"Here are those nights of Paris, full of my fatigue of other times, of the malls, the avenues and the walks in the dark; those nights of exhaustion that I lived in unfazed light." This dedication by Soupault to the poet René Laporte gives the tone of this novel. Everything in it is bathed in the light of the farewells; at every moment, Paris is revealed as a city threatened by a relentless rain heralding a flood and by the fire of a new Nero who dreams of fate turning it into another Rome. The characters stumble from night to night and the anonymous narrator, so similar to the author, awaits as one last hope the indecisive catastrophe that will allow him to escape the usury of days and gestures.
