The autobiographical Mes petites amoureuses is Jean Eustache's revisiting of his past: he was born in Pessac (Gironde) and then moved to Narbonne (Aude). It was a commercial failure, although now Eustache's reputation has grown immensely. The protagonist of this second (and final) feature by Eustache is Daniel (Martin Loeb) who lives in a village with his grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne) until his mother (Ingrid Caven) calls him away to the big town where she lives in shabbiness with her Spanish lover José Ramos (Dionys Mascolo)*, an agricultural worker.
His mother can't afford to send Daniel to school: OK, it's free, but there are clothes, books, etc, so no way: he'll have to find his own way. She procures him a kind of job working in a tool/vehicle repair shop where he not only gets by but manages to prove himself far more intelligent and resourceful than the owner, not that the owner has the intelligence to understand that.
But Daniel keeps quiet about his intelligence, in fact keeps quite about most things by saying very little. He can work out how to mend a light on a Solex, but most of all he learns about sex from observation: on his train journey to his mother's town (let's call it Narbonne) he's learned a great deal from three passengers; the screens pulled down, two young men kiss and fondle a young girl, which recalls to some extent the threesome in La Maman et la putain (only of course with two men as opposed to two women; in a scene in a cinema in the city, he learns that a way to enjoy the opposite sex is to whisper to a single girl in front and spend time kissing her.
Mixing with older males at the local café, Daniel also learns the downside of the females of the day: they won't sleep with you before marriage. During a bike ride with several café friends to a neighbouring village he meets a girl, only to learn (on feeling around) that she doesn't want him to go very far because, as his café chums have said, there's no sex before marriage.
*Dionys Macolo was married to Margurite Duras from 1947 to 1956.
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