Jean Rolin embarks on a double project in the area of ​​Paris bounded by Boulevard Ney and Rue Clôture. On the one hand, he recalls the figure of the eccentric Napoleonic Marshal Michel Ney - a key figure in understanding the battle of Waterloo- and, At the same time, to narrate his own campaign among the forgotten slums of contemporary Paris. Marshal Ney appears as a mixture of hero and abject character, who saves his army from a defeat that conspires against the Emperor, until finally is shot by treason on December 7, 1815, at nine o'clock in the morning. On the other hand, the population of prostitutes, refugee immigrants and vagabonds who inhabit this Parisian ghetto are doomed from the start to wander their streets looking for ways to survive. With Ney's adventures as background, Rolin narrates the murder of a Bulgarian prostitute, who shocks society to the degree that the media refer to her by his first name; He meets characters like Gérard Cerbère, who lives in a caravan after being thrown out of forty jobs and fantasizes about being as indestructible as the devil himself; Is acquainted with the case of Lito, a former soldier from Zaire who was persecuted in his country for refusing to continue extinguishing corpses to obstruct investigations by the international community. Just as the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme immortalized the execution of Marshal Ney in a painting titled with the date and time of its execution, Rolin uses words to express the daily condemnation of the excluded, who are forced to comply with it without previous judgment or apparent cause .