On a Sunday in July, Ambrose Guise arrives in Paris. No one is there except the statues. The city strikes him as a deserted place after a bombing and the exodus of its inhabitants. As an author of English crime novels, he plans to meet his Japanese publisher. But he also wants to use this trip to unravel the mysteries of his past, from the time when he was French and called Jean Dekker, twenty years ago. In a dim and hallucinatory Paris, he conjures up strange places: a secret room on Rue de Courcelles, opposite a pagoda; a spacious ground floor overlooking a garden, Place de l'Alma. He awakens the spirits of Georges Maillot, at the wheel of his white car, of Carmen Blin, Ghita Wattier, the Haywards... Thus, an entire lost neighborhood is rediscovered from memory, and he reveals the secrets of his charms and magic.