In 1969, I was living in London, paying $40 a month for a flat near Notting Hill Gate, wearing a secondhand pea coat against the damp, and trying to write my first novel. To earn some money, I was dashing off profiles of aging movie stars for United Artists. The studio used these pieces to promote its European films in the United States. I hated the profile business and was in the process of renouncing it when, as sometimes happens to a writer, along came an offer I couldn't refuse: to write a series of articles about Francois Truffaut's latest film, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Truffaut had been a hero of mine since I saw a freshman in college. That lyrical study of a boy's evasions of the conventional adult world and his doomed sprint for freedom had a literary flavor, and my admiration for it had been inspired by my own impatience to get life going. Truffaut's new film, the preposterously named (—with one p), would be shot on location in Nice, Aix-en-Provence, and the Alps. Some filming had already been
