A wounded veteran narrates his search for an elusive woman, roaming Parisian streets, official entrances, cafés and dance halls as he confronts postwar loneliness and changing social textures. He seeks to recover intimacy and friendship by joining younger companions, but his memories of death and loss clash with their innocence and performative gaiety. Episodes set in skating rinks, masked balls and salons trace shifting manners, transient attachments, and the narrator’s uneasy attempt to reconstruct identity and belonging amid a society reconfigured after the war.