An eccentric will endows an annual Christmas banquet for ten of the most miserable people, and two somber stewards select guests and stage a funerallike feast complete with cypress, a sepulchral urn, and a skeleton as a grim emblem. The invited company embodies diverse dispositions of sorrow and lack—gentle despondency, a man who advertises his emotional wounds, hypochondria, accumulated misanthropy, an earnest but unrecognized idealist, an aging former gallant, a distressed poet, and a melancholic simpleton—each presenting a different mechanism of inner vacancy. The gathering stages human discontent as a temperamental and perceptual condition that resists external consolation.