ABSTRACT
In La chambre verte, Francois Truffaut's outstanding intuition lies in showing us how the impossibility of completing the mourning process coincides with the impossibility of loving. This impaired but vibrant image seems to be a self-quotation from L'enfant sauvage in which Truffaut, as he did in La chambre verte, chose to play the part of the main character, Professor Itard, who tries in vain to bring the little wolf-boy back into the human community. Truffaut's great artistic intuition lies precisely in this dimension of anguish and guilt combined with the theme of hatred and of impossible forgiveness for his old friend now dead—a dimension also present in the original story by Henry James. Julien Davenne's dead are Truffaut's dead, intermingled with the portraits of his favourite authors—Henry James himself, Cocteau, Wilde, Proust, Balzac—in a kind of affective equivalence between books and people.
