In one of the most turbulent centuries in Europe, where religious wars devastated cities, culture and human beings, leaving only a handful of ruins; where revolts against political and ecclesiastical power sowed the fields with corpses and fire; where epidemics and plague that gripped the entire continent instilled loneliness, desolation and a deep fear and fury towards each other; in the seventeenth century, at the end of one of the most complex and rich periods in history, the only consolation, perhaps the only salvation, was music, literature and love. These are the themes of this delicate and lucid novel, almost a poem: the daily life, violent and sometimes beautiful, of some of the musicians and writers who redeemed, without knowing it, their century and ours. Johann Jakob Froberger, the origin of our music, Bach's teacher; the enigmatic and airy Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, who never wanted to be published; La Rouchefoucauld, the man with the best ear of his time, who tore our language apart into fragments. But also the lutenist Hatten, and Thullyn, a viola virtuoso, whose love story is a sun and a shadow that covers all the pages of this book. Pascal Quignard has written with Love and the Sea his most personal and ambitious novel. All his wisdom, his journey through the world and through the days, flows into it. It is a celebration of light, of the earth, of love, because also, in each of its pages, there is a reminder of our mortality. It is a book that will leave, in the fingers of the readers, the trace of a world that is at the same time wild and full of serenity, dark and illuminated, incendiary and salvific.