One summer evening outside the Gare Montparnasse, an distraught man hails our writer hero. At the bidding of this lost soul, the writer follows him on a mournful hike to the street where his father died. As the two men wander through a strangely empty Paris, visions of the past arise and eras blur, from Boulevard Saint-Michel, where General Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division rolled through to liberate Paris, to Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, where poet François Villon killed a priest in a street fight.