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 François Truffaut embarked on his filmmaking career. It is the only fiction that Truffaut wrote solely for print.

"Every artist begins with a pastiche," Paul Gauguin once observed, and so it is with Truffaut. When "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" was published, François Sentein, one of the editors of La Parisienne, appended a preface in which he pointed out that the story was an homage to Jean Cocteau and that, in writing a pastiche, Truffaut was reviving an outdated form. He also noted that the story was composed with affection and without irony, that it was "innocent, almost naive, and content to be so." His conclusion was that "a pastiche which deprives itself of irony interests us by itself. Its value does not come from the skill with which it broadcasts its tricks but in the natural way it keeps using them."

Although Truffaut's debt to Cocteau, as both writer and filmmaker, was not as great as was his debt to other writers and filmmakers, it is also noticeable in his first feature films. In The Four Hundred Blows, when Antoine runs away from home he stays in the apartment of his best friend, René Bigey, an apartment that features a stuffed horse and other grotesque furnishings and that Truffaut acknowledged was constructed "à la Cocteau." That Les enfants terribles was a specific model in this film is apparent from several direct allusions (the scene, for instance, in which Antoine and René flap the bedcovers to clear away their cigarette smoke) and from the fact that Truffaut quotes Cocteau in his introduction to the anthologized scripts for the Doinel cycle. In "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" there are a number of obvious references to Les enfants terribles (Antoine's room, his childish games, and the description of his father's apartment as "an empty theater" for their lovemaking). A more likely source is Cocteau's "Le grande écart" ("The Miscreant") with its use of asterisks and discontinuous narrative, its sad-wise aphorisms, and its anti-feminist overtones. As Sentein implies, however, it is not the specific allusions that make this an effective pastiche but the feeling generated by the story that the author has steeped himself in Cocteau's works.

More noteworthy than the literary allusions, and more recognizable to a contemporary audience than they would have been to Sentein, are the story's autobiographical elements. Antoine Doinel has long been recognized as Truffaut's cinematic alter ego, as has the fact that Truffaut utilizes details from his own life in all of his films. "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" proves that this is not just a cinematic tactic but part of his total esthetic.

Truffaut's childhood was not a happy one. Both of his parents worked, and they spent their spare time pursuing his father's passion for camping and the outdoors. Thus he felt unwanted at home, particularly by his mother who was, it seems, almost pathologically sensitive to any noise or disruption he might make. Although his father was an outdoorsman, Truffaut did not share his enthusiasms. He once admitted, for instance, "I never show people swimming because I don't know how to swim." As a teenager he was rarely at home and rarely in school. When he was about fifteen, his father turned him over to the police for vagrancy. The boy was consequently sent to le centre d'observation des mineurs delinquants at Villejuif. Truffaut was rescued from this prison-asylum by the noted film critic André Bazin—who performed a similar "miracle" in getting him released from military service in 1952. All of these figure in "Antoine and the Orphan Girl." The only detail that is, from existing evidence, untrue to Truffaut's life is the death of his mother; she died only recently, not when he was twenty. In The Four Hundred Blows, however, Antoine performs a similar "execution," using the supposed death of his father as a way of excusing his many absences from school.

"Cinema of the First Person Singular" is a phrase that has been used to describe Truffaut's career, but it is clearly more than just this autobiographical quality that characterizes both his films and the preceding story. When he uses details from his personal life he injects these into popular genre forms. And it is this conflict, this dialectic, between the personal and the conventional, the auteur and the genre, which gives his films their distinctiveness.

Yet even this is not precise enough. Jacques Rivette, Truffaut's friend and colleague at Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950s, made a comment concerning The Four Hundred Blows that can be applied to all of Truffaut's work but has never been given sufficient emphasis. He observed that Truffaut "humbly reconstructs from personal experience a reality which is equally objective, and which he then films with absolute respect." It is this feature, the combination of subjectivity and objectivity, which gets to the heart of Truffaut's esthetic.

This quality of objective subjectivity is partly a function of Truffaut's peculiar use of point of view. In "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" he combines the intimacy of a confession with the detachment of a sociological analysis. Although the story is told from the point of view of a superior, "limited-omniscient" narrator, the sentiments expressed indicate that this narrator is also, if not identical to Antoine, then entirely in sympathy with him. As in his films, Truffaut plays with the idea of multiple perspectives. At times the narrator provides the audience with first-hand, privileged access to certain intimate disclosures. At other times information is withheld; things are left unspoken or unrevealed. Ellipses are used. (At their most extreme the ellipses in this story are the literary equivalent of a jump-cut—the disjunctive cinematic device for which Truffaut and his colleagues in the French nouvelle vague were to be so celebrated.)

Furthermore, at various points in the narrative Truffaut abandons the third-person for another tactic he has repeatedly used in his movies. He has described it as a "first-person confidential tone," and its main feature is a form of direct address. Near the beginning of the description of the budding romance between Antoine and Henriette the narrator asks: "Have I made it clear that with Henriette Antoine was not living his first adventure?" This attempt by Truffaut to bring the reader into the story is the literary equivalent of, for instance, Antoine's responding to the psychologist's questions in The Four Hundred Blows by talking directly to the camera. Voice-over narration in his films is often used for the same effect—to create an intimacy, an immediacy, between audience and characters. One of the models Truffaut admits to having used as a source of this tactic is the film version of Les enfants terribles.

"If a man has character he will," according to Nietzsche, "have the same experience over and over again." The experience that keeps recurring in Truffaut's films is estrangement. Every story that Truffaut has written for or adapted to the screen has in one way or another dealt with the termination of a relationship, either familial or romantic. What fascinates him most is not the termination itself but the conflicting attitudes of the people involved and the effect the ending of a relationship has on the more sensitive and/or naively romantic person—the dreamer, the idealist. Truffaut believes that for some people love is provisional (temporary or relative) and for others it is definitive (permanent or absolute). Rarely do two people share the same attitude at the same time. And, if they do, circumstances conspire against them. The idealist, therefore, is made to suffer. For idealists do not change; they do not learn from experience.

Such is the case with the central character in "Antoine and the Orphan Girl." Antoine is the role model for at least two dozen Truffaldien movie characters. "Accustomed to miracles" and believing in destiny, he is blind to his obsessions and his inevitable fate (a fate that we the readers are privy to from the opening paragraph where dreams dissolve into reality, where a "suit of armor [is] just a pair of wool trousers"). His actions are rendered more poignant by the fact that he is "rejected" by both his family and his lover—and by the momentary realization of his dreams. Furthermore, his is not a lofty quest but simply a yearning, however urgent, to be accepted, to be normal. Antoine goes swimming, for instance, because of a "desire to do-as-others-do."

Truffaut orchestrates his story about Antoine into four straightforward sections: one in which he provides a quick character sketch, a second in which he spells out the situation, and two longer sections detailing the ecstasy and the agony of romantic love. Clearly, it is the latter two sections in which he is most interested, especially the final section which delays a result that is inevitable to the audience while it underlines the irony of Antoine's actions. In Henriette's absence Antoine reinforces his romantic obsessions in the funny yet sad way that is characteristic of Truffaut's best films. In Pigalle he "imagines ideal couplings, with perfect actors and actresses." He is inspired by a vision in a movie house to such an amusing extent that he overvalues its importance to others. He and his best friend belittle women, not realizing the callow and contradictory nature of their observations, and reaffirm their friendship without acknowledging the inadequacy of it to their present situations. Obviously, as the abruptness and irony of the last two words of the story indicate, Antoine does not learn from this affair. That he should be doomed to repeat these encounters with almost Sisyphean regularity in the Antoine Doinel cycle of films is entirely consistent with this initial story.

From the vantage point of the fifties, the value of "Antoine and the Orphan Girl" was calculated by the ease with which Truffaut executed his homage to Cocteau. Today the value of the story comes from the way it anticipates so completely his filmmaking career: his methods of storytelling, his concerns about the fragility of love, and his fascination with characters who are, to use John Dryden's phrase, "but children of a larger growth." Over the years of his evolution at the hands of his creator and Jean-Pierre Leaud, the actor who portrayed him on screen, Antoine has grown to be less easily identified with Truffaut—who declared that with Love on the Run he was ending the screen life of his long-time alter ego. "Antoine and the Orphan Girl," therefore, provides the final link in the chain of Antoine's "adventures." Ironically it was also the first.