by Hal Erickson
synopsis
Le Mioche is the story of Prosper Martin (Lucien Baroux), a once-promising scholar who has met with nothing but failure in his adult life. When an abandoned baby is left on his doorstep, Martin decides to raise the child himself, obliging him to take the kid along when he starts his new job at a highly moral girl's finishing school. At first poised to expose the new teacher as a corrupting influence -- after all, the baby is probably illegitimate -- the students elect instead to help Martin take care of the child, thereby arousing the parental instincts of the rest of the faculty. Le Mioche was remade in Hollywood in 1940 as 40 Little Mothers, with Eddie Cantor as the hapless foster father.
