SOURCE: "Antoine's First and Final Adventure," in Mosaic, Vol. XVI, Nos. 1-2, Winter-Spring, 1983, pp. 139-43.

In the following essay, Walz discusses Truffaut's short story "Antoine and the Orphan Girl," which he describes as a pastiche of Jean Cocteau's work.

Antoine Doinel was to acquire a last name and a police record in The Four Hundred Blows (1959), his first girlfriend and job in Antoine and Colette (1962), a dishonorable discharge from the military and several more jobs in Stolen Kisses (1968), a wife, a child and a mistress in Bed and Board (1970), and a divorce in Love on the Run (1979). The "adventures" of this amusingly pathetic cinematic character were first chronicled, however, not on film or in a film script but in print—in "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" ("Antoine et I'orpheline"). This little-known story … was published in a small and now defunct monthly, La Parisienne, in May 1955—two years before...