, it had a modest but intimate appearance, like most restaurants in the Latin quarter. This is where Jean Guehénno, the French writer, had arranged for us all to meet. Jean Guehénno was a highly considered writer of the Left—he came from a shoemaker’s family, but taught Latin and Greek at a famous college, Lycée Lakanal, in Paris. He also edited the international literary magazine, Europe, which published Romain Rolland, Panait Istrati, and Thomas Mann. Guehénno had published one or two pieces by me—my earliest writings—and he was one of those rare men Malraux ever met. Malraux always had this obsession. ‘I have no interlocutors,’ he would say. ‘France is full of clever men and women. But what do you talk to them? I have ever, ever felt, unless one can die for an idea it’s not worth living. That’s what I like about the Orient, about India.’ And Guehénno was one of those, like Romain Rolland, who dared die for an idea. And France is only France, when a man or woman is willing truly to die for an idea. Thus the resistance, and De Gaulle.