The first eighteen years ago was marked by two events equally dismal in his memory: the death of his father and his first sexual experience (with a prostitute). As the taxi that brought him to the Trux Witt stops at the Ascot, Hugh Person, middle-aged American publisher, recalls her three previous stays in this shabby station in the Swiss Alps. R. . . A few years later, invited to visit a second time to Switzerland to work with a well-known writer, Mr. Murder, many nightmares, a successful interview with a psychiatrist and some real fire or dreamed complement the frame of the transparent veil through which the past shines . Hugh met Armande, capricious daughter of a Belgian architect and an exiled Russian, and falls madly in love her.