Welles always denied authorship of the book, and French actor-writer Maurice Bessy, who is credited as translating it into French, was long rumoured to be the real author. Rosenbaum suggested that the book was written in French and then translated into English, since lines from the script were approximations that seemed to have been translated from English to French to English again. Research by film scholar François Thomas in the papers of Louis Dolivet has uncovered documentary proof that Bessy was indeed the author.
