Edouard Furfooz, a forty-six-year-old man, is passionate about tiny things. Collect for the whole world everything that fits in the hand of a child. In Rome, Tokyo, Paris, London, Edouard Furfooz buys and sells old toys, dolls, miniatures, all precious and executed in noble materials. Her love life is as fluctuating as her daily life: from airport to airport, from woman to woman. But a diffuse memory colonizes his life, that of a schoolmate girl whose memory fails to recover. What did you live in your childhood that dominates you in such a way? Is it because of you that you detest any noise, including music, and you always prefer silence? Is that why he has a perpetual impression of cold that takes him to shelter even in summer?

On the stairs of Chambord, Pascal Quignard demonstrates once more his mastery of the story, his sense of time, the dialogues, the secondary characters, but above all his ability to build universes, in this case a collector of old toys , Who will not find peace until he revisits all the steps of his existence to undo the knot that imprisons him from his childhood.