The last time TIME & LIFE saw Paris, it was from the back window of a French Renault -- last car in a baggage-bulging cavalcade of seven in which 24 of our news people, a child with chicken pox, and two dogs lit out of the city just one jump ahead of the Nazis.

Now we're back again -- and I thought this week you might like to hear how our correspondents are rounding up and chasing down the news for you in the newly liberated French capital where communications and accommodations are still pretty snafu.

Our Paris homecoming began on August 25, when TIME's chief War Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker and LIFE's photographer Bob Capa jeeped through the Porte d'Orleans directly behind the armored car of General Jacques Leclerc. As soon as they had shaken loose from the cheering, flower-throwing crowd they looked up a longtime member of our Paris staff who had spent the last four years in German-occupied Paris. She told them that the French had sealed up our old offices on the Champs Elysees until the authorities could find out what damage the Nazis had done--so Wert and Capa got a big room in the Hotel Scribe as temporary headquarters for themselves and the seven other correspondents on their way to Paris.

Since then you have read in TIME many of the reports these correspondents have cabled back across the Atlantic--stories like those about the snipers who almost got General De Gaulle--about the foot-high hats and orange-sized earrings Parisiennes were wearing to keep up morale--about the French girl patriot who cried out against shaving the heads of women collaborationists -- and many others, contributing all sorts of on-the-spot details to the news now flowing to our editors out of the French capital. And perhaps future stories like these will have added interest if I pass on to you the cable Bill Wilton filed last week to let News Bureau Chief David Hulburd know about how TIME is getting along over there these days:

"Our room in the Hotel Scribe is huge, highceilinged, with Army bed rolls stacked in one corner and piles of Army rations in another. We have hot water only once or twice a week for an hour, so everybody tries to bathe and shave at the same time.

"In the Scribe basement an Army mess has been set up, which keeps bodies and souls joined but leaves us completely unsatisfied. (The chef has managed to destroy the old myth that you can give a Frenchamn even Army rations and he will make something tasty out of them.) But the Cafe de la Paix is just around the corner and gets a good deal of our trade.

"There is such a scarcity of Army transport that we walk or take a horse and carriage everywhere. The telephones work but nobody is ever at home, and offices are disorganized. Your correspondents meet, compare notes, write cables, miss appointments, hunt each other and generally go nuts in this city so full of intrigue and excitement, rumors and history.

"Wert , Capa and I live at Lancaster -- Mary Welsh is at the Ritz -- others are bivouacking at the Grand Hotel. But we all get together at the Hotel Scribe, and almost any morning you can see Wert, Capa, Walton, Welsh and Landry lined up at the rail of the balcony planning the day's operations."

With our Paris office righted and running, only one TIME News Bureau still remains a casualty of the European war. And judging by the news of these past few weeks, it may not be very long before TIME is open for business again at that address too -- No. 1 Innsbruckerstrasse, Berlin, Germany.

Cordially,

P. S. Wertenbaker has just cabled that TIME-in-Paris moves out of the Scribe Monday, takes over a whole floor on the Place de la Concorde as roomier but still temporary quarters.

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