The novel takes place in Paris during the days of the Arab outrages. Lednikov meets with his school friend Yuri Inozemtsev, who has long settled in France, is engaged in the antique business and collects information about Novorussian emigrants both for the Russian intelligence services and for French counterintelligence. An attempt is made on the girlfriend of Inozemtsev’s mistress, and a week before, under strange circumstances her father, a retired police officer, died. After the frightened girl handed over her father’s briefcase with documents to Inozemtsev, an attempt was made on him too: right in the restroom of the restaurant, and the killer was Russian... Meanwhile, Lednikov, in the house of his old friend Baron Rennes, met the newly-minted first lady of France. The same one with whom the President of France, having barely met, immediately said: “This woman will be mine.”